PGA vs LIV: golf’s never-ending war

Golf is nearing the end of its fourth year of professional division, and nothing suggests that reunification will happen anytime soon.

In fact, the most sensible bet at this point might be that it will never happen. Despite the perception that both sides seemed closer than ever at the beginning of the year, a feeling which was boosted with the return to the White House of Donald Trump. The US president appeared determined to become the mediator and bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion but over the past few months, both the PGA and LIV have been designing significant changes aimed at further strengthening their respective products.

That February summit in the Oval Office, where Trump brought together the top brass of the PGA Tour, including Commissioner Jay Monahan, Tiger Woods, and Adam Scott—the leading voices in player representation—and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) that governs the LIV, now seems a distant memory. At the time, a deal seemed imminent, but the paths of both organizations diverged again shortly thereafter. What has emerged is that the PGA was proposing a kind of merger, and that Al-Rumayyan’s vision in no way includes seeing his creation absorbed into another organization.

Since then, the relationship has been in a glacial period. The levels of hostility from 2022 and 2023 have not recovered; the phase of harassment and takedown in the form of high-profile signings financed by the endless flow of Saudi oil seems to be over, but neither have any of the rapprochements that Monahan and Al-Rumayyan used to stage from time to time occurred again, or at least they haven’t reached the media sphere. And this despite the fact that two figures who were perceived as obstacles to the agreement have left the equation: Monahan, to whom many attributed a considerable share of the blame for the schism for refusing to listen when the LIV was only in its embryonic stage. Many feel betrayed when he negotiated behind the players’ backs a preliminary agreement announced in the summer of 2023 that has ultimately proven worthless; And Greg Norman, the controversial first CEO of the LIV super league, a figure who has never had good press in the upper echelons of golf and whom his counterpart did not recognize as a valid interlocutor.

Each to their own

They have been replaced respectively by Brian Rolapp and Scott O’Neil, who, at least for now, seem more focused on figuring out how to improve their tours than on unifying them. Rolapp, a top NFL executive, is determined to apply to the PGA what has made American football the most-watched sport in the United States. According to reports in recent months, he is planning a major overhaul, which includes a significantly shorter schedule. The mantra is to make elite golf a scarcer, and therefore more exclusive, product. Fewer tournaments and a structure designed to give more prominence to the biggest stars, even at the expense of a middle class that has increasingly less influence on everything happening across the Atlantic.

O’Neil, for his part, has understood what Norman refused to admit: there are some things that even petrodollars can’t fight. One of them is the governing board of the world rankings. The LIV has already announced that it will eliminate one of the features that was anathema to its inclusion in the system, and which faced opposition from several internal voices, including that of a heavyweight like Jon Rahm: three-round tournaments.

From 2026 onwards, they will be played in four rounds, demonstrating flexibility even at the cost of eliminating part of the competition’s distinctive identity. Beyond that, the plans involve slowing down investment. The era of mammoth contracts and multimillion-dollar sums earmarked for paying fines imposed on players by their previous tours is over; the era of self-sufficiency has arrived. The idea is to let franchises that are already attracting sponsors and developing into national or continental teams take flight in an attempt to gain fans. In that sense, the Fireballs, who next year will field their captain Sergio García, along with Josele Ballester, David Puig, and Luis Masaveo, will be the first all-Spanish team since the project began in the summer of 2022.

Deadlock

All of this reinforces the feeling that the PGA and LIV need each other far less than they did two years ago. The former already secured the necessary capital to finance the increase in prize money and bonuses for the top stars, a move necessitated by the economic firepower of its rival, through the intervention of the Strategic Sports Group, a consortium of billionaires with a significant presence in the American sports industry, which injected $1.5 billion (and now seeks to recoup its investment, hence the proposed changes). The latter, if their request for inclusion in the ranking is finally granted, would significantly improve the prospects of access to the majors for their players (who now, exemptions aside, make a living between the Asian Tour, the DP World Tour and the qualifiers), thus covering up their major weakness along with television coverage, a problem that seems difficult to solve at least until 2030, when the agreements that the PGA has with CBS, NBC and ESPN expire.

At this point, what is the point of unification? Beyond making life easier for the spectators, who count for as much in this business as in the vast majority of professional sports—that is to say, very little—Rolapp and O’Neil will have to find new areas of common ground. Assuming that such common ground is what they are seeking, which is perhaps a big assumption.

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