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It’s been close to two years since the PGA Tour and LIV Golf agreed to a merger that still hasn’t come to fruition, and the two sides have seemingly made close to zero progress as far as a truce is concerned. There’s no telling if that will change after Donald Trump visits Saudi Arabia, but it sounds like he’ll be using that trip to put some pressure on the country that’s funding the upstart league.
At this point, there’s not much to be said about the standoff between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour that hasn’t been said a thousand times since the two sides unveiled a tentative plan that would seemingly bring it to an end with a merger mediated by an investment by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in the summer of 2023.
That ended up being an incredibly premature announcement based on what’s transpired since then, as the golfers who defected to LIV are still exiled from the PGA Tour as the organization they joined flails for the relevance that continues to elude it in the midst of its fourth season.
Last year, Donald Trump claimed he would only need 15 minutes to mediate a deal, and while he’s had plenty of other things on his plate during a second term that has lasted more than 162,000 minutes, the two factions remain at an impasse.
At this point, it’s pretty clear the PGA Tour has the upper hand as its television ratings continue to rise while routinely putting the numbers LIV Golf is able to generate to shame. There’s little doubt it would benefit from the return of some notable names who fled, but it’s safe to say it currently has the lion’s share of the leverage at the negotiating table.
According to Eamon Lynch of Golfweek, that’s the gist of the message the President of the United States will be sending to the Saudi officials he’ll be meeting with this week on behalf of the PGA Tour, saying:
“The president is going to Saudi Arabia to tell its autocratic leader, Mohammed bin Salman, that any deal between the Tour and the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund will be on the Tour’s preferred terms, and those terms will not include a long-term future for LIV.
Tiger Woods, a director on the Tour’s policy board—and around whom Trump is reduced to a fawning fan boy—was dispatched to the White House late last week to ensure the president would be on message in Riyadh.”
While the Saudis could certainly rebuff those terms, it’s difficult to envision a scenario where they do so and come up with some magical solution to address the well-documented woes that continue to plague the ill-fated venture; they may “lose” by agreeing to a deal that’s friendly to the PGA Tour, but they’ll likely still reap more benefits than they’d gain by rejecting one outright.
Saudi Arabia has already poured billions of dollars into LIV and can certainly afford to keep pumping cash into what seems like an absolute money pit, but it’s hard to imagine it won’t eventually reach a point where it decides to cut its losses.
There’s no telling if Trump’s message will serve as the catalyst for that particular development—and it’s fair to wonder if he’ll deliver it based on the money he’s made from LIV Golf events held at properties he owns—but it’s becoming increasingly impossible to ignore the writing on the wall.
