Bankruptcy filings are one of the very few places where the creator economy has to show its actual numbers. Brand deals are covered by non-disclosure agreements, rate cards are fiction, and every figure a creator quotes in public is negotiable in private. Then a company collapses, a court requires a list of who it owes, and the real contracts fall out.
LIV Golf filed for Chapter 11 protection on Tuesday, September 8. Among the thirty largest unsecured claims sits Rick Shiels, one of the biggest golf creators on YouTube, owed roughly $1.4 million.
That places him sixteenth on the list, above several of the professional golfers the league actually paid to compete.
Quick facts
- LIV Golf filed a Chapter 11 petition on Tuesday, September 8, 2026
- Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund withdrew funding in April 2026 after reportedly spending more than $6 billion since 2022
- BC Partners has taken control of the league following the PIF exit
- The filing lists the thirty largest unsecured claims, of which fourteen are players
- At least 24 parties are owed more than $1 million each
- Rick Shiels is owed about $1.4 million for an ambassador role he signed in May 2025
- The listed amounts are past-due payments, not the full remaining value of anyone’s contract
- A proposed restructuring could transfer majority ownership of the league to its players
- Players are reportedly under no obligation to continue, even on multi-year deals
The list
Reported figures vary by a few hundred thousand dollars between outlets, which is normal when a docket is being read quickly, so treat these as close approximations rather than settled numbers.
| Creditor | Role | Reported amount owed |
|---|---|---|
| Jon Rahm | Player | About $7.5 million |
| Bryson DeChambeau | Player | About $5.7 million |
| Dustin Johnson | Player | About $5.5 million |
| Cameron Smith | Player | About $4.8 million |
| Tyrrell Hatton | Player | About $3.4 million |
| Brooks Koepka | Player | About $1.7 million |
| Rick Shiels | YouTuber, brand ambassador | About $1.4 million (16th) |
| State of Louisiana | Public body | About $1.2 million |
| Lucas Herbert | Player | About $1.01 million |
Reports indicate the listed sums reflect payments that came due in the third quarter of 2026 rather than the total value of each agreement. If that reading is right, and it has not been confirmed by anyone with the full contract in front of them, Shiels’ annual package would sit well north of $5 million. That number should be held loosely. What is not in doubt is that a content creator was being paid at the same order of magnitude as touring professionals.
Sixteenth in line is the actual story
The $1.4 million is the headline. The word “unsecured” is what matters.
In a Chapter 11 case, money flows out in a fixed order, and general unsecured creditors are close to the end of it. Secured lenders get paid from their collateral. The professionals running the restructuring get paid because nothing happens without them. Certain taxes and limited wage claims have statutory priority. Whatever remains after all of that gets divided proportionally among everyone in the last group.
In large Chapter 11 cases, that last group routinely recovers a fraction of what it is owed, and routinely waits years to find out how small a fraction. A creator with a seven figure claim and no security interest is in the same position as an equipment supplier and the state of Louisiana. Being sixteenth on a list of thirty does not mean sixteenth to be paid. It means sixteenth by size within a group that shares the leftovers.
Shiels paid for this deal twice
There is a second cost here that does not appear in any filing.
When Shiels signed with LIV in May 2025, a section of his audience objected. LIV has been dogged since launch by accusations that it functions as a reputation laundering exercise for Saudi Arabia, and some viewers stopped watching over the association. He took a measurable audience hit as the price of the contract.
Which is the part worth sitting with. He absorbed the reputational cost up front, in full, on schedule. The financial compensation for absorbing it is now a claim in a bankruptcy court.
The asymmetry every creator should internalize
A brand deal costs a creator two things: the work, and a slice of audience trust. Both are spent immediately and neither is refundable. The money arrives later, on terms written by someone else, and it is the only part of the arrangement that a bankruptcy court can take away. There is no mechanism anywhere for giving back the subscribers who left.
What actually protects you
Nothing in the contract Shiels signed was unusual. That is the point. Standard influencer agreements are drafted almost entirely around deliverables and usage rights, and almost not at all around what happens if the payer stops existing.
A few clauses change the outcome materially, and they are worth pushing for at any deal size:
- Money up front. A meaningful percentage on signature, before any content is published. Cash received is not a claim.
- Short payment terms tied to delivery. Net 30 from publication, not net 90 from quarter end. Long terms are how large unpaid balances accumulate quietly.
- A termination right on missed payment. One missed invoice should let you stop work and stop carrying the association, immediately, without penalty.
- Usage rights that expire with payment. If they stop paying, they stop being allowed to run your face in their marketing.
- A parent company guarantee. When a deal is signed by a subsidiary, ask who else stands behind it. This is the single clause that moves you out of the back of the queue.
Most creators will be told no on at least half of that list. Asking still tells you something useful about how the counterparty views its own stability.
LIV Golf’s proposed restructuring could hand majority ownership of the league to its players. Photo via Pexels.
The wider signal
Creator income has been quietly re-concentrating into brand partnerships for years, because platform revenue keeps moving underneath everyone’s feet. YouTube alone has spent 2026 rewriting the rules twice, first when it redefined what counts as a view and again when it rewrote its gameplay violence monetization rules ahead of GTA 6. Neither change was hostile. Both changed what a channel earns without the channel doing anything differently.
The rational response to platform volatility has been to diversify into sponsorships, and this filing is the reminder that sponsorship income carries counterparty risk of its own. It is just risk that stays invisible until the day a docket gets published.
LIV Golf may yet come out the other side. The proposed restructuring would hand majority ownership to the players, and a version of the league is expected to return next year. But the $6 billion that PIF poured in since 2022 is not coming back, and neither, most likely, is the full $1.4 million.
Shiels will be fine. He has a large audience, a diversified business and other partners. The creators this should worry are the ones two tiers down, who sign similar contracts with smaller companies for smaller sums, and who do not have the leverage to ask for anything up front.
