LIV Golf Spent Billions Buying Players. Bankruptcy May Let It Rewrite the Deals.

Strategic Analysis | September 10, 2026

LIV Golf Spent Billions Buying Players. Bankruptcy May Let It Rewrite the Deals.

LIV Golf was built with a simple competitive weapon: certainty.

Traditional professional golf made players earn most of their money through performance. Make the cut, climb the leaderboard, collect the check. Miss the cut, and the expenses still belong to you.

LIV attacked that model with guarantees.

It paid enormous commitment fees. It promised annual compensation. It bought portions of players’ sponsorship inventory. It offered enough economic security to persuade some of the best golfers in the world to leave an established ecosystem and join a startup league facing open hostility from the PGA Tour.

LIV’s own bankruptcy papers now acknowledge that this strategy worked—and that it was extraordinarily expensive. The league says its compensation model included guaranteed upfront and annual payments, team equity for certain players, prize purses, and the acquisition of sponsorship and, in some cases, name-image-and-likeness rights. It also says player contracts now comprise a significant portion of its unsecured obligations.

Five years later, the competitive weapon has become the restructuring problem.

LIV filed Chapter 11 in New Jersey on September 8 with estimated assets between $100 million and $500 million and liabilities between $500 million and $1 billion. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which supplied approximately $5 billion in equity since LIV’s inception, announced earlier this year that continued equity funding no longer fit its investment strategy. LIV says it nevertheless remained years from stand-alone profitability under its existing structure.

Now the league wants to use bankruptcy to build something very different.

The easy headline is that LIV wants to “tear up” its player contracts.

That is directionally right but legally incomplete.

On the first night of the bankruptcy, LIV filed a motion asking Judge Michael Kaplan for permission to reject a large collection of executory contracts, including player-participation agreements involving stars such as Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson, Cameron Smith, Tyrrell Hatton, Phil Mickelson, and many others.

Section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code gives a Chapter 11 debtor, subject to court approval, a powerful choice regarding an executory contract: assume it or reject it.

Assumption means essentially keeping the deal. If the debtor has defaulted, that ordinarily requires curing the default and providing adequate assurance of future performance.

Rejection means the debtor decides that continuing to perform the agreement is not economically worthwhile.

But rejection is not a magic eraser.

The Supreme Court made that clear in Mission Product Holdings v. Tempnology: rejection of an executory contract constitutes a breach, not rescission. Bankruptcy does not rewind history and pretend the contract never existed. Rights that would survive an ordinary contractual breach do not necessarily disappear simply because the breach occurred through § 365.

That distinction could matter enormously here because LIV’s player agreements reportedly do much more than require golfers to show up and play.

They allocate sponsorship inventory. Some grant licensing rights. Some involve NIL. Some involve team interests. And the contracts may contain restrictions, termination rights, exclusivity provisions, or remedies whose continued effect will depend on the language of the individual agreement and applicable nonbankruptcy law.

So “LIV rejected the contract” does not automatically answer every downstream question.

It starts the next set of questions.

This is where bankruptcy changes the leverage.

If LIV rejects a player agreement, the resulting damages are generally treated as though the breach occurred immediately before the bankruptcy filing. The player therefore receives a prepetition claim against the bankruptcy estate. 11 U.S.C. §§ 365(g), 502(g).

That is very different from having a solvent counterparty obligated to make guaranteed payments for another several years.

Consider the creditor list.

Rahm is listed with an unsecured claim of approximately $7.47 million. DeChambeau is owed approximately $5.77 million. Dustin Johnson is listed at roughly $5.5 million, Cameron Smith at $4.8 million, Hatton at $3.4 million, and Brooks Koepka at $1.7 million.

Those amounts should not be confused with the full remaining headline value of their player contracts. A bankruptcy creditor schedule reflects claims asserted or recorded as of the petition date; rejection can potentially generate additional damages claims based on future contractual obligations.

But the structural point is the same.

Before bankruptcy, a golfer could say:

You promised to pay me. Perform the contract.

After rejection, the conversation can become:

You breached the contract. File your claim.

That is an enormous shift in bargaining power.

A bankruptcy claim may ultimately receive cash, equity, some combination of the two—or substantially less than the nominal amount asserted, depending on the plan and the value available for unsecured creditors.

And LIV is not hiding what it wants to do with that leverage.

It wants the players to negotiate again.

The proposed restructuring is far more interesting than a conventional cost-cutting exercise.

Under the term sheet attached to LIV’s restructuring papers, BC Partners would provide approximately $300 million through a combination of term debt, senior preferred equity, and convertible preferred equity. Existing PIF-funded debt and equity would be cancelled without an economic distribution under the proposed transaction.

The golfers would receive something different.

Players with allowed claims would receive equity as part of their bankruptcy recovery. Participating golfers would also have rights designed to produce an aggregate 52.5% common-equity stake in the reorganized LIV holding company, subject to adjustments. Those agreeing to play in LIV 2.0 would receive new contracts that contemplate signing bonuses, the return of certain NIL rights, and approximately 30% aggregate player ownership in the teams.

That is not simply debt restructuring.

It is a proposed redesign of the relationship between athlete and league.

Old LIV said:

We will guarantee you enough money to leave the incumbent tour.

LIV 2.0 is proposing something closer to:

Own the business with us—and share the risk of whether it succeeds.

That distinction matters.

Guaranteed compensation places operating risk primarily on the league. If television ratings disappoint or sponsorship revenue develops more slowly than expected, the player is still owed the contractual guarantee.

Equity moves part of that risk back toward the player.

If LIV 2.0 becomes valuable, the golfers could benefit enormously.

If it does not, 52.5% of very little is still very little.

At first glance, the golfers appear vulnerable.

Their old contracts may be rejected. They are unsecured creditors. The PGA Tour may not offer an easy or immediate route back. And LIV controls whatever remains of the platform they helped create.

But the restructuring papers reveal something crucial:

LIV cannot realistically restructure without them.

BC Partners’ restructuring support agreement requires a substantial bloc of golfers to sign onto the deal within 35 days of the September 8 filing. The agreement defines the required player group as holders of at least two-thirds in amount and more than one-half in number of eligible player claims.

That requirement gives the players collective leverage.

BC Partners is not investing $300 million in office furniture, trademarks, and tournament contracts.

It is investing in a professional golf league.

And a professional golf league without professional golfers is a fairly uninteresting asset.

That creates a fascinating restructuring dynamic. LIV is asking the court to reject existing agreements because they are economically burdensome while simultaneously needing many of the same counterparties to sign replacement agreements before the restructuring works.

The players are therefore both liabilities and essential assets.

That is an unusual position, and probably the central strategic fact of the case.

There is an irony here.

LIV altered the economics of professional golf by paying athletes sums the existing market had not historically offered.

The purpose was rational. A new entrant trying to break an incumbent’s grip on elite talent usually cannot offer the same bargain and expect players to accept the additional risk.

It must overpay—or at least pay a premium—for disruption.

LIV says essentially that in its bankruptcy declaration. It describes guaranteed compensation as necessary to overcome the power of the established tours and acquire recognizable talent.

But once those guarantees existed, they became part of the market.

The PGA Tour changed.

Prize money increased. Player compensation increased. Equity became part of the conversation. The broader economics of professional golf shifted.

Now LIV is attempting to remove the very guarantees it used to produce that shift.

Chapter 11 may make that possible because bankruptcy law does something ordinary contract law generally does not: it provides a judicial framework for a financially distressed company to breach burdensome long-term contracts, channel resulting damages into claims, recapitalize the business, and emerge with a new cost structure.

That is precisely why § 365 exists.

But it also means LIV may be attempting to use bankruptcy to reset a player-compensation market that LIV itself helped inflate.

The players will naturally dominate the headlines, but they are not the only constituency whose contracts matter.

LIV’s business depends heavily on sponsorships, host-city arrangements, tournament venues, broadcasters, vendors, and licensing relationships.

According to its bankruptcy declaration, sponsorship represented approximately 49% of 2025 revenue, host fees roughly 22%, ticketing and hospitality about 16%, and broadcasting only around 5%. LIV says it has approximately $300 million of long-term sponsorship agreements covering 2027 through 2029.

That revenue mix matters.

Sponsors are not merely buying the LIV trademark. Host cities are not merely renting golf courses.

They are paying for events featuring recognizable players.

If Rahm, DeChambeau, Smith, Hatton, or others leave, the value of sponsorships, media contracts, host agreements, and hospitality commitments may change dramatically.

The bankruptcy therefore cannot be analyzed one contract at a time.

Every important contract sits inside the same commercial ecosystem.

Reject too few player contracts and the new league may remain uneconomic.

Reject too many—or lose too many stars—and the revenue contracts supporting the new league may become less valuable.

That is the restructuring tightrope.

There is another important distinction in the capital structure.

PIF announced that it would stop supplying the long-term equity capital LIV depended upon. But it is still financing the bankruptcy.

LIV entered Chapter 11 with approximately $15 million of cash and sought a $49.6 million debtor-in-possession facility from PIF. Judge Kaplan granted interim approval of that financing on September 9. The financing receives the kind of enhanced priority and security typically associated with DIP lending because the debtor needs fresh money to survive the restructuring process.

That creates another strategic reality.

PIF may be willing to surrender the economic value of its historical investment under a reorganization, but it remains essential to preserving the company long enough to reach that reorganization.

LIV 2.0 is therefore not quite a clean break from the Saudi-backed league.

It is a court-supervised transition funded, for the moment, by the very investor trying to stop funding the old version.

Chapter 11 can fix a balance sheet.

It cannot manufacture demand.

It can reject contracts.

It cannot force Rahm or DeChambeau to sign replacements.

It can recapitalize a league.

It cannot guarantee that broadcasters, sponsors, host cities, or fans will value the reorganized product.

And bankruptcy certainly cannot resolve the larger political and competitive relationship between LIV, the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour, and international golf.

That is why the next several weeks matter more than the mere filing.

LIV must persuade enough players that equity in a smaller, less expensive league is worth more than whatever alternatives they possess outside it.

Some players may value ownership.

Some may prefer restored control over sponsorship and NIL rights.

Some may use the restructuring as leverage to negotiate a return elsewhere.

And some may simply conclude that the extraordinary guarantees that justified joining LIV are gone—and that the reason for staying disappeared with them.

LIV Golf entered professional golf promising to rewrite the economics of the sport.

Chapter 11 may allow it to rewrite those economics again.

But this time the league is negotiating from the opposite side of the table.

The original LIV paid players to bear the risk of joining an unproven competitor.

The proposed LIV 2.0 asks those players to bear more of the risk themselves.

That is what makes this bankruptcy so interesting.

It is not simply the failure of an expensive sports startup. Nor is it necessarily the end of LIV Golf.

It is an attempt to convert the league’s greatest historical liability—the enormous contractual cost of its stars—into the ownership structure of its next version.

The golfers who were once paid to disrupt professional golf are now creditors in the restructuring of the disruption.

And LIV’s future may depend on convincing them that owning part of what remains is worth giving up what they were once promised.

That is a very different sales pitch.

But in Chapter 11, sometimes the second contract matters more than the first.TL;DR

LIV Golf entered Chapter 11 on September 8 after burning through billions of dollars in backing from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and failing to reach profitability. Now it wants bankruptcy-court approval to reject many of the player contracts that helped create the league.

That does not mean the contracts simply disappear. Under bankruptcy law, rejection generally operates as a breach, leaving the players with claims against the estate rather than the right to force LIV to continue performing the old deals. LIV’s proposed replacement is striking: a “LIV 2.0” in which participating golfers could collectively own a majority of the reorganized league, regain certain NIL rights, receive new signing bonuses, and exchange some of the certainty of guaranteed contracts for ownership in whatever comes next.

In other words, the contracts LIV once used to disrupt professional golf have become liabilities it is now using Chapter 11 to restructure.

And that may be the most important part of the bankruptcy.

LIV Golf was built with a simple competitive weapon: certainty.

Traditional professional golf made players earn most of their money through performance. Make the cut, climb the leaderboard, collect the check. Miss the cut, and the expenses still belong to you.

LIV attacked that model with guarantees.

It paid enormous commitment fees. It promised annual compensation. It bought portions of players’ sponsorship inventory. It offered enough economic security to persuade some of the best golfers in the world to leave an established ecosystem and join a startup league facing open hostility from the PGA Tour.

LIV’s own bankruptcy papers now acknowledge that this strategy worked—and that it was extraordinarily expensive. The league says its compensation model included guaranteed upfront and annual payments, team equity for certain players, prize purses, and the acquisition of sponsorship and, in some cases, name-image-and-likeness rights. It also says player contracts now comprise a significant portion of its unsecured obligations.

Five years later, the competitive weapon has become the restructuring problem.

LIV filed Chapter 11 in New Jersey on September 8 with estimated assets between $100 million and $500 million and liabilities between $500 million and $1 billion. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which supplied approximately $5 billion in equity since LIV’s inception, announced earlier this year that continued equity funding no longer fit its investment strategy. LIV says it nevertheless remained years from stand-alone profitability under its existing structure.

Now the league wants to use bankruptcy to build something very different.

The easy headline is that LIV wants to “tear up” its player contracts.

That is directionally right but legally incomplete.

On the first night of the bankruptcy, LIV filed a motion asking Judge Michael Kaplan for permission to reject a large collection of executory contracts, including player-participation agreements involving stars such as Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson, Cameron Smith, Tyrrell Hatton, Phil Mickelson, and many others.

Section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code gives a Chapter 11 debtor, subject to court approval, a powerful choice regarding an executory contract: assume it or reject it.

Assumption means essentially keeping the deal. If the debtor has defaulted, that ordinarily requires curing the default and providing adequate assurance of future performance.

Rejection means the debtor decides that continuing to perform the agreement is not economically worthwhile.

But rejection is not a magic eraser.

The Supreme Court made that clear in Mission Product Holdings v. Tempnology: rejection of an executory contract constitutes a breach, not rescission. Bankruptcy does not rewind history and pretend the contract never existed. Rights that would survive an ordinary contractual breach do not necessarily disappear simply because the breach occurred through § 365.

That distinction could matter enormously here because LIV’s player agreements reportedly do much more than require golfers to show up and play.

They allocate sponsorship inventory. Some grant licensing rights. Some involve NIL. Some involve team interests. And the contracts may contain restrictions, termination rights, exclusivity provisions, or remedies whose continued effect will depend on the language of the individual agreement and applicable nonbankruptcy law.

So “LIV rejected the contract” does not automatically answer every downstream question.

It starts the next set of questions.

This is where bankruptcy changes the leverage.

If LIV rejects a player agreement, the resulting damages are generally treated as though the breach occurred immediately before the bankruptcy filing. The player therefore receives a prepetition claim against the bankruptcy estate. 11 U.S.C. §§ 365(g), 502(g).

That is very different from having a solvent counterparty obligated to make guaranteed payments for another several years.

Consider the creditor list.

Rahm is listed with an unsecured claim of approximately $7.47 million. DeChambeau is owed approximately $5.77 million. Dustin Johnson is listed at roughly $5.5 million, Cameron Smith at $4.8 million, Hatton at $3.4 million, and Brooks Koepka at $1.7 million.

Those amounts should not be confused with the full remaining headline value of their player contracts. A bankruptcy creditor schedule reflects claims asserted or recorded as of the petition date; rejection can potentially generate additional damages claims based on future contractual obligations.

But the structural point is the same.

Before bankruptcy, a golfer could say:

You promised to pay me. Perform the contract.

After rejection, the conversation can become:

You breached the contract. File your claim.

That is an enormous shift in bargaining power.

A bankruptcy claim may ultimately receive cash, equity, some combination of the two—or substantially less than the nominal amount asserted, depending on the plan and the value available for unsecured creditors.

And LIV is not hiding what it wants to do with that leverage.

It wants the players to negotiate again.

The proposed restructuring is far more interesting than a conventional cost-cutting exercise.

Under the term sheet attached to LIV’s restructuring papers, BC Partners would provide approximately $300 million through a combination of term debt, senior preferred equity, and convertible preferred equity. Existing PIF-funded debt and equity would be cancelled without an economic distribution under the proposed transaction.

The golfers would receive something different.

Players with allowed claims would receive equity as part of their bankruptcy recovery. Participating golfers would also have rights designed to produce an aggregate 52.5% common-equity stake in the reorganized LIV holding company, subject to adjustments. Those agreeing to play in LIV 2.0 would receive new contracts that contemplate signing bonuses, the return of certain NIL rights, and approximately 30% aggregate player ownership in the teams.

That is not simply debt restructuring.

It is a proposed redesign of the relationship between athlete and league.

Old LIV said:

We will guarantee you enough money to leave the incumbent tour.

LIV 2.0 is proposing something closer to:

Own the business with us—and share the risk of whether it succeeds.

That distinction matters.

Guaranteed compensation places operating risk primarily on the league. If television ratings disappoint or sponsorship revenue develops more slowly than expected, the player is still owed the contractual guarantee.

Equity moves part of that risk back toward the player.

If LIV 2.0 becomes valuable, the golfers could benefit enormously.

If it does not, 52.5% of very little is still very little.

At first glance, the golfers appear vulnerable.

Their old contracts may be rejected. They are unsecured creditors. The PGA Tour may not offer an easy or immediate route back. And LIV controls whatever remains of the platform they helped create.

But the restructuring papers reveal something crucial:

LIV cannot realistically restructure without them.

BC Partners’ restructuring support agreement requires a substantial bloc of golfers to sign onto the deal within 35 days of the September 8 filing. The agreement defines the required player group as holders of at least two-thirds in amount and more than one-half in number of eligible player claims.

That requirement gives the players collective leverage.

BC Partners is not investing $300 million in office furniture, trademarks, and tournament contracts.

It is investing in a professional golf league.

And a professional golf league without professional golfers is a fairly uninteresting asset.

That creates a fascinating restructuring dynamic. LIV is asking the court to reject existing agreements because they are economically burdensome while simultaneously needing many of the same counterparties to sign replacement agreements before the restructuring works.

The players are therefore both liabilities and essential assets.

That is an unusual position, and probably the central strategic fact of the case.

There is an irony here.

LIV altered the economics of professional golf by paying athletes sums the existing market had not historically offered.

The purpose was rational. A new entrant trying to break an incumbent’s grip on elite talent usually cannot offer the same bargain and expect players to accept the additional risk.

It must overpay—or at least pay a premium—for disruption.

LIV says essentially that in its bankruptcy declaration. It describes guaranteed compensation as necessary to overcome the power of the established tours and acquire recognizable talent.

But once those guarantees existed, they became part of the market.

The PGA Tour changed.

Prize money increased. Player compensation increased. Equity became part of the conversation. The broader economics of professional golf shifted.

Now LIV is attempting to remove the very guarantees it used to produce that shift.

Chapter 11 may make that possible because bankruptcy law does something ordinary contract law generally does not: it provides a judicial framework for a financially distressed company to breach burdensome long-term contracts, channel resulting damages into claims, recapitalize the business, and emerge with a new cost structure.

That is precisely why § 365 exists.

But it also means LIV may be attempting to use bankruptcy to reset a player-compensation market that LIV itself helped inflate.

The players will naturally dominate the headlines, but they are not the only constituency whose contracts matter.

LIV’s business depends heavily on sponsorships, host-city arrangements, tournament venues, broadcasters, vendors, and licensing relationships.

According to its bankruptcy declaration, sponsorship represented approximately 49% of 2025 revenue, host fees roughly 22%, ticketing and hospitality about 16%, and broadcasting only around 5%. LIV says it has approximately $300 million of long-term sponsorship agreements covering 2027 through 2029.

That revenue mix matters.

Sponsors are not merely buying the LIV trademark. Host cities are not merely renting golf courses.

They are paying for events featuring recognizable players.

If Rahm, DeChambeau, Smith, Hatton, or others leave, the value of sponsorships, media contracts, host agreements, and hospitality commitments may change dramatically.

The bankruptcy therefore cannot be analyzed one contract at a time.

Every important contract sits inside the same commercial ecosystem.

Reject too few player contracts and the new league may remain uneconomic.

Reject too many—or lose too many stars—and the revenue contracts supporting the new league may become less valuable.

That is the restructuring tightrope.

There is another important distinction in the capital structure.

PIF announced that it would stop supplying the long-term equity capital LIV depended upon. But it is still financing the bankruptcy.

LIV entered Chapter 11 with approximately $15 million of cash and sought a $49.6 million debtor-in-possession facility from PIF. Judge Kaplan granted interim approval of that financing on September 9. The financing receives the kind of enhanced priority and security typically associated with DIP lending because the debtor needs fresh money to survive the restructuring process.

That creates another strategic reality.

PIF may be willing to surrender the economic value of its historical investment under a reorganization, but it remains essential to preserving the company long enough to reach that reorganization.

LIV 2.0 is therefore not quite a clean break from the Saudi-backed league.

It is a court-supervised transition funded, for the moment, by the very investor trying to stop funding the old version.

Chapter 11 can fix a balance sheet.

It cannot manufacture demand.

It can reject contracts.

It cannot force Rahm or DeChambeau to sign replacements.

It can recapitalize a league.

It cannot guarantee that broadcasters, sponsors, host cities, or fans will value the reorganized product.

And bankruptcy certainly cannot resolve the larger political and competitive relationship between LIV, the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour, and international golf.

That is why the next several weeks matter more than the mere filing.

LIV must persuade enough players that equity in a smaller, less expensive league is worth more than whatever alternatives they possess outside it.

Some players may value ownership.

Some may prefer restored control over sponsorship and NIL rights.

Some may use the restructuring as leverage to negotiate a return elsewhere.

And some may simply conclude that the extraordinary guarantees that justified joining LIV are gone—and that the reason for staying disappeared with them.

LIV Golf entered professional golf promising to rewrite the economics of the sport.

Chapter 11 may allow it to rewrite those economics again.

But this time the league is negotiating from the opposite side of the table.

The original LIV paid players to bear the risk of joining an unproven competitor.

The proposed LIV 2.0 asks those players to bear more of the risk themselves.

That is what makes this bankruptcy so interesting.

It is not simply the failure of an expensive sports startup. Nor is it necessarily the end of LIV Golf.

It is an attempt to convert the league’s greatest historical liability—the enormous contractual cost of its stars—into the ownership structure of its next version.

The golfers who were once paid to disrupt professional golf are now creditors in the restructuring of the disruption.

And LIV’s future may depend on convincing them that owning part of what remains is worth giving up what they were once promised.

That is a very different sales pitch.

But in Chapter 11, sometimes the second contract matters more than the first.