LIV Golf has suffered another legal blow amid a week that has seen the beleaguered breakaway scramble to find reassurances on its future.
The golf league and its powerful backer, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), are being sued by the circuit’s predecessor.
Premier Golf and its parent company World Golf Group Limited filed a lawsuit against the PIF, Golf Saudi and other LIV entities in the London Commercial Court, Sky Sports reports.
The Premier Golf League was a precursor to LIV Golf. The concept, designed to rival the PGA Tour, first emerged in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic crushed any momentum for the proposed breakaway. Soon after, LIV staged its first competition in 2022.
Its concept bore striking similarities to LIV, with a proposed format of concurrent individual and team championships, lucrative purses and 54-hole, no-cut events.
Premier Golf is now claiming that it implemented the concept of a breakaway golf league before Saudi Arabia’s PIF turned to fund a new venture, which ultimately became LIV.
LIV Golf (Pictured: CEO Scott O’Neil) has been sued by its predecessor in a London court
The Saudi-backed breakaway was thrown into chaos this week amid ‘shutdown’ fears
The lawsuit comes as LIV was thrown into chaos on Wednesday amid fierce claims that it could be scrapped, with executives meeting in New York City for an emergency summit earlier this week.
However, LIV CEO Scott O’Neil has since scrambled to reassure the league’s players and employees about its future in an email on Wednesday evening.
‘I want to be crystal clear: Our season continues exactly as planned, uninterrupted and at full throttle,’ an excerpt from the email read.
‘While the media landscape is often filled with speculation, our reality is defined by the work we do on the grass. We are heading into the heart of our 2026 schedule with the full energy of an organization that is bigger, louder, and more influential than ever before.
‘The life of a startup movement is often defined by these moments of pressure. We signed up for this because we believe in disrupting the status quo. We have faced headwinds since the jump, and we’ve answered every time with resilience and grace.
‘Now, we answer by doing what we do best: putting on the most compelling show in sports.’
Although the rebel circuit appears to have averted the possibility of immediate dissolution, LIV’s future, principally its viability beyond August, remains shrouded in doubt.
LIV’s Saudi Arabian backers have already pumped almost $6billion into the venture, which is only hemorrhaging millions of dollars, and are understood to be ready to call time on the hugely expensive project.
O’Neil confirmed at this week’s Mexico tournament that LIV’s Saudi funding will end in August
According to multiple players and agents working on the tour, the expectation is that the PIF will continue pumping in cash until the conclusion of their 2026 campaign in Michigan on August 30 – hopes that appear to have been validated by O’Neil’s latest remarks.
Speaking at their ongoing tournament in Mexico, he told TNT Sports: ‘The reality is that you’re funded through the season, and then you work like crazy as a business to create a business and a business plan to keep us going.
‘But that’s not different from any other private equity-funded business in the history of mankind.’
The latter sentiment will only raise eyebrows, given the PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan told players last month that his fund was committed to the league until 2032.
