LIV Golf has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which means much of its business operations — both in the past and in the future — have been forced into the public eye ahead of its various court hearings. In total, LIV’s representation filed hundreds of pages of documents Tuesday evening and Wednesday in advance of a Wednesday afternoon hearing in front of Judge Michael B. Kaplan in New Jersey. 

We pored through those documents and picked out several findings that help tell the story of where LIV has been and where it hopes to go. Check them out below. 

1. The ticking clock reads: 34 days

For LIV Golf to come back in a different form, it has secured an agreement with BC Partners’ credit division to fund its court-monitored bankruptcy interim as well as exit financing to support the league moving forward … so long as players commit by early October.

The trove of documents included a term sheet between LIV and BC Partners, which states that the transaction requires specific players and number of players to join the agreement within 35 days of the filing (which took place Tuesday, Sept. 8). Thirty-five days from Sept. 8 is Oct. 13. 

According to the term sheet, 50% of players with “claims” are needed for the agreement to go through, and the collective value of the claims associated with committing players must equal or exceed two-thirds of the total player claims. In other words, LIV needs sign-on from some of its biggest fish. 

2. The investment is significant (but pending)

If LIV 2.0 comes to fruition, it will happen via $300 million in total financing, much of which will come from BC Partners, and possibly from minority investors. As evidenced above, the term sheet is considered a “Restructuring Support Agreement” with various clauses that must be met, and met by a certain deadline. 

While plenty needed to be straightened out in the last month since BC Partners was first reported as LIV’s “lead investor,” it all followed a flurry of pitches that Ducera Partners — an investment bank working on behalf of the PIF — was making to potential financiers. 

Roughly 100 of those potential investors signed NDAs, and about 30 “engaged in detailed diligence,” documents say. Of those 30, two submitted bids by LIV’s July 22 deadline, after which BC Partners was declared the leading bid. All in, that’s about 80 days from May 3, when the search officially began, to the bid deadline. It’s a tight window, all while LIV itself visited four different countries for events.

And what did LIV bonus BC Partners, at least hypothetically? The right to own a LIV expansion team in the future, at virtually no initial cost.

3. April 13 really was D-Day

Bring yourself back to the 2026 Masters, where Rory McIlroy defended his title on Sunday, April 11. Just a few days later, on Wednesday evening, April 14, Ryan French of Monday Q Info posted about a forthcoming “bombshell announcement,” and alluded to a winding down of events. 

As stated in various documents, the Saudi PIF already was down the path of restructuring LIV’s future, so much that investment bankers Gene Davis and Jon Zinman were added to the boards of various LIV entities as early as Tuesday, April 13. 

To bring in advisors like Davis and Zinman, who specialize in restructuring, bankruptcy filings, etc., and officially add them as Independent Directors to LIV’s board, it’s increasingly likely that the PIF was considering these moves before the Masters even took place. 

In the end, it led to an early-September reduction of staff, wherein LIV laid off 289 employees across its U.S. and U.K. companies, or roughly 90% of its total staff count. 

4. Shockingly small TV revenue 

Any number of explanations could explain why LIV Golf, in its five years of existence, couldn’t find sustainable business operations. But if there is one basic and glaring one: LIV struggled to create enough eyeballs to secure a significant TV deal. 

According to filings, LIV’s annual revenue from broadcast rights came out to just 5% of its total revenue, a stunningly small amount. Little had been reported about LIV’s TV deals, which was with Fox in the United States and with other, localized broadcasters in international markets, but it pales in comparison to the money the PGA Tour pulls in for its broadcast rights. As GOLF reported earlier this year, the Tour’s broadcasting deals were aggregating to upward of 67% of core business revenues. That Tour number is much closer to the standard in modern, top-end pro sports.

As you can see in the chart below, sponsorship dollars had become roughly half of LIV’s revenue, and as of 2025, amounted to $102 million. That suggests LIV’s annual total revenue was in the range of $208 million, which means its broadcast rights revenue was about $10-$11 million. 

5. PIF has been lending to LIV for months 

Plenty has happened in the background for both LIV Golf and the Saudi PIF since the latter announced it would cease funding LIV beyond the 2026 season. As a means to do so, the PIF decided to become a lender in early June, offering LIV a $495 million secured loan to proceed with the rest of its season “largely as planned.”

Ultimately, that was a target of which the league still fell short, considering its New Orleans event was canceled and its year-end Team Championship folded into the season-ending individual championship in Indiana. 

While this lender relationship was established in U.K. documents in June, it suggests that LIV finishing its 2026 season meant it was taking on a significant amount of debt in the process, in the form of $495 million, plus interest. 

6. LIV is down to $15 million in cash

When the Saudis decided to stop funding LIV, the end of the road started to take shape. Without a theoretical blank check and annual installments of hundreds of millions of dollars from the Middle East, LIV was forced to operate differently immediately. That’s how (very quietly) a golf league widely known as a music festival-adjacent sporting event only hosted one concert from May through August. That took place in Korea, and was the surest sign that, despite not acknowledging this trend, LIV’s late cancellation of its concerts in Indiana was a virtual certainty weeks if not months prior. 

According to the filing, as of this week, LIV had just $15 million in spending cash remaining, further proof of how it was unable to pay vendors for services rendered throughout 2026. Despite that shortfall, the filing included this fascinating line from David Orlofsky, chief restructuring officer: 

“LIV Golf firmly believes that, with appropriate funding and a level playing field with its competitors, its existing operating model would have reached profitability within five to seven years, primarily through continued revenue growth across both the League and teams, which had increased significantly in 2025 and 2026.”

This aligns, at least loosely, with Scott O’Neil’s now infamous quote toThe Financial Times in February, that LIV would not break even for five to 10 years.

7. Curious, single-player clauses 

Among the many clauses and statements in the filing were multiple items that show individual players had struck personal deals with the league. First among them was a tiny slice of league equity (0.23%) granted to a current player, along with the same amount for Greg Norman. The player’s identity is unclear, but one can surmise it would be among the league’s biggest signings. 

A different clause buried in the filing suggests that one player reached an “indemnification agreement” with LIV that would see the league provide up to $3 million in aggregate legal support pertaining to a specific claim from that player’s pre-existing sponsor agreement. In simpler terms, a LIV player reached a deal to have the league back him if an disgruntled sponsor took legal action against him. 

Finally, Financial Times reporter Sujeet Indap found a clause that clarified how one player’s CIGNA health insurance plan was covered in full by the league. 

9. Request to reject player contracts

As part of its filing, LIV requested the bankruptcy court to allow it to reject various contracts and leases into which the league had entered. That includes things like the leases it had struck for offices in West Palm Beach, Fla., and Scottsdale, Ariz.; arrangements for team-specific trainers; but also player contracts.

Some of those “contracts” were “player participation agreements” — aka contracts that formally lock players into specific LIV events/seasons — as well as dated “Letter Agreements” that suggest the initial timelines on which various LIV commits took the league seriously. 

For example, Henrik Stenson, Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter are all listed to have established “Letter Agreements” on May 10, 2022. While Poulter and Westwood played in LIV’s first event a month later, Stenson took an extra month and a half to commit to LIV, ultimately losing the European Ryder Cup captaincy in the process. 

To show just how direct these Letter Agreements could represent player interest at a certain date, Joaquin Niemann’s Letter Agreement is listed as August 28, 2022, the same day James Corrigan reported in The Telegraph that Niemann had signed with the league. That same week, Niemann attended the Tiger Woods-led meeting of top Tour players that birthed the Tour’s Signature Events model. 

Curiously, PGA Tour star Cameron Young’s name also is listed with a Letter Agreement dated July 24, 2022, one week following his solo second place finish at the 2022 Open. It serves as a reminder that during the summer of 2022, a lot of players were approached by LIV, and Young took it very seriously before ultimately committing to the PGA Tour, which he admitted a month later at the 2022 Tour Championship. 

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The first signs that Angel Yin was not well came at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship in Minnesota in late June. Yin, who was then ranked 16th in the world, opened with a solid one-under 71 — then checked herself into a hospital, complaining of stomach pain. The next day, Yin was on the back on the course, at shin-kicking Hazeltine National, where she dug deep and posted another 71 to make the cut by two. But by Saturday morning, Yin, who is 27, was back in the hospital with no hope of playing the third round. She was hospitalized for another six days before flying home to Florida. She would have weeks more of gastrointestinal challenges ahead of her. 

Over the next two months, Yin was unable to return to competition and limited her diet to the likes of rice, boiled chicken and cooked vegetables, she told Golfweek’s Beth Ann Nichols. Yin wasn’t trying to lose weight but she did: 35 pounds in all. In late August, she returned to the LPGA, at the FM Championship at TPC Boston. It did not go well, at least not in terms of the numbers on her scorecards: 81-76. More worrying still, the Solheim Cup, for which Yin had qualified months earlier, was less than two weeks away. 

U.S. captain Angela Stanford had been keeping close tabs on Yin, and she had a back-up plan, in the form of alternate Lilia Vu. If Yin or Stanford determined that Yin was unfit for the physical and emotional grind of one of the game’s most pressurized events, Vu, the former world No. 1, was ready to step in. 

But Yin felt she was ready — is ready — and has earned Stanford’s stamp of approval. Yin is at Bernadus Golf in the Netherlands this week with her 11 teammates (plus Vu), and on Wednesday said she was “feeling great.” Asked about the state of her game, the ever-colorful and expressive Yin said, “I guess everybody has different opinions. I personally think it’s not bad. Every day it’s getting better. So, yeah, I guess it’s like art, right? Everybody has a different opinion. But results just is the only thing that matters, right?”

Not always. But at this high-stakes event, most certainly. The U.S. won the most recent Solheim Cup, at Robert Trent Jones GC in Virginia two years ago, but before that went three straight editions without a win. Ask the U.S. women or men — winning these team events isn’t easy, and on the road it can feel almost impossible. For success, virtually every player needs to be dialed. Yin knows how her place on the roster might look from the outside looking in.  

“I know it’s crazy that I’m here because I played a week before in Boston,” Yin said Wednesday. “Scores, obviously, I’ll just say it. 81, 76. … It’s not a score you really bring out and you go, wow, that’s the person that’s going to be — you know, helping America bring home the Cup.”

But if Yin can find some semblance of her normal form, she might be just the player Stanford wants and needs on her side. Yin, who has two LPGA wins, loves the big stage. She went a combined 4-2 in the last two Solheim Cups and has five top-10 finishes in the last nine majors. Still, Yin knows she’s put Stanford in a tricky spot, albeit unintentionally. Under Stanford’s captain’s agreement with European skipper Anna Nordqvist, every player must play at least once in the team sessions in the first two days. An exception can be made if, say, Yin were to take a turn for the worse and was unable to play, but all signs have been pointing toward Yin suiting up. That would come in the form of at least one team match and then a singles match on Sunday.         

“It’s a tough decision because you don’t want to jeopardize the team,” Yin said. “I can say and be confident as much as I want, but ultimately it’s up to the captain because she needs to be responsible for the 11 of us.”

Stanford now is faced with the unenviable task of assessing Yin’s health, form and readiness. Stanford is well aware of what Yin can bring to the team — question is, can and will Yin bring it this week?

“Well, she’s here,” Stanford said Tuesday. “She’s playing — she’s played two practice rounds. She will play because that’s in the spirit of this competition.” 

Stanford could still lean on Vu if it came to it — but that option won’t be available for much longer. Once the Opening Ceremony commences Thursday evening, no substitutes will be permitted. Any withdrawals after that point would force a team to play with 11 players and forfeit a point in Sunday singles. 

Here’s the bright side for the U.S.: Yin says her game has been improving by the day, and Yin’s teammates don’t sound worried about her form, either. On Wednesday, Alison Lee said Yin has not looked fatigued or unfit. Yin has been grinding through practice rounds, and Lee called her “one of the hardest working girls here this week.”

For Yin, those voices in her corner have been fueling her.  

“I have my team that trusts me,” Yin said. “They have been super supportive, assistant captains and the captains. With a team like that, I think we can do anything, like trying to win this week.”