A quick timeline: LIV was announced in 2021 and held its first tournament in 2022. The tour signed a handful of the PGA Tour’s top golfers to hundred-million dollar contracts, which are rare in a sport in which players traditionally earn their pay through sponsorships and tournament prizes. But the PGA’s very best players largely stayed where they were as the tour increased its payouts. The last big defection was Jon Rahm in December 2023. This past year, players started leaving LIV and going back to the PGA Tour.

The key to LIV was the money — seemingly endless amounts, courtesy of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Many accused the Saudi government of sportswashing … and as Sportico pointed out, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman pretty much agreed. He used the actual words “sport washing” when describing Saudi sports investments.

And there was so much money. Rahm won $87 million in just two years of LIV golf, which would put him fourth on the all-time career PGA Tour money list.

Some guy named Talor Gooch won $69 million. LMAO.

But LIV also claimed to offer innovations on the sport. The tournaments were 54 holes instead of 72. (LIV is supposedly a Roman numeral backronym for 54.) The golfers were split into teams that competed for championships in addition to the individual prizes, allowing fans to become supporters of “the 4Aces” or “RangeGoats GC.” (“Join the Goat Gang,” LIV’s website begs.)

Few businesses have tried more desperately to seem Fun. (And is anything more Fun than desperation?) One of LIV’s early slogans was “Golf, but Louder.” I remain haunted by this video simply titled, “Party Time.”

LIV also offered extreme closeness with President Trump, who appeared at events hosted by Trump-owned clubs at a time when the PGA had pulled out of Trump clubs after he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Finally: A league for people who actively want politics in their sports.

I cannot stress this enough: Nobody wanted to watch this. LIV events got comically low TV ratings. When the two tours went head-to-head on network TV last year, the PGA’s viewership quadrupled LIV’s.

The most-watched LIV event ever, a 2025 tournament finale on the real-deal FOX network, got about 484,000 viewers. Here are some of the things that aired on TV this past Saturday that got more viewers than the highest-rated LIV round ever: regular-season college softball, regular-season hockey, a race in the second-tier of NASCAR, and a new Hallmark original movie.

The UFL gets better ratings for most of its games. And it’s not trying to beat the NFL!

Per financial filings, LIV lost $590 million in 2025 alone.

FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETY MILLION. In LOSSES! In ONE YEAR!

That’s right folks. You’re currently reading a newsletter that was $590 million more profitable than a professional golf tour in 2025.

To prevent golfers from leaving, LIV increased its payouts in 2026 from $25 million per event to $30 million.

One easy way to judge LIV’s success was major events where its players competed side-by-side with the PGA’s. For a while, that comparison looked pretty good for LIV. Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau won majors in 2023 and 2024, and Rahm and Cameron Smith joined LIV shortly after winning major events.

But PGA Tour golfers swept the 2025 majors, and only one LIV golfer (Tyrrell Hatton) finished in the top 30 at the Masters. Only two LIV golfers (Rahm and DeChambeau) are among the top 30 in the current DataGolf rankings.

Part of the problem is that LIV picked a bad set of aging golfers. (One of its most expensive signings was Phil Mickelson, who is 55 years old and has missed the cut at 11 of the last 16 majors.) But what’s more striking is that even the golfers who were good at the time they signed with LIV got worse. At the start of LIV’s second season in February 2023, six LIV golfers ranked in Datagolf’s top 25. Here’s a look at how four of those golfers fared after joining LIV:

(I don’t think I’m cherrypicking here; you can corroborate this exercise with many other LIV golfers.)

Maybe LIV’s events failed to prepare golfers for better tournaments. They were generally played at second-rate venues, and literally had less golf in them than PGA tournaments. But LIV also self-selected golfers who wanted a lot of money to play a version of a golf that had fewer rounds and less incentive to actually perform well. Of course those golfers got worse! Irons sharpen irons!

The end result was bad golf played by poorly-motivated rich guys.

The LIV story feels like an important lesson: If you build something that sucks, nobody is going to show up. And the people who do will probably suck as well.

Tottenham are in 18th place. They haven’t won a league match in 2026. They’re on their third manager of the season, Roberto De Zerbi, having already fired Ivan Tudor and Thomas Frank, who himself was only hired after the offseason firing of Ange Postecoglou.

The road to salvation got a lot harder in the last week. On Friday, West Ham beat Wolverhampton Wanderers 4-0, jumping Tottenham in the standings and pushing them into the relegation zone. And one of the teams just above Tottenham, Leeds United, pulled off a shocking win over Manchester United on Monday. They’re now six points clear of Spurs, likely safe from being caught.

And on the field, Tottenham’s performance just keeps getting worse. Here’s an ESPN graphic charting their position in the league over time.

Since Jan. 1, Tottenham are the worst team in the Premier League. They’re the only team without a win this calendar year, and they are dead last in goal differential.

I’m trying to do the British thing where they say “Tottenham are…” btw. I’m probably gonna mess it up like 8 times.

Things are especially bad at home, where Tottenham have won just twice all season, including the season-opening match on Aug. 16. Over the last eight months, Carson Wentz has won as many games in Tottenham Hotspur Stadium as Tottenham Hotspur.

Why is this a big deal? Normally, money buys wins in soccer, and Tottenham have the sixth-most expensive roster in the world. Forbes ranks them as the ninth-most valuable club in the world. They’re about twice as valuable as the second-wealthiest Premier League team ever to get relegated.

Why is Tottenham so bad? ESPN’s Ryan O’Hanlon (my first editor at The Ringer!) has a solid theory: Tottenham’s relatively new management built a roster loaded with exceptional athletes graded highly by various cutting-edge player tracking services. Basically, it’s just like how I might fill my FIFA roster with a bunch of players rated 97 in “speed” and “agility.” Unfortunately for Tottenham, they’re all bad at passing. In a video game, those players can outrun the opposition and win me the Premier League; in real life, they’re non-functional.

What’s bizarre is … Spurs have done great in European competition! They made the final 16 of this year’s Champions League, which means they’re probably going to finish better in the Champions League, the most prestigious competition on the planet than in their domestic league. No Premier League team has ever been relegated while participating in the Champions League. Only a handful of CL teams have ever been relegated, and none since 2011.

When a team this big gets sent down, it’s usually due to severe financial mismanagement — “doing a Leeds” has its own Wikipedia page — or as punishment, as happened to Juventus as a result of the Calciopoli ref-fixing scandal. It’s basically unprecedented for a club of this caliber to perform so poorly as a result of simply Being Bad At Soccer.

UCLA had a record five first-round draft picks and a record six players taken overall, all in the top 18 picks. Turns out they were good at basketball, in case you missed their 28-point win in the national championship.

Dallas drafted Azzi Fudd, who will be reunited with former UConn teammate Paige Bueckers. Fudd and Bueckers are probably a couple, but they’ve chosen to be private about it over the past year, and their relationship wasn’t mentioned on the draft night broadcast. I’m used to covering men’s sports, where public relationships between players are uncommon, so my instinct was to yell OMG THE TOP PICKS ARE DATING? WHAT IF THEY BREAK UP? WHAT IF ONE GETS TRADED? DID THEY TAKE HER BECAUSE THEY’RE DATING? … but as Frankie de la Cretaz wrote in Out of Her League, queer relationships are much more common in women’s sports, and players have long proven capable of acting professionally in similar circumstances.

The biggest surprise of draft night was probably Golden State’s decision to draft and then trade LSU star Flau’jae Johnson … followed by a bizarre press conference where Valkyries GM Ohemaa Nyanin refused to comment on the trade, saying she prefers not to speak about her strategies publicly. It now seems as if Golden State agreed to the trade without realizing Johnson would be available. (BTW, those posts are from Marisa Ingemi’s new beehiiv newsletter Valkyries Beat where she’ll be covering the team!)