Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

What Is LIV Golf? It Depends Whom You Ask.

Bold new project or crass money grab? Even golf’s best players (and former President Donald Trump) disagree on the merits of the Saudi-financed golf tour.

Credit...Montana Pritchard/LIV Golf/LIVGO, via Associated Press

The Saudi-financed, controversy-trailed LIV Golf series has been the talk of men’s golf since its launch last year.

But what is it? Who is playing it? What’s all the hubbub, and how can you watch it? Here’s what you need to know.

The series, which Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund bankrolled with at least $2 billion, has presented itself as “an opportunity to reinvigorate golf” through rich paydays, star players, team competition and slick marketing.

LIV Golf’s organizers hope to position it as a player-focused alternative to the PGA Tour, which has been the highest level of men’s pro golf for generations.

LIV’s critics, which include some of the world’s best players, have labeled it an unseemly money grab that is diminishing golf as a sporting test.

When LIV debuted in June 2022, its tournaments were the richest in golf history, with regular-season events boasting purses of $25 million. The winner’s share at each stop was $4 million, and the last-place finisher was guaranteed $120,000. (For context, the winner of the 2022 Masters Tournament received $2.7 million, a prize bumped up to $3.24 million in 2023.)

And LIV’s prize money was on top of the appearance fees and signing guarantees accepted by individual players. Phil Mickelson, a six-time major tournament winner, is being paid a reported $200 million to take part, and Dustin Johnson, a Masters and U.S. Open champion, was said to have been tempted by an offer worth $150 million. Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka, Patrick Reed and Cameron Smith are among the players who appear to have received multimillion-dollar inducements to surrender their PGA Tour careers.

The PGA Tour has since increased the purses at some of its events, but the blend of guaranteed money and LIV prize funds has kept the young league writing the biggest checks in golf.

LIV has 48-player fields, and some of the men who participate are indisputably big names in pro golf. Beyond the past major champions like Koepka, Mickelson and Smith, there are also players like Lee Westwood, formerly the world’s top-ranked golfer, the Ryder Cup stalwart Ian Poulter and Mito Pereira, who came tantalizingly close to winning a major in 2022.

Image
LIV Golf’s roster is a mix of star and largely unknown players. Thomas Pieters, left, Talor Gooch, Bubba Watson and Harold Varner III after a team event in Singapore in April.Credit...Scott Taetsch/LIV Golf/LIVGO, via Associated Press

The PGA Tour has retained the loyalties of other stars, though. Tiger Woods, who rebuffed a nine-figure offer from LIV, has denigrated the league's approach to competition and complained that its players “turned their back on what has allowed them to get to this position.” Rory McIlroy has been a fearsome critic, and Jon Rahm, who won the 2023 Masters, said earlier this year that he thought the PGA Tour was “making the necessary changes to adapt to the new age, and I think it’s better for everybody.”

Despite the star power of some players, many LIV golfers are probably strangers even to deeply committed golf fans. But many know the league’s commissioner: Greg Norman, the two-time major tournament winner who spent years fuming over the PGA Tour’s structure.

Not exactly. Saudi Arabia is among the resource-rich Persian Gulf states that have turned toward sports to raise their profiles, reshape their reputations and develop their economies in new ways.

Through its sovereign wealth fund, Saudi Arabia has been around the forefront of the movement. In addition to LIV, the wealth fund has acquired the Premier League club Newcastle United, and Saudi money has poured into Formula 1 racing and boxing.

But documents obtained by The New York Times show that Saudi officials know that their golf foray may have limited financial payoff. McKinsey and Co. consultants privately told the wealth fund that a golf league could be earning revenues of at least $1.4 billion a year by the end of the decade — or be losing hundreds of millions of dollars.

For its part, the wealth fund has insisted it is nothing more than an investor in LIV. In February, though, a federal judge in the United States said she had concluded that the fund was “the moving force behind the founding, funding, oversight and operation of LIV.”

Image
Former President Donald J. Trump, left, with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in Bedminster, N.J. in July 2022.Credit...Seth Wenig/Associated Press

Not always well. One of LIV’s biggest signings, Mickelson, provoked outrage when he praised the series as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” even as he called Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights “horrible” and used an expletive to emphasize a description of the country’s leaders as “scary.” Norman made things worse soon after later when he dismissed Saudi Arabia’s murder and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by saying, “Look, we’ve all made mistakes.”

Not that pro golf’s existing power structures, including the PGA Tour, have always held the moral high ground. See: here, here, here and here.

The PGA Tour, which is now mired in litigation against LIV, suspended players because it requires members to request and receive releases to play in events that conflict with those on its schedule.

The punishments were not a surprise: The tour had clearly signaled that it would take action against any of its players who joined. So moments after the players hit their first LIV shots, the tour dropped the hammer.

The suspensions also applied to any PGA Tour affiliates, including the developmental Korn Ferry Tour, tours in Canada and Latin America and, notably for the older players who joined the LIV series, the PGA Tour Champions circuit for golfers 50 and older.

The DP World Tour, formerly known as the European Tour, is closely aligned with the PGA Tour, and it imposed fines and suspensions on its players who appeared at LIV events. In April, an arbitration panel in London upheld the DP World Tour’s right to punish players, a decision that will affect the European roster for this year’s Ryder Cup, which will be contested this autumn in Italy, and for years to come.

That decision did not leave American golf organizations in the clear, though. In addition to the lawsuit LIV is waging against the PGA Tour, the Justice Department is conducting an antitrust investigation into men’s professional golf. Department officials have been especially interested in whether the PGA Tour’s threats of discipline undermined the integrity of golf’s labor market and in the ties between the tour and the organizers of major tournaments.

U.S. officials have interviewed Mickelson, DeChambeau and Sergio García as a part of their inquiry. It is not clear when the investigation will conclude, much less whether the government will try to force any changes in golf.

Image
Phil Mickelson was the biggest name to join LIV Golf, but his comments about its Saudi backers raised eyebrows, and pushed him to at least one apology.Credit...Brenton Edwards/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The PGA Tour has long, close links to the organizers of the four major tournaments: the British Open, the Masters, the P.G.A. Championship (which is run by an organization that is distinct from the PGA Tour) and the U.S. Open. But the tournament organizers have taken no steps to ban LIV players explicitly. At the Masters, contested in April, Koepka and Mickelson tied for second place. And in May, Koepka won the P.G.A. Championship by two strokes.

There is a catch, though: The tournament organizers set the criteria for entry and have the authority to change them at any time. Also, many, though not all, exemptions that grant automatic entries are based on relatively recent performances in sanctioned events, so many LIV players could ultimately find themselves excluded from the majors.

Norman felt a version of that power last summer, when the R&A, which runs the British Open, said it had “decided not to invite him to attend” a traditional dinner of past Open champions. Augusta National Golf Club also opted not to invite Norman to attend the Masters, but that decision was less freighted since Norman never won that event.

Some of the players who have signed up for LIV, and even many who have not, believe the PGA Tour offers many golfers a raw deal. The biggest stars contend their earnings should be more commensurate with their status in the game, and they have pointed out how the best players in other sports earn far more than golfers do.

Moreover, LIV players routinely argue that they should be viewed as independent contractors and free to play whenever and wherever they choose.

In their decision in the DP World Tour case, British arbitrators said pointedly that the independent contractor argument was “overplayed.”

“Individual players have to accept some limitation on their freedoms inherent in tour membership,” the panel said. No player, the arbitrators noted, “suggested that he had given up his independence by signing up to onerous (albeit remunerative) obligations to LIV.”

Image
Winning golfers on the LIV circuit celebrate in front of fans differently than winners on the more established tours.Credit...Matt Turner/EPA, via Shutterstock

LIV has set up what are essentially shorter tournaments with smaller fields — three rounds instead of four, and with only 48 players competing instead of the rosters on the PGA Tour, which can be three times as large some weeks — and featuring concurrent individual and team play events.

With the small field, there is no cut midway through the event to lop off the stragglers, and every round starts with a shotgun start, meaning players tee off from different holes on the course simultaneously and then proceed around the course’s layout from there.

The individual competition feels, in many ways, like a traditional golf event: three rounds, lowest score wins. In the team event, four-man squads effectively contest a separate competition for a separate prize pot.

With rare exceptions, PGA Tour events generally consist of four rounds of stroke play, in which players compete against one another to post the lowest score. And while the LIV Golf format might feel unusual for players and viewers, the ultimate goal — circle the 18-hole course in as few shots as possible — is the same.

The PGA Tour is planning to eliminate the cut at some of its events beginning in 2024, a shift that LIV has openly relished.

LIV Golf organizers scheduled 14 events for 2023. The schedule includes three events at courses controlled by former President Donald J. Trump’s family — keeping the league close to one of its greatest political patrons — as well as a tournament at Real Club Valderrama, the Spanish course that hosted the Ryder Cup in 1997.

Other venues are less dazzling. When someone essentially asked Johnson ahead of the Masters this spring to compare Orange County National Golf Center, where LIV had just held a tournament, to Augusta National, he replied: “I don’t think you could have those in the same sentence, other than I played there last week and I’m playing here this week.”

Image
One of LIV’s marketing slogans is “Golf But Louder.” Fans cheering Cameron Smith in Adelaide, Australia in April.Credit...Jason O'Brien/LIV Golf/LIVGO, via Associated Press

In LIV’s first year tournaments were shown online and on lesser-watched streaming services in much of the world. For 2023, the league signed a deal with the CW Network to broadcast its events in the United States. It is not, however, thought to be the kind of deal that has the CW paying an enormous rights fee to LIV.

The CW is not exactly known for sports programming, but CBS, NBC and ESPN (which is owned by Disney, which in turn owns ABC) have enormous contracts to show PGA Tour competitions. Those networks may have their fill of golf, but they also may be wary of angering their business partners at the PGA Tour. LIV has argued in court papers that the tour pressured broadcasters not to do business with the rebel league.

LIV (rhymes with give) Golf chose Roman numerals for its name. If it’s been a while since you studied those in school, LIV translates to 54, which is the number of holes each player sets out to complete in each event’s three-round format. That is one fewer round than a typical PGA Tour workweek, but it pays a lot more money.

Kevin Draper contributed reporting.

Alan Blinder is a sports reporter. He has reported from more than 30 states, as well as Asia and Europe, since he joined The Times in 2013. More about Alan Blinder

Tariq Panja covers some of the darker corners of the global sports industry. He is also a co-author of “Football’s Secret Trade,” an exposé on soccer’s multibillion-dollar player trading industry. More about Tariq Panja

Andrew Das joined The Times in 2006. An assistant editor in Sports, he helps direct coverage of soccer, the Olympics and international sports. More about Andrew Das

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Player Power or Money Grab? An LIV Primer.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT