The Financial Times reported that Yasir Al-Rumayyan’s decision to pull the plug on Saudi Public Investment Fund financing for LIV Golf was influenced by Sergio Garcia busting a club during a tantrum at the Masters. The paper said people familiar with the matter believed Rumayyan’s embarrassment over the sequence of events helped lead to the move.
Garcia is not new to controversy. In 2019, he was disqualified from Saudi’s tournament after defacing five greens in a mid-round tantrum, and in 2022 he was heard in a European locker room shouting, “You’re all f——-d, you should have taken the Saudi money!” Around the same time, he was caught on a hot mic in the U.S. saying, “I can’t wait to leave this tour.”
The reporting landed with force because it tied a major funding decision to a public outburst by one of LIV Golf’s best-known players. PIF is a $900 billion sovereign wealth fund, and the Financial Times said its five-year strategic plan, announced one week before the LIV change in April, did not mention sports. That matters because it suggests the Garcia incident may have been a trigger, not the whole explanation.
The sharper reading is that the Masters tantrum may have embarrassed Al-Rumayyan, but the broader retreat from golf appears to have been shaped by geopolitics and shifting Saudi priorities more than by one player’s conduct. The article also points to the Neom project fiasco, which has torched over $50 billion, as part of the wider strain on Saudi spending choices. In that light, LIV’s problems look less like a single reaction and more like a decision being pulled by several forces at once.
What remains unanswered is how much weight Garcia’s behavior actually carried inside the financing decision. The reporting connects the dots, but it also leaves open whether the club-busting episode was the decisive embarrassment or simply the most vivid moment in a much larger strategic turn.
