Shipnuck: LIV Golfers Could Lose Everything

Alan Shipnuck has been tracking LIV Golf's finances and contract structures, and his latest reporting suggests the players who jumped to the upstart tour could find themselves holding empty bags if the operation folds or restructures.

The central mechanism is a legal clause called force majeure. Most LIV player contracts contain one, and one agent told Shipnuck that Yasir Al-Rumayyan and LIV leadership are exploring whether the Iran war qualifies as an unforeseen act that voids existing contracts. Force majeure became a household term during COVID, when it blew up contracts, employment relationships, and entire commercial calendars overnight. If LIV successfully invokes it, the tour could walk away from every remaining player guarantee without owing another dime.

Whether that theory actually holds is another question. A legal challenge would have to be filed somewhere, and the venue matters enormously. LIV Golf is incorporated in London and has offices in New York, but it's a Saudi enterprise. If a dispute ends up in a Saudi court, the outcome is essentially predetermined. Suing the crown in its own jurisdiction is not a fight most players are going to win.

Bryson DeChambeau sits at the center of the entire question. His contract is expiring, and he's been negotiating with LIV for an extension. The number Shipnuck has heard floated is in the hundreds of millions. That's a staggering ask for LIV right now given everything else in motion, and Shipnuck floated a striking possibility. DeChambeau's legacy could end up being the player who priced LIV out of its own survival. His ask might be the number that forces the Saudis to say the math no longer works.

The bigger signal comes from above the tour. The Saudi crown prince's flagship vanity project, NEOM, the trillion-dollar futuristic city, is being scaled back. If the project meant to define his rule is getting trimmed, the appetite for bleeding money into a disruptive golf tour is almost certainly shrinking too. LIV is vulnerable the moment the top of the org chart reprioritizes, and every signal suggests that's already happening.

Shipnuck closed on the interconnected web of uncertainties. Few answers exist right now. The questions compound weekly. But the player guarantees that defined LIV's entire pitch, the thing that pulled golfers across the line, could turn out to be a lot less guaranteed than anyone believed when they signed.