There is no spinning bankruptcy. The entrails of a failed vanity project lay scattered about the floor of a New Jersey court. What was LIV Golf met a fitting end, its critics would argue, a bloody conclusion predicated on irrational spending that proved unsustainable in a time of war.

It was never about golf for Saudi Arabia, who blew $5bn (£3.7bn) torching the sport’s ecosystem over a four-year period. In the context of these wild Trumpian times, the launch in Hertfordshire already feels like an episode from a distant historical epoch.

Big sport was the big idea, a key policy driver in the repositioning of Saudi Arabia as a contemporary, forward-thinking state, far removed from the medieval theocratic autocracy from which it was trying to disassociate.

Alongside football, Formula One, tennis and boxing, golf was identified as a heavyweight normaliser.

What could be more civilising than 18 holes on a Sunday? Fancy a knock? The great deceit, of course, was that the only golfers taking part were professional, persuaded to leave the established tours for eyewatering sums even by PGA Tour standards.

In return, headliners like Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Patrick Reed, Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter would proclaim the promised land, telling the world they were growing the game as well as banking millions. 

To be fair to them, that fallacy is equally indulged at the station they left, the fellowship of PGA Tour elders insufferable in their talk about seeding golf all over the world for the benefit of mankind.

Money is the principle of first resort across all professional sports. It was the good fortune of golfers that the Saudi state aligned golf with geopolitical objectives, a shortcut to the love and acceptance of the major western powers, i.e. the United States.

That world disappeared on the last day of February when the United States and Israel attacked Iran. Saudi Arabia, already coveted by the Trump administration, moved closer to the centre of things, confirmed as an American ally in a wave of retaliatory attacks by Iran’s first responders.

The new order came at a cost, billions in lost revenues as the oil flows slowed to a trickle. Saudi Arabia cut the cord on almost all its flagship initiatives, LIV going the same way as futuristic, carbon free cities, luxury Red Sea resorts and other so-called giga enterprises.

Even before the war, Saudi Arabia was running a budget deficit to fund its “Vision 2030” project, intended to reduce dependence on oil. Increased sales of government bonds in conjunction with billion-dollar loan deals has seen the national debt hit a record high of almost $500bn. 

$20m prize funds per event was barely petty cash in the days of plenty, but $5bn of cumulative investment since St Albans made nil sense to a state no longer preoccupied with normalisation.

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It hardly matters to golfers already enriched beyond their dreams on the PGA Tour before the LIV earthquake struck. The bit that hurts is the realisation that they were only ever disposable elements in a far bigger game than golf, useful, if well-paid, idiots in a billion-dollar branding exercise.

The bankruptcy filing allows LIV 2.0 to proceed toward an uncertain future with provision to settle some of the debt to contributors and players, leaving participants free to pursue alternatives should they choose not to be part of the proposed, player-owned, project. 

Total debts were estimated at somewhere between $500m to $1bn, with Rahm the player reportedly owed the largest sum, $7m plus, followed by DeChambeau and Johnson, each down more than $5m. The heart bleeds.