BC Partners, a top private equity firm, has quietly revived its effort to create a successor to LIV Golf after publicly abandoning its plan for "LIV 2.0" earlier this week. The upstart global golf league filed for bankruptcy in September after recording billions in economic losses when its main backer, the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, withdrew future funding.
BC Partners has told counterparties that it believes a team-based global golf group will eventually thrive and that it is still willing to invest more money and time to establish a LIV successor. That optimism comes even as the US PGA Tour and Europe's DP World Tour have been cool toward allowing their players to appear in future LIV events. According to multiple people familiar with the matter, BC is seeking to acquire a $50mn bankruptcy loan from the PIF, the so-called debtor-in-possession financing that would allow it to control the LIV Golf Chapter 11 process. BC Partners has previously committed $4mn for the DIP loan alongside PIF.
The deal would also give BC the time and freedom to revive LIV 2.0, though the 2027 version may now look thinner than BC's previous 17-tournament proposal. BC is also seeking to preserve the $5bn in financial losses LIV has accrued since 2021 in the US and UK. The firm could later use these net operating losses as the foundation of a corporate acquisition vehicle to hunt for companies to buy, some of which may be in the sports industry. Its bid remains preliminary, and it was not immediately known whether LIV or PIF were receptive.
BC Partners said in a press release on Thursday that it was "disappointed that mutually acceptable terms could not be reached among the various stakeholders" for the full LIV 2.0 project. LIV's lawyers told a federal New Jersey bankruptcy court that the group would move to wind down and file liquidation paperwork by Monday, while stating they would revisit that option if circumstances change.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing