This is one of the weeks where golf doesn’t need to talk itself up, not that it ever feels it should be modest. For the Majors, the circus barking of the host television networks can still be grating, but at least it has meaning.
Nobody will be trying to work out how many of the best players in the world have bothered to turn up for the PGA Championship, which is how golf operates now on many other weeks of the year. And nobody will be fixated on the prize money either, which is how golf has landed itself in an existential crisis, mortgaging its future to live beyond its means.
The imminent demise of LIV Golf has crystalised where greed took the game over the last four years. Because everyone assumed Saudi Arabia had limitless resources and endless patience, the PGA Tour felt compelled to enter an arms race on prize money. It was a desperate act of self-preservation.
The marquee players who had turned down LIV’s advances expected the PGA Tour to stump up for their loyalty. In professional sport, loyalty can be couched in loving language, but invariably it has a price.
In this conflict the PGA Tour have haemorrhaged money from the start. When 11 LIV players, led by Phil Mickelson, sued the PGA Tour for antitrust violations in a federal court, the tour countersued. In these disputes only the lawyers are guaranteed to win, and when the case was in full swing the PGA Tour was shelling out $5 million (about €4.2 million) a month on legal fees.
At the same time, the PGA Tour were trying to finance an enhanced prize fund model to eyeball their new rivals. Almost every tournament on the LIV Tour had a purse of $20 million, so in 2023 the PGA Tour introduced “designated” events with prize funds of between $15 million and $25 million.
Since then, they have streamlined that programme into eight no-cut “signature” events, each with a prize fund of $20 million. Perversely, it meant that in 2025, both the Open Championship and the PGA Championship, two of golf’s Majors, had a smaller purse than these made-for-greed events, designed to line the pockets of the “loyal” elite.
The PGA Tour also created what it called a “Player Impact Program”, worth a total of $100 million, which was another way of greasing the palms of the most successful players on tour.
Phil Mickelson with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, then chairman of LIV Golf, during the Pro-Am before last June’s LIV Golf Invitational at The Centurion Club in St Albans, England. Photograph: Charlie Crowhurst/LIV Golf/Getty Images
Essentially, the game was sitting at a roulette table in Vegas and betting on whatever numbers came into its head.
Alan Shipnuck, author of LIV and Let Die, the definitive account of the upstart tour, wrote a superb piece about its demise on the Skratch Golf platform recently.
“One of the glum realizations in the tour wars was that professional golfers – who, by definition, play the game for money – are not romantics like the rest of us,” wrote Shipnuck.
“Turns out … swapping out a [PGA] Tour event in Hartford for a LIV event in Portland wasn’t a big deal – if the price was right. ‘What you have to understand about professional golfers is that they are all whores,’ says a long-time agent with clients on both LIV and the PGA Tour. ‘That is the starting point.’”
The question is what happens next? Now that the PGA Tour has committed to outlandish prize funds, how can it sustain this model?
“It has left the game, in my view, in a very difficult and potentially unsustainable place,” said Paul McGinley recently. “The overheads and prize funds now are so huge because of LIV that the tours are under pressure. Everybody else loses, except the players.
“The tours lose – they’ve got massive overheads. The public lose, because they’re seeing a diluted product on TV, and are having to pay a lot more money to go to events now. The sponsors lose because they’re having to spend a lot more money to sponsor the same events. The media companies lose because TV numbers are not huge. So, tell me anybody who’s winning except the players here.”
The Saudi money was an economic shock that the game simply couldn’t absorb. To stay in the fight with LIV, the PGA Tour looked to the world of private equity and at the beginning of 2024 they announced a partnership with Strategic Sports Group, who pledged up to $1.5 billion in funding. But is that a bottomless well?
Ian Poulter has raised interesting points about the future of the DP World Tour. Photograph: Cliff Hawkins/Getty Images
In an otherwise self-serving interview with the Daily Telegraph last week, Ian Poulter raised some interesting points about the knock-on effect for the DP World Tour if, or when, LIV leaves the stage.
The PGA Tour entered into a “strategic alliance” with the DP World Tour in 2021, before the advent of LIV, but after the Saudis had explored the possibility of forming a partnership with the DP World Tour.
For the PGA Tour, the “strategic alliance” was an act of front-foot defence. They initially paid $85 million for 15 per cent of the DP World Tour’s media arm and later raised that stake to 40 per cent. But crucially, the PGA Tour also guaranteed that prize funds on the DP World Tour would not fall below $3 million for any event. In 2024 that pledge cost them about $25 million.
That deal is set to be renegotiated next year. The PGA Tour recently announced 56 job cuts, and its new prize fund regime has clearly put its resources under enormous strain. Poulter’s point is that if LIV disappears, will the PGA Tour continue its benevolent uncle relationship with the DP World Tour?
Without that support the DP World Tour would continue to shrink. Even as it stands, it is not much more than television wallpaper for the first two-thirds of the year until the FedEx Cup concludes at the end of August and Europe’s Ryder Cup class turns up for the lucrative end-of-season tournaments.
Television viewing figures for the PGA Tour have stabilised in the States, the game’s biggest market, but not at the kind of levels that would make advertisers climb over each other for a piece of the action.
The biggest audience for the final round of a PGA tournament last year – excluding the Majors – was just less than 4.5 million. In contrast, the average audience for a regular-season NFL game was 18.7 million.
The greed of the players created a spiralling dynamic in which the game started to cannibalise itself. It was always too easy just to blame the Saudis.