Proving even Saudis have a spending limit, LIV Golf runs out of time, cash and luck.

Not until late Wednesday did O’Neil address the crisis engulfing his business, claiming financing had been secured. It was reported that he told players the league is funded “for the foreseeable future.” That’s unlikely to provide much comfort since O’Neil’s foresight didn’t seem to extend from Wednesday morning to Wednesday evening.

“We have faced headwinds since the jump, and we've answered every time with resilience and grace,” he wrote in a memorandum to staff, with commendable bravado. “Now, we answer by doing what we do best: putting on the most compelling show in sports.”

Leaving aside the Kool-Aid conclusion, O’Neil’s challenges are enormous. Depending on who you ask, LIV’s losses range from $5 billion to north of $8 billion, if you include future commitments. That explains why his most daunting headwinds are now internal, from those financing the farce.

“Our season continues exactly as planned, uninterrupted and at full throttle,” O’Neil emphasized. Which is short of saying LIV is funded through the end of the schedule four months from now, and farther yet from previous claims that the league was solid through 2032. The emergency infusion obtained Wednesday seems less an investment than severance by another name, but it was sufficient to get players to work on Thursday. Meanwhile, LIV’s announcers opened the broadcast by blaming everything on media mischief — the kind of guff usually delivered while wearing a pink hanbok like Ri Chun-hee, the North Korean newsreader who has spawned many a mocking meme.

So what becomes of LIV? O’Neil can seek new financiers, but who would deem it a good investment to pay millions of dollars to guys like Talor Gooch or Caleb Surratt, or to sustain a burn rate reported at $100 million a month? And if the Saudis are no longer interested in spending in sport, and on his LIV enterprise in particular, what leverage does he have to secure a soft landing deal with the PGA Tour or its European counterpart? He has nothing to offer but a toxic product.

Through four years of LIV’s existence, some things have been constant: bullishness that is often exposed as bullshit; metrics that never signal an upward trajectory; a victim mentality that blames its failures on a conspiracy against the league rather than on its own well-documented missteps; and a drool-speckled army on social media insisting that the Saudis have enough cash to cover LIV forever.

Thing is, though, no one likes setting money on fire, no matter how much of it they have. Which is why “forever” seems to have arrived.

Eamon Lynch is a columnist for Golfweek and a frequent contributor to Golf Channel.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: LIV Golf proves even the Saudis have a spending limit: Eamon Lynch