The Merger of LIV Golf and the PGA Tour: Here’s What to Know

The PGA Tour, the world’s pre-eminent skilled golf league, and LIV Golf, a Saudi-funded upstart whose emergence over the previous yr and a half has cleaved the game in two, have agreed to hitch forces.

The pact is difficult and incomplete, and quite a few golfers hate it. They are directing their wrath on the architects of the deal. Let’s begin from the start.

What are the PGA Tour and LIV Golf?

The PGA Tour holds tournaments practically each weekend, principally within the United States but in addition in different nations in North America, Europe and Asia, with prize swimming pools value tens of millions of {dollars}. The tour has been the house to virtually each male golfer you possibly can identify: Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Arnold Palmer and so forth.

It has relationships with, however is separate from, the organizations that stage males’s golf’s 4 majors: The Masters Tournament, The P.G.A. Championship, The U.S. Open and the British Open.

LIV Golf started in late 2021 with the previous PGA Tour participant Greg Norman as its commissioner and billions of {dollars} in backing from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, which is named the Public Investment Fund. LIV lured a number of PGA Tour gamers, together with the main champions Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka, with large purses and assured payouts that far surpassed what they may earn on the established circuit.

LIV promised a pointy break from golf’s fusty traditionalism, with music blaring at occasions, looser gown codes and staff competitions — and tournaments that lasted three days as an alternative of 4. Further, of specific enchantment to potential gamers, whereas the PGA Tour tournaments lower golfers with the worst scores after two rounds, LIV wouldn’t lower anybody.

What was the connection between the leagues earlier than the deal to align?

Acrimonious, to place it evenly. Players who joined LIV had been pressured to resign from the PGA Tour — and its European equal, the DP World Tour — below the specter of suspension and fines. LIV sued the PGA Tour and the PGA Tour countersued, litigation that’s nonetheless technically ongoing (although the deal is meant to resolve it).

PGA Tour supporters and different critics of LIV stated the enterprise was merely an try by the Saudi authorities to distract consideration from its human rights report, whereas LIV supporters stated the PGA Tour was a monopoly that used inappropriate strong-arm ways to guard its place in big-time sports activities.

It appears so. The PGA Tour and LIV introduced Tuesday the creation of a brand new entity that will mix their belongings, in addition to these of the DP World Tour, and transform golf’s governance.

The PGA Tour would stay a nonprofit group and would retain full management over how its tournaments are performed. But the entire PGA Tour’s business enterprise and rights — such because the extraordinarily profitable rights to televise its tournaments — can be owned by a brand new, nonetheless to be named for-profit entity that’s presently referred to as “NewCo.” NewCo can even personal LIV in addition to the business and enterprise rights of the DP World Tour.

The board of administrators for the brand new for-profit entity can be led by Yasir al-Rumayyan, who’s the governor of the Public Investment Fund and in addition oversees LIV. Three different members of the board’s government committee can be present members of the PGA Tour’s board, and the tour would appoint nearly all of the board and maintain a majority voting curiosity, successfully controlling it.

Does this variation how I comply with golf?

Not but. For the remainder of 2023, all of the excursions will stay separate, and all their tournaments will proceed as scheduled.

And after that?

Who is aware of? This is how Jay Monahan, the commissioner of the PGA Tour, answered questions Tuesday about what golf may appear to be sooner or later.

• Will LIV live on as a separate golf league? “I don’t want to make any statements or make any predictions.”

• Will LIV golfers return to the PGA Tour and DP World Tour? “We will work cooperatively to establish a fair and objective process for any players who desire to reapply for membership with the PGA Tour or the DP World Tour,” Monahan wrote in a letter to gamers.

• Will PGA Tour gamers, a lot of whom spurned LIV and its enormous paydays, obtain compensation? Will LIV gamers someway be pressured to surrender the cash they had been assured? “I think those are all the serious conversations that we’re going to have,” Monahan advised reporters.

How do gamers really feel about all of this?

Broadly, LIV gamers appear to assume they’ve gained a significant victory, and they’re in all probability proper. They bought their cake (enormous paydays) and may eat it (a pathway to returning to the PGA Tour), too.

Mickelson, the primary main participant to depart for LIV, tweeted that it was an “awesome day today.” Koepka took a jab at Brandel Chamblee, a former skilled golfer and present tv commentator, who has been vocally anti-LIV.

Many PGA Tour gamers had been much less jubilant. They had been blindsided by the news, studying of the settlement when the general public did, and they didn’t appear to grasp why the tour waged a authorized conflict towards LIV and a conflict of morality towards Saudi cash, solely to ask the wolf into the henhouse.

Monahan met with a bunch of gamers Tuesday in Toronto on the Canadian Open, which was set to begin in two days, and afterward advised reporters it was “intense, certainly heated.”

Johnson Wagner, a PGA Tour participant, stated on The Golf Channel that some gamers on the assembly referred to as for Monahan’s resignation.

“There were many moments where certain players were calling for new leadership of the PGA Tour, and even got a couple standing ovations,” he stated. “I think the most powerful moment was when a player quoted Commissioner Monahan from the 3M Open in Minnesota last year when he said, ‘As long as I’m commissioner of the PGA Tour, no player that took LIV money will ever play the PGA Tour again.’”

Wagner estimated that 90 % of the gamers within the assembly had been towards the merger.

Can the gamers cease this from occurring?

Possibly! The settlement was negotiated in secret over seven weeks this spring. Most of the board, gamers, broadcast companions and others had been left in the dead of night till the general public announcement.

Monahan burdened that there was solely a “framework agreement” and never a “definitive agreement,” with many particulars nonetheless to be determined. The definitive settlement should be voted on by the PGA Tour’s coverage board, which is what it calls its board of administrators.

The coverage board is made up of 5 impartial administrators, together with Ed Herlihy and Jimmy Dunne, who helped negotiate the deal. The board additionally consists of 5 gamers: Patrick Cantlay, Charley Hoffman, Peter Malnati, Rory McIlroy and Webb Simpson.

If Wagner’s estimate is correct that 90 % of gamers oppose the merger, the vote may very well be tough.

If the PGA Tour was so towards LIV and Saudi cash, what modified?

“Listen, circumstances change, and they’ve been changing a lot over the last couple years,” Monahan stated.

Get it? No?

“What changed? I looked at where we were at that point in time, and it was the right point in time to have a conversation,” Monahan stated.

Between the traces, Monahan made it sound just like the settlement got here all the way down to cash and competitors, because it typically does. To compete with LIV, the PGA Tour has enhanced purses, supported the DP World Tour financially and pursued extraordinarily costly litigation. “We’ve had to invest back in our business through our reserves,” Monahan stated.

He additionally stated the flexibility to “take the competitor off of the board” whereas retaining management was vital.

Can anyone else cease the deal from going via?

The Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission or the European Commission might actually attempt.

For a few yr, the Justice Department has been investigating the tight-knit relationship between the PGA Tour and different highly effective entities in golf. Among its questions is whether or not the organizations have exerted improper affect over the Official World Golf Rankings, which decide gamers’ eligibility for sure occasions and could be an necessary issue of their success and revenue.

As a part of their deal, LIV and the PGA Tour agreed to drop their dueling lawsuits, however doing so wouldn’t essentially change the Justice Department’s inquiry. If there have been any unlawful conduct by the PGA Tour, a merger wouldn’t stop the PGA Tour from being punished for it.

“The announcement of a merger doesn’t forgive past sins,” stated Bill Baer, who led the Justice Department’s antitrust division through the Obama administration.

The federal authorities, via the Justice Department and the F.T.C., additionally critiques greater than 1,000 mergers for approval every year, and the European Commission critiques them for the European Union. Without a definitive settlement, it’s not clear whether or not this may be the kind of mixture regulators might block or whether or not they would attempt to take action.

Saudi Arabia appears to have grand sports activities ambitions. Will it all the time stay a junior accomplice to the PGA Tour in golf?

As all the time, Saudi Arabia has the proper automobile to achieve extra management: cash.

The Public Investment Fund will make investments “billions,” in accordance with its governor, al-Rumayyan, into the brand new for-profit entity. It can even maintain “the exclusive right to further invest in the new entity, including a right of first refusal on any capital that may be invested in the new entity, including into the PGA Tour, LIV Golf and DP World Tour,” in accordance with the discharge saying the settlement.

If the Public Investment Fund invests extra money, it would absolutely demand extra board seats and larger voting rights, additional tilting management of males’s skilled golf towards the dominion.