Asked what he would say to the contractors his league has not paid, LIV Golf’s chief executive Scott O’Neil did not promise them anything.

“What I would say to them is we’re doing everything we can to make sure we can do right by them and the work they committed, and I hope we can,” he told reporters outside The Club at Chatham Hills the day before his tour’s scaled-down season finale.

Asked in the same conversation whether bankruptcy protection was still on the table, he said he would rule out no option.

The Saudi money is gone

The crisis traces back to April, when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund confirmed it would end its funding of LIV after the 2026 season, closing an experiment on which the sovereign wealth fund had poured more than $5bn since 2022. PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan stepped down as LIV’s chairman at the same time.

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That left the league searching for a new backer while still trying to finish its own season. London-based BC Partners Credit is the current prospective lead investor, and its top executive Ted Goldthorpe was in Indianapolis this week to meet the players it would inherit.

A finale worth half of what was promised

Indianapolis itself has been scaled down. The individual pool is $10.1m rather than the standard $20m, with the winner taking home just over $2m instead of $4m. The $40m Michigan team championship that was supposed to close the season on 27-30 August was cancelled. In all, roughly $30m has been cut from the end-of-season purses.

That is before the money players have already earned. Several competitors at LIV Bedminster on 6-9 August had still not been paid their winnings weeks later, and one source close to the field told Sports Business Journal some were weighing whether to skip Indianapolis in protest.

Two vendors sue for more than $1m each

Fresh Tape Media, which produced LIV’s January preseason media days, is suing for $1.23m in missed invoices and interest. Mobii Systems Group, the vendor behind the tour’s “Any Shot, Any Time” broadcast feature, is chasing more than $1m of its own. Smaller contractors are owed sums running up to $100,000.

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O’Neil told reporters the priority now is closing the BC Partners deal.

“The entirety of our focus is to get to this transaction and get through it,” he said.

He sketched a 2027 built around 10 events: five team championships overseas, five individual tournaments in the United States positioned near the majors, and equity ownership for the players who stay.

Whether the tour survives to play any of it depends on money it does not yet have and vendors it has not yet paid.

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