How a deal to shape golf’s future went cold

NEW YORK – Just months ago, professional golf seemed to be on the brink of resolving a bitter conflict that had torn the sport apart.

The PGA Tour and Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit, rival leagues that had been feuding over stars and audience share for several years, finally submitted a proposal for a deal to the US Justice Department.

Golf executives hoped United States President Donald Trump would help move things along – and the 78-year-old was confident he could.

“I could probably get it done,” he said on the Let’s Go! podcast with Bill Belichick and Jim Gray in November. “I would say it would take me the better part of 15 minutes to get that deal done.”

But it is taking a lot longer.

As the Masters teed off on April 10 at Augusta National, the negotiation has essentially come to a standstill, three people familiar with the talks said.

Despite Mr Trump’s personal interventions – in February, for example, he hosted Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the chair of LIV and the governor of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, at the White House – the two sides appear at their greatest extremes since June 2023, when they stunned the sports world by announcing a thinly sketched deal that would bring an end to acrimonious litigation.

“I don’t think it’s ever felt that close,” Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy told reporters last week of those February meetings. “But it doesn’t feel like it’s any closer.”

In the months before those Oval Office meetings, the two sides had hammered out a tentative agreement for the Saudis to pool US$1.5 billion (S$1.98 billion) in a new commercial arm, alongside a band of new US investors. That deal answered some competitive concerns, but left several business questions unresolved.

Namely, that the agreement would have left LIV intact as a stand-alone circuit, even as golf executives and fans alike remain unconvinced the market for the sport is large enough to support two competing tours. For those on the PGA Tour, there was the nagging issue that LIV’s approach has been burning cash.

Mr Trump’s victory in the presidential election changed the calculus. The two sides expected his Justice Department would be more lenient towards a consolidation, and during the meeting at the White House, the PGA Tour proposed a new deal to absorb its rival golf league, while integrating aspects of LIV Golf. The PGA Tour would give the Saudis a US$500 million credit on their US$1.5 billion investment, effectively the value it pegged to LIV.

The hope was that Mr Trump might give the final nudge to make that all happen. Like many golf fans, he may be less interested in the dollars and cents of any deal than he is having the world’s top players competing against each other more regularly. (The Masters is one of the few tournaments that includes both PGA Tour and LIV players.)

And he likely would not mind being known as the deal maker who brought it all together.

“The president, he can do a lot of things,” McIlroy said shortly after that meeting. “He has direct access to Yasir’s boss.”

But the Saudis baulked. They preferred instead to stick with the deal to invest in the commercial arm and keep LIV alive – no matter how much money it was losing. And in recent weeks, the PGA Tour formally rejected that offer, two people familiar with the deal said. The Tour told the Saudis it wanted to focus on a true merger, now that the regulatory backdrop might allow it. The Guardian first reported the Tour’s rebuff.

In the wake of the seeming collapse of the talks, Greg Norman, LIV’s former CEO who left in January, riffed about how the word “merger” had been tossed around. “I don’t even know what the right word is,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. But, he added, “As far as I know from my boss at the time, it was never going to be a merger. LIV was always going to be a stand-alone.”

Preserving the future of LIV is personal for Al-Rumayyan, a golf fanatic who has steeped himself in the small details of the circuit.

“I can only go on what he says in our meetings,” Norman said, “that LIV is a stand-alone, and LIV will be around long after he’s dead, and he’s not planning on dying soon.”

The two sides maintain that a deal is not officially off the table. And naturally, each contends it has the upper hand in negotiations.

LIV, with its seemingly unlimited budget, may once again go after PGA Tour players.

And Tour executives have crowed about how ratings for a recent quotidian PGA Tour tournament in Texas – which many stars had skipped in order to prepare for the Masters – blew away those for a LIV tournament at Trump’s property in Doral, Florida.

They also do not feel as if they particularly need the cash. The Tour has yet to spend much of the US$1.5 billion from a band of big-name American investors last year, as it looked to strengthen its hand in negotiations with the Saudis.

Mr Trump, for his part, remains confident that a deal will close – and that someone will surrender.

“Ultimately, hopefully the two tours are going to merge,” he said on April 3. “That’ll be good. I’m involved in that, too.” But unless he, the PGA Tour and the Saudis can find their way to a deal, this weekend will be one of the only times in 2025 that players from both circuits will be on the fairways together. NYTIMES