The PGA Tour, DP World Tour and LIV Golf League, which have been embroiled in a bitter legal battle for more than a year, have agreed to merge and move forward with a larger commercial business, the circuits announced Tuesday.
This was announced today by the three tours, which described the merger as “a historic agreement to unify the game of golf worldwide”.
The agreement was reached without the knowledge of many PGA Tour members and LIV Golf players and agents.
In a statement, the circuits said the parties signed an agreement that “combines the golf-related business and commercial rights of PIF (including LIV Golf) with the business and commercial rights of the PGA Tour and DP World Tour into a new, collectively owned, for-profit entity to ensure that all stakeholders benefit from a model that offers maximum excitement and competition among the sport’s best players.”
“After two years of disruption and distraction, this is a historic day for the sport we all know and love,” PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said in a statement. “This transformative partnership recognizes the immeasurable strength of the PGA Tour’s history, legacy and pro-competitive model and combines with it the DP World Tour and LIV, including the concept of team golf, to create an organization that will benefit golfers, and charitable partners and fans.”
As part of the settlement, the parties will drop all claims involving LIV Golf against each other, effective immediately.
The LIV Golf League, which is being funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and headed by two-time Open Championship winner Greg Norman, and 11 of its players, including Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka, had sued the PGA Tour in federal court last year, alleging that the PGA Tour had used its monopoly power to crush competition and influence suppliers, media companies and others not to work with LIV Golf.
The PGA Tour filed a counterclaim, alleging that LIV Golf had interfered with its contracts with the players.
It is yet to be determined how players like Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson, who defected to Saudi Arabian-funded LIV Golf for nine-figure bonuses, can rejoin the PGA Tour after this year.
It was also unclear what form the LIV Golf League would take in 2024.
PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said in a memo to players that a comprehensive evaluation would determine how to integrate team golf into the sport.
“They were going their way, we were going our way, and after a lot of introspection you realize that all this tension in the sport is not a good thing,” Monahan said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, will join the board of the PGA Tour, which continues to operate its tournaments. Al-Rumayyan will be chairman of the new business group, with Monahan as chief executive officer and the PGA Tour will have a majority stake in the new company. The PIF will invest in the commercial venture.
The PIF had invested more than $2 billion in the golf venture, which critics have claimed is a form of sports laundering to make amends for the Saudi Arabian monarchy’s history of human rights violations.
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