Saudi Fund set to back away from LIV Golf under mounting financial pressures

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is on the verge of announcing it will withdraw financial support from LIV Golf, the upstart golf circuit it launched four years ago to compete with the PGA Tour, a person familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

The Saudi league splashed into professional golf in 2022, attracting some of the sport’s biggest stars with contracts that exceeded their career earnings with more established circuits, like the American-run PGA Tour, by tens of millions of dollars.

The move comes as Saudi Arabia’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund announced a new five-year strategy on Wednesday, with the fund’s governor saying that it would slow down some of its biggest projects as it focuses on “increasing the efficiency of investments”.

Saudi officials have said that the oil-rich kingdom is reevaluating its priorities amid mounting financial pressures, including the cost of its pledges to host the World Expo in 2030 and the men’s soccer World Cup in 2034.

Earlier on Wednesday, Sergio Garcia, a LIV player who won the Masters Tournament in 2017, suggested the athletes were in the dark about the league’s fate, even as speculation swirled online about its future.

Garcia said the wealth fund’s leader, Yasir al-Rumayyan, had assured players that LIV was part of a broader, longer effort. “Honestly, we haven’t heard anything other than what Yasir told us at the beginning of the year,” Garcia said at a news conference in Mexico on the eve of a LIV tournament there.

“Honestly, you know how these rumours are. There are always a lot of them. And I can’t tell you anything more than what we already know.”

LIV did not immediately announce plans to cancel the event in Mexico.

The kingdom’s wealth fund did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The fund’s head, al-Rumayyan, said that the new strategy represents a “natural progression” of the fund’s path as it enters its second decade as a global investment powerhouse. The fund’s board had asked executives to look through their plans with an eye for “what’s must-have, and what’s good to have,” he said.

“There needed to be a reconsideration of the timing of some investments,” al-Rumayyan said during a news conference in Riyadh, the kingdom’s capital.

More to come ...

The New York Times