Newton Golf Swaps $2.3M of Debt for Perpetual Preferred — the Same Trade TruGolf Made to Stay on Nasdaq
Two of golf’s listed manufacturers are now rebuilding their balance sheets to hold their listings — Newton this week, TruGolf last year — plus the rest of the week across the industry
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Good morning, GBR community,
Newton Golf turned $2.3 million of debt into preferred stock this week. The instrument never matures, pays 10%, and can pay that 10% in paper whenever the company prefers. The purpose is not growth: it is to manufacture enough stockholders’ equity to satisfy Nasdaq before the compliance clock runs out. TruGolf ran the identical play last year and is still listed. Two of golf’s listed manufacturers, one financing method, one reason — and if you supply, distribute or lend to either of them, that is the week’s biggest open question.
We also return to LIV Golf, because the paperwork arrived, and paperwork carries dates. The WARN notice went in on 8 July, which starts a 60-day clock expiring around 6 September — with four events still to play, no schedule for 2027, and a claim of up to $630 million now on the record in London.
Plus: Golf.AI on the day the golf trip gets planned by an agent instead of a person, Forest Hill enters administration with a TrackMan range and a gym already built, Gedling Borough Council counts a 120-year-old club as 750 houses, and Chipotle buys attention inside a video game.
THE LEAD
WHEN AN AI PLANS A FOUR-DAY TRIP TO SCOTLAND, DOES IT PUT YOUR COURSE IN THE ITINERARY?
“Plan me a four-day golf trip to Scotland for eight players in September. Mix famous links with hidden gems, keep travel times short, include great dinners, and make sure the handicaps work for each course.”
One sentence. In the time it takes to read it back, an AI agent returns a complete itinerary. Four courses in. Every other course in Scotland out.
It books the hotel. It holds the table for eight at nine o’clock. It splits the bill eight ways and collects the money before anyone lands, which is the part the man who organises these trips has been dreading since March. And when the group reaches the first tee, the same agent is in their pocket, reading them the line on a green they have never seen.
No Pro Shop was called. The eight players will fly in, play their rounds and go home, and the courses that were considered and dropped will never know it happened.
The assembly layer
A golf trip has always been an assembly job, and a miserable one. Search for courses. Read the reviews. Check availability. Compare hotels. Find the restaurants. Book the vans. Herd the WhatsApp group. Call the Pro Shop and wait. Hope the weather holds. Hope everybody pays.
Somebody does that work today. A tour operator in Edinburgh, or the one man in the fourball who volunteers and then regrets it for four months. What the professionals sell is knowledge that exists nowhere in writing: which club takes eight visitors on a Saturday, which hotel says twenty minutes from the first tee and means fifty, which restaurant seats a group of eight at nine in high season.
Defensible knowledge, for as long as it stayed in their heads.
An agent assembles from what it can read, in seconds, for free. The operators who treat that as a competitor will be quoted against and undercut by a system that never took anybody to lunch. The ones who come through will do the obvious thing and put twenty years of it into the machine, because that knowledge is worth more as training data than as memory.
Which makes golf travel the next vertical to move. A fragmented market of small, knowledge-rich intermediaries sitting directly on top of the highest-margin transaction in golf.
What a slot in the itinerary is worth
A place in a golf trip is worth several rounds. Four green fees, eight sets of hire clubs, lunch for eight and whatever follows it at the bar. Then the return visit in three years, because these groups come back, and they come back to the courses that made the list the first time.
For a course or a resort that lives on visitors, the touring group is the highest-yield round on the sheet, and it arrives in a handful of weeks a year. Lose three of them across a season and you are into the maintenance budget.
A machine cannot recommend what it cannot read
Ask an agent to build that Scotland trip and it goes looking for green fees, visitor access windows, group size limits, handicap requirements, buggy policy, drive times, and whether four visitors can get out before nine on a Thursday in September.
Most courses cannot answer those questions in any form a machine can process. The green fee is seasonal and lives inside a PDF. The visitor policy sits on page four of a members’ handbook. Availability is behind a phone line that stops being answered at six.
An agent that cannot confirm your terms will not put you in the itinerary. It will put in the course that published them.
Four things to get ready
Your data. Every green fee, including the visitor rate that currently requires a phone call to discover. Group sizes, days, times, handicap limits. If a society of eight cannot get out on a Saturday, say so, because an agent forced to guess will guess against you.
Your availability. A tee sheet an agent can query and hold, and a payment it can take. A contact form that lands in an inbox until Monday is invisible to a machine working in seconds. And a group that has already paid is a group that turns up.
Your services. Minutes from the airport. Buggy policy. Caddies and how far ahead to book them. Hire clubs, and which brand.
Your story. Who designed the course and when. What the signature hole asks of you. Why it justifies the extra forty minutes in the van. A model retrieves facts, and a fourball spending four hundred pounds a head is buying something no stock photograph has ever once conveyed.
Then answer the phone at eleven at night, because the golfer typing that prompt is sitting in Atlanta and it is four in the afternoon where he is. That is what GOLF.AI has been building toward. A Pro Shop line that gets answered every time, in the caller’s language, whether the caller is the golfer or the golfer’s agent.
The silent rejection
For twenty years a course could tell when it lost a group. The operator stopped calling. The block booking failed to reappear. There was a person to take to lunch and a conversation to have about it.
Nobody is going to tell you now. Your course was read, weighed and left out of an itinerary in the time it takes to boil a kettle, and nothing arriving in your inbox tomorrow will mention that it happened.
The itinerary is being assembled while your Pro Shop is closed.
→ Tour operators and travel specialists: GOLF.AI is building the travel layer and looking for partners in it. Come and build it, at GOLF.AI.
M&A & EARNINGS
The small end of golf manufacturing is not raising money to grow. It is rebuilding its balance sheet to stay listed — and the same trade has now been made twice.
NEWTON GOLF SWAPS DEBT FOR A PERPETUAL 10% — AND TRUGOLF ALREADY RAN THIS PLAY
Newton Golf has entered a $5.0 million senior secured revolving facility maturing on 1 July 2028, and exchanged roughly $2.3 million of convertible notes, accrued interest included, for 24,092.61 shares of a new Series A Convertible Preferred. Read as financing, it is unremarkable. Read as what the company says it is for — materially improving stockholders’ equity so the Nasdaq-listed maker of the Motion shaft can meet the exchange’s minimum requirement inside its compliance review period — it is something else. Newton’s announcement is not a growth story. It is a listing rescue.
The company’s release puts the initial conversion price at $1.00 a share. The economics of the instrument turn up somewhere else — in a director’s Form 4, lodged the following day: the preferred is perpetual, pays 10% a year, and lets Newton settle that dividend in cash, in kind by increasing the stated value, or by simply letting it accrue — at the issuer’s sole discretion. Newton has not retired the cost of its capital. It has made it deferrable, and moved it ahead of the common. The same filing shows who took it: one of Newton’s own directors swapped notes for 3,246.66 preferred shares through a revocable trust and 2,164.44 through an LLC on 8 July — 5,411.10 in all. The release highlights record 2025 net sales, up 136%. It says nothing about the first quarter of 2026: revenue down 18% to $1.0 million, and a net loss of $2.7 million.
The sharper point is that this is the second time. TruGolf Holdings, the other Nasdaq-listed golf technology company of its size, ran the identical play. TruGolf’s 2025 accounts show notes payable exchanged into equity, total liabilities cut from $21.8 million to $15.9 million, and a $4.6 million stockholders’ deficit turned into positive equity of $4.3 million. Repairing the equity line was only half the defence: TruGolf announced a one-for-ten reverse split on 25 March, effective two days later — its second in under a year. Nasdaq tests the share price as well as the balance sheet, and TruGolf spent last year answering both. The listing survived. The growth TruGolf now sells is a franchised venue network, leased by its regional developers — not by TruGolf. More on that below.
If you supply, distribute, license to or carry receivables from the small end of golf manufacturing, your counterparty’s capital structure has changed shape. The revolver is senior and secured. The preferred sits ahead of the common and can accrue instead of paying cash. The facility matures in 2028; the Nasdaq clock runs faster. By its own account, Newton has shafts in OEM evaluation programmes and a Korean distributor. The product is not the problem. The paper behind it is. SGB Online has the fullest account of the transactions. And on the sell side, the tell is in Newton’s own paperwork: the release announcing Emerging Growth Research’s May note — a reiterated Buy, a $3.00 target, the FY:26 forecast cut to about $10.9 million — went out over the wire with Newton Golf named as the source, and described the revolving facility as under discussion “to support future growth initiatives.” Six weeks later the company told the market what it was really for. If your customer’s equity had to be manufactured, what are your terms in 2027?
TOURS & POWER
LIV’s question is no longer whether it survives. It is that a statutory clock, a sale process and a nine-figure claim are now all running at once.
LIV FILED THE NOTICE — WHAT A 60-DAY CLOCK DOES TO A SALE PROCESS
Friday’s edition carried the news: LIV Golf has told employees to expect potential layoffs as it hunts for the capital the PIF will no longer provide. What deserves a second look is the paperwork, because paperwork turns a report into a deadline.
LIV notified staff in the United States and the United Kingdom on Wednesday 8 July that it is filing a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act notice. WARN obliges employers with more than 100 people to give 60 days’ warning of mass layoffs; the UK has its own equivalent, and LIV has more than 300 employees split between New York and London. Sportico, which broke the filing, has also seen the investor deck, and it corrects the number everyone has been repeating: the league is seeking $250 million to $350 million, not a round $300 million. The plan it is selling is a ten-event season reaching profitability in year three, on the back of a claim that revenue doubled from 2024 to 2025 and is on pace to add another $100 million this year. LIV’s public line is that nothing has changed yet — no changes to workforce, operations or schedule at this time.
Now do the arithmetic. Sixty days from 8 July expires around 6 September. LIV’s next event is 23–26 July in England and four remain on the calendar, so the legal window in which the league may cut its corporate staff closes while the season is still being played. And the liability column got heavier. ESPN’s Mark Schlabach obtained the court records showing that World Golf Group and Premier Golf League filed a claim in London’s Commercial Court on 16 April seeking between $210 million and $630 million from LIV, the PIF and Golf Saudi, alleging breach of confidence and unlawful means conspiracy. Whoever buys a league buys its litigation. At the top of that range, the claim is roughly twice the entire raise.
So if you hold a LIV contract that runs into 2027 — a venue, a sponsorship, a supply agreement, a player deal — you are now pricing three things at once: a counterparty with an owner it does not yet have, a calendar cut from fourteen events to ten, and a contingent claim that could exceed the money being raised to fund the whole thing. The pitch asks investors to buy a growth story and a pile of tax losses in the same breath. Would you underwrite that receivable at your current terms? Front Office Sports maps what is still unresolved across the 2027 landscape, and Golf Digest adds the governance detail — the independent board LIV assembled in late April, after Yasir Al-Rumayyan stepped down as chairman of it.
COURSES & REAL ESTATE
Three ways to stop running your own club: insolvency, a landlord with a housing target, or a management contract. Forest Hill and Mapperley are living the first two; a Florida daily fee has just signed the third.
FOREST HILL DID EVERYTHING RIGHT AND WENT INTO ADMINISTRATION — WHAT THE BUYER IS ACTUALLY BIDDING FOR
Forest Hill Golf Club — 140 acres inside the Leicestershire National Forest, opened in 1991, more than 600 members — appointed administrators from FRP Advisory on 26 June. The business is still trading under their control, still accepting new members, and will be brought to market and offered for sale. No reason for the insolvency has been given. The Golf Business, which reported it, has the administrators’ statement.
What makes the file instructive is that this was not a bare eighteen holes waiting to die. By the club’s own description, the site carries a floodlit 20-bay driving range running TrackMan, a three-bay simulator suite, an 18-hole adventure golf course, a gym and studio, and a bar and restaurant. That is the diversification playbook, executed in full: weather-proof revenue, off-course revenue, non-golfer revenue, food and beverage. It is precisely what every consultant in Britain has been telling clubs to build. It did not carry the company.
Which means the administrators are not selling a golf business. They are selling 140 acres, ten minutes from junctions 21A and 22 of the M1 and twenty minutes from the centre of Leicester, with a going concern sitting on top of it. Leicester City tried to buy the site in 2017 for £2.2 million and turn it into a training ground. The club more recently tried, and failed, to get a 98-bedroom hotel approved. Both are the same instinct: the land wants a different job. And it is the mirror image of the analysis carried in Tuesday’s edition, which found that the land under golf’s great courses holds its value because the golf stays. At the top of the market, the golf protects the land. At Forest Hill, nothing is protecting it.
If you own a UK club, or lend against one, this is the file to read this month. It says the revenue diversification you were sold — the range, the sims, the gym, the food — can be fully built and still not service the debt. It says a 600-member roll is not a covenant. And it says that when the business fails, what clears is the ground. So: what is your club worth if the golf stops? And is there anyone in your borough who has already run that number?
GEDLING BOROUGH COUNCIL HAS EARMARKED MAPPERLEY GOLF CLUB FOR 750 HOMES. The 120-year-old club leases the ground from the council on a lease expiring on 27 May 2030, and no decision has been taken on renewal. Government targets lifted Gedling’s requirement from 460 to 638 homes a year in December 2024, and the borough must now find 11,484 by 2043. The Golf Business has the council’s statement and the campaign against it. Carl Froch is why you have heard about this one; the lease is why it matters — municipal ground is the cheapest golf land in Britain and the easiest to take back.
KEMPERSPORTS HAS TAKEN OVER EVERY OPERATION AT THE FLORIDA CLUB IN STUART. KemperSports’ announcement lists what changes hands at the Dick Gray-designed Martin County daily fee: golf, agronomy, hospitality, food and beverage, sales, marketing and events — the whole P&L, not a slice of it. The firm powers more than 200 properties by its own count, and it no longer only manages them: through a subsidiary it bought Streamsong and 7,000 surrounding acres for $160 million in 2023 — the operator across town now has a national purchasing book and a balance sheet behind it.
TECH & AI
The club software stack keeps thickening, and the golfer never sees the joins.
HOWDIDIDO AND INTELLIGENTGOLF HAVE FOLDED PIN VISION’S GPS INTO THEIR SCORING APPS. Live pin positions, updated by greenkeepers every time a hole is moved, plus hazard yardages, pace-of-play data, club notifications and course updates now sit inside the app members already open to enter a card. The partnership announcement sells it to clubs as one less system to run. The fact worth holding is the ownership: HowDidiDo and intelligentgolf both belong to ClearCourse Sports & Leisure — and every layer the group absorbs is a layer an independent supplier can no longer sell into the British club market.
BRANDS & PLAYERS
Golf’s brand money is moving to where the golfer already is, and it is not the golf course: a burrito chain buying attention inside a video game, and a TGL franchise installing simulators in a public school.
CHIPOTLE HAS BUILT A CUSTOMER-ACQUISITION FUNNEL INSIDE PGA TOUR 2K25. Chipotle’s announcement puts 80,000 free-entrée and double-protein codes on the table for the first players to finish the in-game quest, with that claim window closing on 29 July or sooner if the codes run out. The codes themselves must then be redeemed at participating locations, on digital orders in the Chipotle app, before 30 September. Skill in a golf video game, converted into an app download and a first-party customer record, at the cost of a burrito. Marketing Dive places it inside the wider shift into in-game advertising — EA launched its own brand platform in June. Golf’s audience is being monetised somewhere you do not own.
BOSTON COMMON GOLF HAS LAUNCHED COMMON GROUND, AND FULL SWING IS PAYING FOR THE HARDWARE. The Fenway Sports Group-owned TGL franchise has turned its community work into a platform, with two $5,000 New England PGA Foundation scholarships alongside Keegan Bradley — and founding partner Full Swing donating three simulators to the City of Boston, one permanently installed at Boston Latin School. Read it as philanthropy if you like. It is also a simulator manufacturer buying shelf space inside a public school system, days after agreeing to sell itself to a broadcaster for $530 million.
THE DEMAND SIDE
Two demand stories pulling in opposite directions: a simulator maker taking a lease in a shopping centre, and a national federation buying tournament starts for players who can no longer afford to enter them.
TRUGOLF LINKS HAS SIGNED A LEASE FOR A 5,000 SQ FT FLAGSHIP IN A ROMEOVILLE SHOPPING CENTRE. Premium simulator bays, an upscale restaurant, a full bar, opening this autumn. The announcement lets the landlord explain the logic better than the tenant does: a revitalised retail centre needs a reason for people to come back regularly. The machinery underneath is franchising — regional developers take territories of a million-plus people, and TruGolf is targeting as many as 70 locations in Chicagoland alone. The retail property trade covered it as a leasing story, which is exactly what it is. The listing was saved at the top of this edition; this is what the reprieve is being spent on. Rent.
ENGLAND GOLF SAYS PLAYERS ARE QUITTING EVERY WEEK BECAUSE THEY CANNOT AFFORD TO CONTINUE. Performance director Nigel Edwards told Golf Monthly that talented amateurs and young professionals are dropping out for lack of money, which is why the federation launched its Professional Development Programme in late June: 50 competitive starts on the HotelPlanner Tour and 35 invitations on the LET Access Series through 2026, plus coaching and facilities at Woodhall Spa. The programme does not fund careers, it buys starts — a governing body absorbing a cost the professional game has always pushed down onto the players.
WHAT WE ARE READING
Huddle Up argues that the record $9.6 billion paid for the Seattle Seahawks has less to do with football than with the tax code: American sports franchises remain the most efficient shelter a billionaire can buy, and Vinod Khosla is about to have a very large gain to shelter when OpenAI goes public. Read it directly against LIV’s pitch, which is selling billions in net operating losses as an asset in its own right. Same mechanism, different sport.
Golf Monthly’s interview with Nick Faldo is filed as an equipment story and is really a manufacturing one. His objection to the ball rollback is commercial, not aesthetic: retooling costs the makers hundreds of thousands, and nobody has yet explained how you market a ball that flies 15% shorter than last year’s. His alternative costs $100 and fits in a pocket. With the rollback now paused to at least 2030, this is the argument the equipment industry will keep making.
Golf Digest’s reported piece on indoor club economics, from May, is still the best thing written on why simulator venues work and why they fail, and it belongs next to the TruGolf item above. The line to keep is from Golfzon America’s chief customer officer: the successful ones are bar and restaurant businesses that happen to run on golf simulators, and the franchises that collapse are the ones that thought they were in the golf business. The National Golf Foundation numbers underneath — roughly $45,000 to build a bay, $55 of simulator and $40 of food per session — are the entire model in two figures.