While Euripides is credited with having coined the phrase about there being safety in numbers, another great philosopher has expanded upon the concept for the modern age. “I think there must be safety in numbers. If you f—- up enough times, they forget which one you really did,” said Willie Nelson. “They start thinking, ‘Well, nobody can be that bad!’”

LIV Golf seems to exist according to the Tao of Willie, since only its most fawning lickspittles can recast constant humiliation as cause for hubris.

LIV’s season opened last week in Riyadh, which was also its broadcast debut on Fox Sports in the U.S. The first round — played under floodlights at night, perhaps to hide the absence of a gallery in the shadows — drew an average viewership of just 12,000. The last time Rupert Murdoch saw numbers that sobering he was writing a $787 million check for defaming Dominion Voting Systems. The closing stretch of the final round attracted 31,000 viewers. LIV’s defenders pointed out that the time difference didn’t help and that figures will improve at this week’s stop in Adelaide. Which is true. Australia will deliver more viewers and crowds but remains the exception that proves the rule.

Four years into this folly, LIV Golf is going nowhere and the excuses for a lack of audience traction have become as worn out as a Greg Norman runner-up speech.

Yet you’d be forgiven for believing that LIV has never been in a stronger position. Much has been made of the USGA and R&A announcing pathways into their Opens for LIV golfers who are not otherwise exempt, a development presented as a significant win for the league. In reality, so few spots are on offer (and the criteria so specific) that it’s possible no players at all will qualify that way. There are considerably more guys who need rescuing than there are seats on the life rafts launched by the governing bodies.

Another number that hints at something less than safety was revealed when LIV Golf’s U.K. arm published accounts for the year 2023 that showed a loss of $396 million, more than 10 times revenue. Those financials don’t include LIV’s activities in the U.S., which are thought to be even more unprofitable. Analysis of those filings suggests that by the end of ‘25 the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund will have set alight at least $5 billion on LIV, with some player contracts soon up for renewal (notably Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson) and a lengthy tail of expenses to consider.

That $5 billion equates to more than $400,000 per head for everyone viewing round one from Riyadh on Fox Sports. Still, some brown-noser stands ready to point out that Adelaide will be a comparative bargain at about forty grand per. And yet there’s a resilient notion that PIF has the upper hand in negotiations with the PGA Tour, that it can continue indefinitely funding this fiasco. It’s self-serving nonsense. Even the Saudis have a limit on lunacy, and LIV must be sorely testing it. Only the pride of PIF chief Yasir Al-Rumayyan is keeping LIV afloat, and no amount of bootlicking blather can obscure that reality.

If the Tour wished to avoid having golf be stained by the sportswashing of authoritarian governments, now would be the time to wait out LIV. But this is commerce and not conscience. The Tour’s executives, some of its players and all of its investors want that Saudi infusion. No one is interested in or incentivized to play hardball, especially over moral quibbles. Al-Rumayyan needs a face-saving off-ramp. The Tour wants reunification for a stronger product. Strategic Sports Group investors want partners with deep pockets. None seem overly concerned right now with what fans might want.

Whatever the particulars of the deal nearing consummation, it will represent humiliation for the Saudis, though their new partners will be too polite to point that out, and their apologists too thick to grasp it anyway. They might buy a seat at the table, but it's far short of the head of the table they set out to occupy when they attempted to purchase the elite level of the game. If they obtain terms similar to that of the private equity investors in PGA Tour Enterprises, then the Saudi spend in golf will total somewhere close to $7 billion.

Seven billion. To end up with about six percent of a company valued at $12 billion. Al-Rumayyan had better hope that his boss doesn’t devote much time to poring over the household expenditures. But perhaps $7 billion is a fair price for proximity to major U.S. sports leagues and their owners in hopes that rules are loosened around sovereign wealth funds having ownership stakes in those teams (and really, what rules aren’t being loosened to suit Donald Trump’s benefactors these days?).

The coming weeks and months will see the Saudis settle for much less than the ownership of men’s professional golf that they aspired to. The Tour will settle for embracing sportswashers thanks to the disloyalty and greed of its own members, who the organization still can’t or won’t force into becoming contracted talent. Fans will settle for… well, who knows?

“Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice,” Willie Nelson once quipped in another pearl. “That's what makes the jukebox play.”

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: LIV Golf by the numbers is simply laughable