What LIV Golf’s meeting with the PGA Tour means for the sport’s future

The Players Championship was a triumph for golf, a tournament that delivered a marquee winner doing what none had ever done. Well done Scottie Scheffler.

However, Scheffler’s back-to-back success at Sawgrass a week after winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational for the second time was overshadowed by the spectre of the sport’s great divide.

Rumours of talks between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), backers of the LIV Golf Tour, began to surface at the start of the tournament and hardened into fact by the time Scheffler signed his winning scorecard.

Of those slated to meet PIF head Yasir Al-Rumayyan were the player directors of the PGA Tour policy board, or at least five of them. Though Jordan Spieth, Adam Scott, Patrick Cantlay, Peter Malnati and Webb Simpson confirmed their attendance for Monday’s meeting, the presence of the sixth and most important figure, Tiger Woods, was not guaranteed.

So why is this meeting significant?

Let’s briefly go back to the beginning. The PGA Tour had initially been in opposition to LIV Golf following its multibillion-dollar launch in June 2022. However, 12 months down the line the tour recognised the futility of trying to compete with multimillion signing-on payments for marque players and $4m winners cheques, by announcing in June 2023 it had entered into talks with PIF about a framework agreement that would bring the sport under one umbrella and put an end to division.

The decision announced by PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan stunned its members, including Rory McIlroy, who had been one of LIV’s fiercest critics. Others, including Spieth, spoke of a lack of trust in Monahan over the volte face, about which the players were neither consulted nor informed.

A working deadline of December 31 2023 was set to reach an agreement. As the months slipped by without an announcement speculation began to emerge that the PGA Tour was seeking a deal with another investor, the Strategic Sport Group (SSG), an investment vehicle led by Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group.

LIV Golf responded by unveiling Jon Rahm for a whopping $450m at the beginning of December, an aggressive move interpreted as a sign of PIF’s impatience with the PGA Tour. Suspicions that Monahan was indeed holding talks with SSG were confirmed in January with the announcement of a $3bn deal.

Though Monahan insisted last week that talks with PIF were ongoing there was a sense that the sport was nearing a pivotal moment, that golf could not continue along divided lines. A meeting with Al-Rumayyan, reportedly close to the tour headquarters in the Bahamas, was thus convened.

Is the PGA Tour united in wanting a deal with PIF?

The short answer is no? Though McIlroy is now a powerful advocate for working with PIF believing there is no prospect of a viable future without agreement, there are others who remain reluctant, including the biggest voice of all, Woods, fellow board members Spieth and Cantlay, plus the world No 1 Scheffler.

What is at stake for PIF?

Saudi Arabia wants a seat at golf’s top table to further its wider political and diplomatic aims of normalising the kingdom.

This policy is commonly described as sportswashing, a PR strategy that uses sport as a method of painting the kingdom in a positive light whilst deflecting from a toxic human rights record. Its involvement in football, Formula One, tennis, boxing and other frontline sports has proved its efficacy.

By becoming the principal sponsor of the world’s most powerful tour the Saudis would augment their grip on the soft power levers that are so effective in countering the negative human rights commentary and presenting Saudi Arabia as a modern state worthy of global interest and inward investment.

What’s in it for the PGA Tour?

Survival, pure and simple. Monahan’s 180-degree, handbrake turn recognised that the PGA Tour could not compete with the financial rewards on offer to LIV golfers.

The deal with SSG is not about competing with LIV but rather a negotiating device which allows the tour to potentially reduce the size of the stake PIF might take.

Moreover, the SSG deal was intended to leave executive power in the tour’s hands. In other words any future deal with the PIF would grant the associated PR benefits of any major sponsor but their influence would be contained.

What is the likely outcome?

A negotiated peace that gives both sides enough of what they need. PIF wants acceptance through involvement. The PGA Tour wants PIF’s financial backing but to hold onto power. Once the power structure is agreed, both parties can start to worry about how to reintegrate the world’s best players under one roof.

Despite Scheffler’s magnificent victory, it was still a triumph achieved in the absence of some of the world’s best players. Golf cannot maximise its potential with major winners like Rahm, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson and Patrick Reed one side of the divide with Scheffler, Spieth, McIlroy, Cantlay and Wyndham Clark on the other.

How the exiles are reintegrated is for another day. First must come the smoke signals over the Bahamas.