Joaquin Niemann has cruised to a wire-to-wire win at LIV Golf New York, as Jon Rahm locked up a third consecutive season-long points title despite his career-worst result in the league.
In the wake of a The Wall Street Journal report confirming Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund will step away from funding LIV Golf from 2027 onwards, the sport finds itself back in familiar territory. Speculation. Noise. Half-truths. Strategic leaks. And not a lot of formal clarity from LIV Golf itself, which, in fairness, is very on brand.
Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and the architect of LIV Golf, is stepping down from his position as chairman of the LIV board, according to a report from the Sports Business Journal.
A PGA Tour delegation of Tiger Woods, Australia’s Adam Scott and commissioner Jay Monahan are meeting US President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday afternoon (Friday morning, AEDT), according to sources.
Golf Digest has confirmed what was first reported by Bunkered.co.uk, that Monahan, along with a few other PGA Tour “team members”, has been in attendance at the Future Investment Initiative (FII), an annual conference run by the PIF in Riyadh.
At the moment, it seems negotiations between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s PIF and its governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, are enmeshed in anti-trust regulation hell, forcing a harrowing holding pattern in which all of golf’s lawyers and all the kingdom’s men can’t seem to put what’s left of the tour back together again.
Monahan did not provide any details on the rendezvous, stating only that the conversation was “constructive and represents an important part of our due diligence process in selecting potential investors for PGA Tour Enterprises”.
McIlroy cautioned that the current state of affairs, with two entities currently holding very different forms of competition and some players secured by LIV through the late 2020s, will require patience to be worked out.
Multiple sources familiar with the matter told Golf Digest that LIV Golf’s team component is one of many highly contested subjects in a potential deal.
Spieth did not go into any detail about who else would be there or if it was taking place three days from now, though he did say he believes this potential meeting could be beneficial for both parties.
Though the incontrovertible takeaway from the past two years in professional golf is that no one knows anything, at least for certain, we’ve spent much of this week at TPC Sawgrass gathering intel on the status of the deal.
In a performance that was alternately confident and cautious, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan spoke in front of the gathered media for the first time since last August at the Tour Championship.
Australian Golf Digest
