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      How the PGA Tour and Liv Golf Merger Could Collapse

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      The tentative agreement has been the talk of golf, but there is no guarantee the pact that aims to bring the tour and LIV Golf under one umbrella will overcome every threat.Golf’s big deal — a planned partnership between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — is not how big deals are ordinarily done.There were almost no outside bankers or lawyers involved in negotiations that led to a five-page framework agreement, and only so much input from the PGA Tour board. The initial pact had few binding clauses and did not assign values to assets. The plan that would, as the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, put it, “take the competitor off of the board” came as the tour faced a Justice Department investigation over antitrust matters.“In some ways, this looks a little more like a settlement to me than an actual M&A deal,” said Suni Sreepada, a partner in the mergers & acquisitions group at Ropes & Gray who said the lack of definitive arrangements complicated the path to closing.“The fact that they were willing to publicly announce it does mean that the parties are pretty committed to doing something,” Sreepada said. “But I guess that leaves us with a question of who holds the leverage at this point? And how does this end up getting fleshed out?”If the agreement closes, it stands to reshape golf’s economic structure profoundly, bringing the business ventures of the PGA Tour, LIV Golf and the DP World Tour, formerly the European Tour, into a new company. The wealth fund is in line to have significant influence over investments in the company, which Monahan is poised to lead as chief executive.Despite the Saudi sway over the new company’s coffers, as well as the plan for the wealth fund’s governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, to serve as the entity’s chairman, PGA Tour officials have insisted that the tour retains control over the competitions themselves. They also note that the tour, which had previously condemned wealth fund money as tainted and immoral, will control a majority of board seats.“We are confident that once all stakeholders learn more about how the PGA Tour will lead this new venture, they will understand how it benefits our players, fans and sport while protecting the American institution of golf,” the tour said this month.Those assurances have done little to curb outrage over the pact, which could still fall apart.Here are some of the obstacles the tour, whose board is meeting near Detroit on Tuesday, and the wealth fund will have to overcome during a process that could take months. If the deal is not done by Dec. 31, it could potentially collapse, allowing both sides to decide whether they want to “revert to operating their respective businesses.”The PGA Tour’s board could balk.The tour has an 11-member board that includes five players. The board’s chairman, Edward D. Herlihy, and a member, James J. Dunne III, were involved in the talks with the wealth fund, but others had little knowledge of the deal until the day it became public.The board must sign off on the agreement once the outstanding details are negotiated. Although Herlihy and Dunne are expected to vote for the pact they helped create, most other board members have been publicly silent or noncommittal.“I told myself I’m not going to be for it or against it until I know everything, and I still don’t know everything,” Webb Simpson, a board member who won the 2012 U.S. Open, said in a recent interview. And at a news conference on June 13, Patrick Cantlay, another player with a board seat, said “it seems like it’s still too early to have enough information to have a good handle on the situation.”Beyond the anticipated backing from Herlihy and Dunne, Rory McIlroy, who sits on the board, has indicated reluctant support for the deal, saying: “If you’re thinking about one of the biggest sovereign wealth funds in the world, would you rather have them as a partner or an enemy?”Other directors have not responded to messages or could not be reached for comment.With many of the agreement’s details still being negotiated, the board did not vote on the deal on Tuesday.The Justice Department could try to block the deal.The Justice Department was looking at professional golf before the deal was announced, with antitrust investigators examining the tour’s closeness with other leading golf organizations and its efforts to deter players from joining LIV.The proposed partnership did not extinguish the department’s interest. In fact, it appears to have strengthened it.Although the tour and the wealth fund have refused to characterize the transaction as a merger, antitrust experts say semantics may not matter. Even if the deal is structured as more of a partnership than an acquisition, the Justice Department could seek to block it, as it successfully did with JetBlue’s alliance with American Airlines.Monahan stirred more doubts in Washington with his public observation that a leading rival would no longer be a threat. Antitrust lawyers said the department could interpret his remark as evidence that the elimination of competition is the aim of the deal, not, say, improving the sport.But Monahan also said the agreement would help create “a productive position for the game at large.” The tour is expected to focus on this in the coming months, arguing that by combining resources and repairing the rift in professional golf, the proposed venture would offer fans the best of all worlds, including more competitions between the finest players on the planet.A LIV Golf event at the Trump National Golf Club in Washington, D.C., this year.Chris Trotman/LIV Golf, via Associated PressThe end of the tension could help persuade regulators to approve the deal, reasoning that it is good for consumers.“If I were the lifetime czar of antitrust in the United States, I would ban the deal and tell them go back and compete,” said Stephen F. Ross, who teaches sports law at Penn State and worked for the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.But, he said, “the real world is that neither private litigation nor antitrust enforcers have ever been particularly good at policing competition between sporting entities to make sure that consumers’ preferences are respected.”The department could also scrutinize how the arrangement will affect professional golfers, given the Biden administration’s focus on workers. In its successful effort to block Penguin Random House’s takeover bid for Simon & Schuster, the department’s antitrust regulators cited the potential effects on author compensation.Even though professional golfers, who often earn millions of dollars in prize and sponsorship money, may appear to be a less sympathetic group of workers than others affected by corporate transactions, the department could be eager to build case law related to the labor consequences of deals.Congress wants the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to study the pact.The deal has been loudly criticized on Capitol Hill, and a Senate subcommittee has scheduled a July hearing. But a Senate hearing cannot stop the deal, and so some lawmakers have asked a Treasury Department-led panel to intervene.The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, is an interagency panel that has broad latitude to scrutinize any transaction that could result in a foreign entity controlling an American business and threatening national interests. Control is interpreted broadly, and can exist even in an investment for a minority stake.A transaction involving golf tours would not immediately seem to trigger a CFIUS review; it does not involve critical technologies and most likely does not involve much sensitive personal data about U.S. citizens. Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, said earlier this month that it was “not immediately obvious” the deal involved national security concerns.The demands for a review have not detailed specific concerns besides a generalized distaste for a partnership between an American sports titan and an arm of a government “known for chilling dissent, jailing dissidents and enacting draconian punishments,” as Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, and Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, put it.But one possible reason to scrutinize the deal involves real estate since CFIUS can review agreements involving property close to sensitive military sites. One of the PGA Tour’s biggest assets that could be controlled by the new for-profit entity is the Tournament Players Club collection of more than 30 golf courses across the United States that are owned, licensed or operated by the PGA Tour. More

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      PGA Tour Board Meets To Discuss Merger With Saudi-Backed LIV Golf

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      The 11-member board did not vote on the surprise pact, whose most significant details are still being negotiated.The PGA Tour’s board, with its members gathered in the same room for the first time since a fraction of them negotiated a deal with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to reshape golf, signaled Tuesday that it intended to move ahead with the agreement and past an outcry that has stretched from clubhouse locker rooms to Capitol Hill.But it also made plain that closing the deal was no certainty.The board, as expected, did not vote on a deal stocked with tentative terms that call for a web of golf businesses — including the tour, the Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit and the European Tour, now known as the DP World Tour — to be housed in a new company. The entity is expected to be flush with Saudi cash but, for now, under the day-to-day control of PGA Tour leaders. But executives hoped that the regular meeting of the board, which is expected to weigh the pact formally only once final terms are negotiated, would help stabilize the tour’s course during a turbulent run of internal division and global scrutiny.That period, executives and board members know, could last for months.Tour executives, the board said in a carefully worded statement Tuesday night, have “begun a new phase of negotiations to determine if the tour can reach a definitive agreement that is in the best of interests of our players, fans, sponsors, partners, and the game overall.”The board, wary of further alienating the players who make up the tour’s membership, some of whom were infuriated after being blindsided by news of the pact, said it was “committed to the safeguards in the framework agreement that ensure the PGA Tour would lead and maintain control of this potential new commercial entity.”The board’s meeting came three weeks after the surprise announcement of the deal, and one day after the tour gave a Senate subcommittee a copy of the five-page framework agreement. The tentative accord, signed in the early-morning hours of May 30 at a Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco, capped seven weeks of secret negotiations, but it was mostly notable for how few binding commitments it included — and how many consequential details remained to be sorted through.Although the tour and the wealth fund are expected to contribute their golf ventures, like LIV, into the new company, the deal’s architects signed the framework agreement so quickly that no valuations were included or, apparently, even completed in advance. The agreement does not quantify the scale of the wealth fund’s expected investment in the new company, though it offers an outline for its leadership structure and protects the Saudi fund’s investment rights.Its few binding clauses include a nondisparagement pledge covering the tour and the wealth fund (but not the players) and a truce that keeps the rival circuits from recruiting golfers from one another. If a final agreement is not in place by the end of the year, barring a mutual extension, the tour and the wealth fund can “revert” to their businesses without any financial penalty, like a breakup fee.Board approval, if it comes, does not guarantee that the deal will last. The Justice Department’s antitrust regulators are among the government officials examining the accord, and they could ultimately try to block it. The pact is also poised to draw scrutiny next month on Capitol Hill, where a Senate subcommittee has scheduled a hearing for July 11.But Tuesday’s meeting was seen as pivotal to the way forward for the tour and an 11-member board that includes five players and luminaries in business, law and finance. Only two members of the board, Edward D. Herlihy and James J. Dunne III, were involved in the negotiations that led to the deal, and it appears many board members did not know they were underway.The board meeting, held at a Detroit-area hotel, began in the early afternoon and stretched into the evening. A person familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private gathering, said it had not focused entirely on the deal; rather, the person said, the board also spent significant time on more technical matters of the sport, such as competition cuts and eligibility.The majority of the meeting focused on the framework agreement, though, with board members receiving a briefing from the tour’s bankers about how they will try to assign values to the circuit’s varied assets. Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, was absent from the meeting in Dearborn; on June 13, the tour announced that he was going on leave as he recuperated from an unspecified “medical situation.”Board members did not comment as they left the meeting, allowing the statement to stand on its own. Only one player who sits on the board, Rory McIlroy, has publicly suggested any measure of support for the deal. In recent weeks, other players have said they wanted to learn more about the accord and what it would mean for the tour.But board members have been told in recent months that the tour could not afford to maintain its duel with LIV, the league founded with billions of dollars from the Saudi wealth fund that enticed some of the game’s biggest stars with guaranteed contracts and enormous prize money. The wealth fund was also facing some pressure as it confronted setbacks in a court battle against the tour, and as LIV struggled to attract audiences and attention in the United States for reasons beyond its financial backer.If the deal collapses, though, both sides have already secured a mutual victory: the dismissal of litigation in California after the tour, the wealth fund and LIV agreed to drop their clashing cases. The dismissals were made with prejudice, meaning that they cannot be refiled, even if the rest of the pact disintegrates.For as guarded as the tour’s statement was on Tuesday night, the dismissal of the litigation was mentioned in its very first sentence. More

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      How Will Jay Monahan of the PGA Tour and Yasir al-Rumayyan Work Together?

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      The stunning golf merger announced last week has raised many questions, and one big one is how will the Saudi wealth fund boss and the tour commissioner manage to work together?After more than a year of high-stakes jockeying and long-distance accusations, Jay Monahan and Yasir al-Rumayyan finally met in May, an arranged blind date in some Venice cafe or hotel.Now the oddest of bedfellows will attempt to remake the future of professional golf and repair the damage done by a yearlong civil war they had once waged against each other.The 53-year-olds in charge could not be more different: Monahan, the American commissioner of the PGA Tour since 2017, and al-Rumayyan, the trusted confidant of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and overseer of his country’s massive Public Investment Fund.It is that fund, claiming to be worth somewhere close to $700 billion, that bought its way into golf last Tuesday. It ended a sniping, court-complicated fight between the PGA’s American and European tours and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour. It instantly solved the PGA Tour’s financial struggles.Now al-Rumayyan will be chairman of this entity. Monahan will be his chief executive. And among the many complex questions this raises is one of internal logistics. How will this unlikely duo manage — manage the game of golf, both on the course and off it, and manage to get along?“Money can change everything,” the legendary golfer Gary Player said in an email exchange. “And all we can do now is hope the outcome moving forward is positive for all.”Monahan has deep New England roots and a background in sports marketing. His leadership style is as hushed as a golf crowd awaiting a winning putt.“I enjoy all forms of human interaction,” he told Golf Digest in 2017. “Talking with people, listening to them, often just observing them. Even unpleasant people, I enjoy discovering what makes them tick. It’s sort of a requirement of the job I’m in now because the range of people is so broad, their situations so dynamic. Their needs and goals can be material, but it’s the human interaction that gets us there.”Al-Rumayyan, the cash-carrying disrupter with a deep passion for golf, is a stern test for Monahan’s people skills. Certainly his “needs and goals” are material.While al-Rumayyan will hold just one of the (now) 11 seats on the PGA Tour board of directors, he and the wealth fund have the exclusive right to invest in the new entity. That means they control the finances, and they plan to pump in billions of dollars.Yasir al-Rumayyan and Monahan sat side by side during an appearance on CNBC.CNBCIn his only public appearance since the merger was announced last week, a televised consummation on CNBC where the two sat chummily side by side, al-Rumayyan said he would let Monahan lead the operation.The “voting system” and the majority of the board, he noted, “is not going to be with us.”But al-Rumayyan’s very presence — and the deal itself, for now only a framework that could take months to formalize — is a heavy reminder that money can trump it all.“The Saudis will want to dominate this,” said James M. Dorsey, adjunct senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School for International Studies in Singapore. “They don’t like to play second fiddle. And they believe, not without reason, that money talks.”What kind of takeover leader al-Rumayyan will become is unclear. His PIF portfolio is massive, and he chairs dozens of state-owned firms, including the oil giant Saudi Aramco and the mining firm Ma’aden. He largely lets executive teams run them as they see fit.But the relationship with Newcastle United, the English soccer team, might provide the best clues for golf.The PIF bought an 80 percent share of Newcastle United in 2021. Fans of the English club immediately welcomed the ownership change, as the prospect of on-field success overrode hard questions. Infused with PIF money, doled out by al-Rumayyan, Newcastle has surged toward the top of the English Premier League.At Newcastle, he has left day-to-day decisions to others, though he has quickly approved expenditures for talent upgrades and has not been invisible.He shows up to matches on occasion. (Compare that with mostly absentee ownership of Manchester City by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, who made news on Saturday by going to the team’s Champions League final.) He has kicked the ball around the team’s field and been photographed in the dressing room.Al-Rumayyan with the Newcastle players, coaching staff and families after they qualified for the Champions League.Scott Heppell/ReutersYet al-Rumayyan is more passionate about golf. Around LIV, his pet project, he is known as H.E., for His Excellency, and has been a considerable public presence. At last year’s LIV event in Bedminster, N.J., al-Rumayyan hobnobbed with former President Donald J. Trump, the course’s owner. For a time, al-Rumayyan wore a “Make America Great Again” cap.But most do not expect him to be an overtly public presence in golf or a familiar figure around the trophy ceremonies. Part of it is his portfolio; he has plenty of other business responsibilities.“How much time does he have to allocate?” Dorsey said. “This is a man at the top of an empire. He oversees a vast array of things. I think you’ll see a lot of his lieutenants and not a lot of him, at least once this settles down.”Part of it is Saudi culture; he has to “walk a fine line,” according to Kristian Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, given the autocratic leadership of Prince Mohammed.“If you seem to be too big, and you seem to be Mr. Saudi Arabia, bin Salman doesn’t take well to people stepping on his toes,” Ulrichsen said. “But we’ve also seen that al-Rumayyan is probably the most trusted and most competent member of his inner circle.”Al-Rumayyan was a little-known banking executive in 2015, when King Abdullah died. Power consolidated around Prince Mohammed, who soon started Vision 2030, an ambitious makeover for Saudi Arabia and its reputation. Part of that involved building the PIF as a diversifying vehicle for growing global capital, financially and culturally.At last year’s LIV event in New Jersey, al-Rumayyan hobnobbed with former President Donald J. Trump.Doug Mills/The New York TimesPrince Mohammed, looking to flush out the aging elite that he felt limited the country’s ambitions — locking up and abusing hundreds of them — handed responsibility of the fund to al-Rumayyan.Continued human rights violations and the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, on orders, the Central Intelligence Agency has said, from Prince Mohammed, have made the Saudis global pariahs.But under al-Rumayyan’s direction, the investment fund grew exponentially.Investment in sports, in particular, has proved an effective reputation launderer that some call sportswashing. The culmination of that effort may be the takeover of golf, announced the same week Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited Prince Mohammed in Saudi Arabia.“This was part of establishing Saudi Arabia on the global stage,” Ulrichsen said of the Saudi push into international sports. “And in this case, it shows that Saudi Arabia is welcome again at the highest kind of table in the United States, especially after what happened post-2018. That period of isolation is now definitely over.”For Saudis, the golf deal is more a global news event than a national one. Wednesday’s front page of Arriyadiyah, the kingdom’s top sports daily, was dominated by the news of the French soccer player Karim Benzema moving to Jeddah-based Al-Ittihad, the latest prize for the top Saudi league, which already attracted Cristiano Ronaldo, among others. The announcement of the golf merger was nowhere to be found in any of the paper’s pages for that day, and merited only a brief mention on Page 11 on Thursday.But al-Rumayyan is on a one-man mission to use golf for Saudi benefit. He helped establish the Saudi Golf Federation and the Saudi Golf Company, founded in 2019 to promote the game in the country.One uncertainty is the long-term role of Monahan as chief executive. Tax records obtained by ProPublica show that he was paid $14 million in salary in 2021 for his role as PGA Tour commissioner. He spent most of 2022 and early 2023 trying to fend off LIV through insults and lawsuits.That litigation will be withdrawn, saving the cash-poor PGA Tour money while shielding al-Rumayyan and the wealth fund from depositions and discovery.Was it all gamesmanship that can be forgiven now? Or might al-Rumayyan work behind the scenes to find a leader more aligned with his goals?Monahan wants golf fans, sponsors and his own players to resist the reflexive, collective wince at this new arrangement, painted by many as a money-over-morals transaction, and to think of where global golf can be in 10 years.One uncertainty is the long-term role of Monahan as chief executive.Eric Risberg/Associated PressIt most likely depends on whatever al-Rumayyan wants.It could be mere tweaks in payouts, schedules and formats to lift a sagging, traditional enterprise — the way he has handled Newcastle. Or it could be an overhaul. A possible comparison, without ties to the PIF, is the way international cricket introduced Twenty20 to counter dragging, multiday contests with something shorter, livelier and more consumable, which is similar to what LIV has tried to do.For someone like Player, 87, a nine-time major tournament winner from South Africa, the hope is broad, global growth, not just on the PGA Tour.“The women’s game and the weekend golfer should not be forgotten with all this money pouring in,” he said. “Allow the ladies to earn a better living. Use the money to make golf accessible for the masses. Let’s make it a point to share this new era to all who love our sport.”At the heart of all the possibilities, for now, is the relationship between two men — an impossibly rich backer from Saudi Arabia and a tradition-rich sports executive from Massachusetts.“We just sat down, him and I, in Venice for about two hours, trying to understand each other,” al-Rumayyan said. “He talked about his aspirations, his life. I did the same. Even my family was with me in Venice. We had a lunch with a big group of people. The understanding and the positive thinking is what really unites us in growing the game of golf. The passion that we have, both of us, is what really cemented this kind of agreement.”Springtime in Venice has a way of sparking such enchantment.Skeptics may point out that Venice is a series of islands and an easy place to lose your sense of direction. Cynics might note that it is sinking.Ahmed Al Omran More

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      How the PGA Tour-LIV Golf Merger Came Together

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      Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, had gone unnoticed in Venice last month.With luck, he thought over breakfast near the Palazzo Ducale, his confidential talks in Italy with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s more than $700 billion sovereign wealth fund, might stay secret. A leak would endanger what only a handful of insiders knew: that the PGA Tour was considering going into business with al-Rumayyan’s LIV Golf league, whose monthslong clash with Monahan’s tour had become a fight as much over golf’s soul as its future.Then Stefano Domenicali, Formula 1’s chief executive, strolled into view. He was in town for the same wedding that had brought al-Rumayyan to Venice. If the motor sports executive spotted the PGA Tour’s leader, he would assuredly connect the presences of Monahan and al-Rumayyan, and golf’s greatest secret might get out. All Monahan could do, he told people later, was try to dodge Domenicali’s gaze.But Domenicali never seemed to notice him. What would ultimately amount to seven weeks of clandestine meetings and furtive calls stayed hidden until a stunning announcement last Tuesday: The PGA Tour, the dominant force in men’s elite golf for decades, planned to join forces with LIV, the upstart that had provoked debate over the morality of Saudi money in the game.The agreement was a singular moment in the history of the professional game. The civil war that had disrupted and defined the once genteel sport — for example, Monahan once publicly asked whether PGA Tour players had ever felt compelled to apologize for competing on the circuit — was abruptly suspended. The tour’s reputation was stained and many of its loyalists were furious, but its coffers were poised to overflow.The deal, though not yet closed, was also a breakthrough for Saudi Arabia’s ambitions in golf. The culmination of a years-old plan called “Project Wedge,” the agreement gives al-Rumayyan, one of the kingdom’s most influential officials, a seat in the sport’s most rarefied rooms. And for a country that has craved a greater global profile, an economy based on more than oil and a distraction from its gruesome human rights abuses, the agreement was another step in its rapprochement with the West.This account is based on interviews with nine people with knowledge of the negotiations. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the lead-up to an extraordinary transaction — one so closely held that most of golf’s eminent bankers, lawyers and broadcast partners had no warning that it was even being discussed.It was not until this spring that even golf’s most connected power brokers grew confident a deal could happen this year, if ever. But there seemed enough conspicuous pressure points, some much more severe than others, that prodded both sides into secret talks.LIV had enticed some of golf’s most talented and bankable stars, including Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson, with contracts that sometimes promised them $100 million or more. The league’s television deal, though, had been meager, and its lawyers had acknowledged that its revenues were “virtually zero.” Federal judges in California added to LIV’s turmoil when they showed limited interest in shielding the Public Investment Fund from the kind of scrutiny it had generally avoided in other court battles in the United States.Brooks Koepka at this year’s Masters tournament, where he tied for second. The LIV golfer won the P.G.A. Championship the following month.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut the PGA Tour, a tax-exempt nonprofit with an aging audience and a stiff reputation, was in greater peril. As part of a federal antitrust inquiry, Justice Department investigators were asking questions about heavy-handed tactics the tour used to discourage player defections and examining whether tour leaders were too cozy with other powerful golf organizations, like Augusta National Golf Club, the organizer of the Masters Tournament.More precariously, the tour’s efforts to retain the loyalty of players, which included raising prize purses by tens of millions of dollars, were severely straining its finances. The tour’s television contracts had been constructed before it was facing one of the richest conceivable rivals. And the tour’s legal fees had swelled to more than $40 million a year — up more than twentyfold from the start of the decade — as it waged fights some thought could last until at least 2026.Monahan had foretold something like this.“If this is an arms race and if the only weapons here are dollar bills, the PGA Tour can’t compete,” he said last June in Connecticut.Late in the year, the PGA Tour said a veteran deal maker, James J. Dunne III, would join its board, and some involved in the wealth fund wondered whether he would someday emerge as an emissary.He did on April 18, when a WhatsApp message flashed on al-Rumayyan’s phone. The tone toward one of the world’s most influential financiers, a figure often addressed as “Your Excellency” and close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was strikingly casual.“Yasir,” Dunne began as he introduced himself and asked to arrange a call and, “hopefully,” a visit. He signed the message with equal informality: “Jimmy.”James J. Dunne III, a veteran deal maker, was named to the PGA Tour’s board late last year.Oisin Keniry/Getty ImagesThe approach, as optimistic and unguarded as men’s professional golf had been tumultuous and tense, led to a conversation within hours. Dunne and al-Rumayyan fast found a point of harmony that would shape the negotiations: Neither man insisted on a nondisclosure agreement.‘Let’s see how that would work.’London was neutral ground, only hours from golf’s birthplace in Scotland. The men decided they would meet there less than a week later, joined by Edward D. Herlihy, the chairman of the PGA Tour’s board. Herlihy was not any ordinary board member; more than a half-century after he earned his law degree, he was a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and one of Wall Street’s most sought-after counselors for mergers and acquisitions.Even without nondisclosure agreements, the men concluded that any prospective deal would have to be weighed in private. Most members of the tour’s board, including Rory McIlroy, one of the world’s most renowned golfers and a ferocious critic of LIV, and the former AT&T chairman Randall Stephenson, would be largely shut out. Greg Norman, the two-time British Open winner who had envisioned something like LIV long before he became its commissioner, would not be at the bargaining table, nor would most of the seasoned bankers and lawyers the two parties had worked with over the years.Rory McIlroy with PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan last year. The talks cut out many board members including McIlroy.Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockBut the negotiators also knew that an accord would not be reached at the initial gathering in London, in part because Monahan would not be in attendance as some of his allies took stock of the Saudis.In a meeting, and later at dinner and over cigars, Dunne, Herlihy and al-Rumayyan discussed their approaches to golf and their own lives, testing whether their budding rapport would endure across hours of face-to-face conversations.Dunne’s personal history made him an unlikely figure to connect with al-Rumayyan. More than one-third of his investment bank’s employees died in the 2001 attacks at the World Trade Center. Dunne had been out of the office playing golf that Tuesday. More than two decades later, after years of supporting the families of the victims, he was meeting with a senior official from a country many people still accused of having a role in the attacks. But al-Rumayyan and his allies, he felt, should not be blamed.“If someone can find someone that unequivocally was involved with it, I’ll kill him myself,” Dunne told the Golf Channel this past week. “We don’t have to wait around.”The morning after their dinner, al-Rumayyan and Herlihy beat Dunne and Brian Gillespie, a wealth fund lawyer, in a round at Beaverbrook Golf Club.At some point before the men parted ways after lunch, Herlihy said he believed it was essential that professional golf be unified. It was another clear signal that the tour was open to an armistice with the wealth fund that had thrown it, and golf at large, into chaos and acrimony.al-Rumayyan paused.“Let’s see how that would work,” he replied.The PGA Tour men told Monahan that he should meet his Saudi rival.Détentes and nervesal-Rumayyan was due in Venice in mid-May, scheduled to attend the wedding of the daughter of Lawrence Stroll, the billionaire Formula 1 racing titan. The lagoon’s islands were not exactly rife with golf courses, but the sides agreed that Venice would be where al-Rumayyan and Monahan would meet for the first time.Monahan, who had risen through Fenway Sports Group and then the PGA Tour before he became commissioner in 2017, had spent months studying and talking about al-Rumayyan.The tour had capitalized on LIV’s Saudi ties, harnessing American emotion and skepticism to sow moral doubts about the league. But now Monahan would undertake a covert mission to meet the man his team had vilified.Survivors and family members of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, members of the organization 9/11 Justice, voiced their objections to LIV at Trump National Golf Club in July 2022.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe group from the United States arrived behind schedule, after its plane required a diversion to Farnborough, England. A series of boat rides later, Monahan at last greeted al-Rumayyan and the Saudi executive’s wife and daughters before the men settled into a private session for about two hours.In the evening, al-Rumayyan went to the wedding, a glitzy gathering dotted with movie stars and world-class athletes. The Americans, preparing for serious negotiations the next day with al-Rumayyan, met for dinner. The trip would also include a meal with al-Rumayyan’s family and some of his closest lieutenants.To the tour’s negotiators, the meetings in Italy were the most pivotal of the conversations that would continue in video conferences, phone calls and gatherings in San Francisco and New York over less than a month.During Memorial Day weekend, the PGA Tour’s Cessna Citation X jet hopscotched from New York to San Francisco. Takeout burgers were brought aboard during a brief stop in Omaha, instigated by Michael Klein, the well-connected banker who was working with al-Rumayyan and invited on the trip.Most of the flight, which also included Monahan, Dunne and Herlihy, was devoted to ironing out some of the remaining details. The men were hoping to finalize things in San Francisco, where al-Rumayyan would attend meetings related to the wealth fund’s other business dealings.An agreement was close, its terms detailed across mounting pages of legalese, with the new company known simply as “NewCo.” Some of the negotiators were still nervous. A leak before a deal was signed, they were certain, would cause an uproar: How could the PGA Tour consider taking the Saudi money it had denounced?“What changed?” Monahan would say after the deal became public. “I looked at where we were at that point in time, and it was the right point in time to have a conversation.”“It was the right point in time to have a conversation,” Monahan said after the deal was announced.Erik S Lesser/EPA, via Shutterstock“I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite,” he said. “Anytime I said anything, I said it with the information that I had at that moment, and I said it based on someone that’s trying to compete for the PGA Tour and our players. I accept those criticisms. But circumstances do change.”In the early hours of May 30, after a bargaining marathon, a dozen or so people gathered at a Four Seasons hotel to sign and toast the deal behind closed doors.The PGA Tour contingent did not linger long. Monahan was due at an Ohio tournament that Jack Nicklaus, who had helped found the modern tour in the 1960s and rejected an offer worth more than $100 million to work with LIV, was hosting.A signed pact, intended to bring the moneymaking components of the PGA Tour and LIV, like television and sponsorship contracts, into a new company expected to be flush with Saudi cash, did not mean the deal was complete. No one had agreed on how to value assets since the litigation had left the rivals unable to delve into each other’s books. The deal did not demand a specific investment from the Saudis, but promised them the exclusive rights to inject cash into the new company. The PGA Tour would get Monahan as the company’s chief executive and a majority of board seats, including ones filled by Herlihy and Dunne. But al-Rumayyan would be the chairman.Many antitrust experts expect the agreement will intensify the Justice Department’s scrutiny of professional golf, in part since Monahan said the deal would “take the competitor off of the board.” On Capitol Hill, lawmakers have raced to condemn it.The tour, though, is expecting an investment well into the billions of dollars. The jockeying with a wealth fund aiming to be worth $1 trillion in the next few years will be over.Yasir al-Rumayyan, during a pro-am LIV event last fall, is set to be chairman of the combined organization.Jonathan Ferrey/LIV Golf, via Getty ImagesOn Tuesday morning, after a session in New York to finalize the deal’s rollout, Monahan and al-Rumayyan sat beside each other for a television interview. Around the same time, the cellphones of players around the world lit up with the news.Monahan soon flew to Toronto to face a gathering of golfers that he called “intense” and “heated.”Dunne and al-Rumayyan retreated to Long Island’s Deepdale Golf Club for another round.al-Rumayyan won again.Mark Mazzetti More

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      Backing Saudi Deal, McIlroy Reprises His Role as PGA Tour’s Backstop

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      McIlroy, however, reiterated his lingering opposition to LIV Golf, saying: “I hate LIV. Like, I hope it goes away.”Rory McIlroy is still seething, still edgy, still eager to bludgeon LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed league that he has spent much of the past year denigrating as a compromised interloper.“I hate LIV,” McIlroy, one of the new circuit’s most fearsome critics, said on Wednesday. “Like, I hope it goes away, and I would fully expect that it does.”He also appears begrudgingly accepting of what PGA Tour executives believe is reality, bruising and humbling as it might be: that the surest way to defang LIV is through a partnership that positions the tour to collect the kind of Saudi money it has denounced.McIlroy’s calculation, which he detailed a day after the tour and Saudi executives blindsided the golf world with the announcement of an agreement that had been hammered out in secret, is not the final word on a pact that is still formally tentative. But his acquiescence instantly fortified the deal’s prospects, not least because McIlroy, one of the most prominent players in the world, is one of the handful who sit on the PGA Tour’s board.Despite McIlroy’s quest to banish the burden of being one of the tour’s eminent spokesmen, he is still one of its most dependable backstops.It is a role he has said has distracted from his game. Given the tumult into which the PGA Tour lurched this week, he might be in the gig for a while.Beyond removing a prospective boardroom barrier, McIlroy’s endorsement of the deal — which would create a PGA Tour-controlled, Saudi-funded company to handle the business dealings of the rival circuits — means that he has effectively signed up for the task of persuading a disoriented public that the PGA Tour remains a worthy, defensible venture.He conceded Wednesday that the tour’s lucrative shift was “hypocritical.” He confessed to a sense of betrayal, saying, “It’s hard for me to not sit up here and feel somewhat like a sacrificial lamb and feeling like I’ve put myself out there and this is what happens.” He acknowledged “ambiguity” in the deal and said he did not “understand all the intricacies of what’s going on.”But his sales pitch for the agreement, qualified as it was, was perhaps the least muddled glimpse of the tour’s playbook for the weeks and months ahead. It may not quell the storm inside the circuit on which he staked his reputation. After all, few people take pleasure in being out of the loop, and hardly anyone inside the tour knew of its leadership’s private dealings with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.Although McIlroy’s guarded support does not guarantee the deal’s path, it assuredly eases it, even if, as the world’s third-ranked player, he is already finding himself trying to explain the nuances of corporate structures.Peering a decade into the future, McIlroy predicted that the agreement would be “good for the game of professional golf.”“There’s a lot of things still to be sort of thrashed out,” McIlroy said Wednesday in Toronto, where a tour event is scheduled to begin Thursday. “But at least it means that the litigation goes away, which has been a massive burden for everyone that’s involved with the tour and that’s playing the tour, and we can start to work toward some sort of way of unifying the game at the elite level.”The finer points of the new partnership between the PGA Tour and the Saudis are still unclear. But once the new company is built out, the tour is expected to hold a majority of the board seats. The upshot for the Saudis, besides the promise of exclusive rights to invest in the company, is that al-Rumayyan is in line to be the company’s chairman.The Saudi wealth fund, which is slinging cash all over global sports, effectively forced the tour’s hand — and, by extension, McIlroy’s. By Wednesday morning, not much more than a day after McIlroy had received his initial briefing about the arrangement, he said he had “come to terms” with the prospect that Saudi money would underwrite golf well into the future.“I see what’s happened in other sports, I see what’s happened in other businesses, and honestly, I’ve just resigned myself to the fact that this is what’s going to happen,” McIlroy said. “It’s very hard to keep up with people that have more money than anyone else.”A measure of control over how Saudi money might race through golf, McIlroy and others figured, was worth something — particularly if McIlroy, as he said Wednesday, was desperate to “protect the future of the PGA Tour and protect the aspirational nature of what the PGA Tour stands for.”“If you’re thinking about one of the biggest sovereign wealth funds in the world, would you rather have them as a partner or an enemy?” McIlroy asked. “At the end of the day, money talks, and you would rather have them as a partner.”McIlroy, not particularly giddy about meeting a band of reporters the day after the tour’s public gut punch, said he would soon turn his attention back to golf, pounding balls on the driving range and looking for a victory ahead of next week’s U.S. Open in Los Angeles.A win could come there, or in Toronto this weekend.But the tumult is not over, not by a long shot, not while McIlroy’s prized tour tries to figure out what to do with the circuit he despises. Until it does, McIlroy is most likely stuck with two tests: conquering golf tournaments — and somehow defending a tour that suddenly looks a little more like the one he so often lashed. More

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      in Soccer

      Karim Benzema Joins Saudi Arabia’s Al-Ittihad

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      The acquisition of Benzema is part of a billion-dollar project to lure global stars to Saudi Arabia’s top league and expand the kingdom’s sports profile.Karim Benzema, one of soccer’s best players and a fixture at the Spanish giant Real Madrid for more than a decade, has agreed to join the Saudi champion Al-Ittihad on a three-year contract that will make him the latest prize acquisition for a kingdom rapidly expanding its ambitions and influence in sports.The decision by Benzema, a 35-year-old French striker, to move to Saudi Arabia was confirmed by Al-Ittihad on Tuesday after days of rumors. While it is an unusual choice for a player still perceived as an elite talent in one of Europe’s best leagues, his acquisition might not be the last high-profile signing by the Saudi league, which is embarking on a billion-dollar project, backed by the seemingly bottomless wealth of the state-controlled Public Investment Fund, to turn the kingdom into a major player in world soccer.W E L C O M E ! B E N Z E M A 💪💪 pic.twitter.com/Oc9IK4OoDj— Ittihad Club (@ittihad_en) June 6, 2023
      Benzema’s arrival will come only months after a different Saudi club lured another star, the Portuguese forward Cristiano Ronaldo, with one of the richest contracts in soccer history.Among the other marquee players said to have been targeted by the Saudi league is Lionel Messi, who led Argentina to the World Cup title in December in Qatar. The salaries offered to the players are some of the largest in sports history, according to interviews with agents, Saudi sports officials and consultants hired to execute the project. All spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations are private.Saudi officials are hoping that the presence of stars like Ronaldo and Benzema will persuade dozens more successful players from Europe’s top leagues to follow them to the kingdom. The signings are part of an ambitious plan, supported at the highest levels of the Saudi state and bankrolled by the Public Investment Fund, to raise the profile of the Saudi league and the country’s status in global sports, and alter perceptions of Saudi Arabia on the world stage.Similar in scale and ambition to a Saudi-financed campaign to dominate professional golf through the year-old LIV Golf series, the soccer effort is a centralized plan to turn a domestic league that has long been an afterthought into a destination for elite talent.The signing of Benzema came days after Saudi Arabia passed ownership of the Saudi Premier League’s four biggest clubs to the PIF from the government by announcing the fund had taken a 75 percent ownership stake in each team: Al-Ittihad, the newly crowned Saudi champion; Al-Nassr, which employs Ronaldo; and Al-Ahli and Al-Hilal. They are among the biggest and best followed clubs in Saudi soccer.Those four clubs are expected to be the primary beneficiaries of the PIF’s new focus on raising the league’s profile. But their common ownership by the fund is already raising questions about sporting integrity, since the rules of soccer’s global governing body, FIFA, and Asian soccer’s ruling confederation prohibit the same owner to control multiple clubs in the same competition. Saudi officials said this week that they have taken measures to ensure the PIF-owned teams comply with these regulations, but they offered no evidence that such safeguards were in place.The state’s involvement in soccer comes on the heels of a surprisingly strong performance by Saudi Arabia’s national team at last year’s World Cup, where the team’s run included a stunning victory over Argentina. The project’s stated goal is to make the country’s top division, the Saudi Pro League, one of the world’s 10 best domestic leagues. The league is unlikely to become a true rival of more established leagues in Europe and elsewhere, but the resources of the PIF could destabilize the multibillion-dollar global market for players, and drive up the price of top talents around the world.Al-Ittihad clinched the Saudi league title in May.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe plan to buy a foothold in world soccer is reminiscent of a similar one a decade ago in which China used high-profile and high-dollar acquisitions of players and European clubs. That plan, marred by broken contracts, economic implosions and the coronavirus pandemic, now appears to be in retreat.The Saudi project, government officials have said, has broader aims than just a few dozen showcase signings. The government sees sports as a promising sector as it attempts to diversify the Saudi economy, and officials also have said raising the importance of sports would help tackle the problem of obesity in the country.The Saudi plan will start on solid financial footing: The PIF already has signed 20-year commercial agreements worth tens of millions of dollars with the clubs it now controls, and it sponsors the league itself through one of the companies in its portfolio, the real estate developer Roshn.The goal is for the four biggest teams to field three top foreign players each, and for another eight players to be distributed among the remaining 12 teams in the league, according to one of the people briefed on the plans to bring foreign stars to the league, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them publicly.Critics of Saudi Arabia have labeled its heavy spending in sports as an attempt to improve the kingdom’s image abroad and divert attention away from its human rights record; Saudi officials have repeatedly rejected these allegations.It is unclear when Benzema will arrive in Jeddah, where Al-Ittihad is based, now that he has committed his future to a country that has a rich soccer history and where the sport is passionately followed.One thing is certain, however: Whenever he does, Al-Ittihad fans, known as some of the most passionate in the country and riding high after winning their latest league title, will be ready to roll out the welcome mat. More

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      PGA Tour and LIV Golf Agree to Deal to End Fight Over Sport

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      The PGA Tour, the dominant force in men’s professional golf for generations, and LIV Golf, which made its debut just last year and is backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in Saudi money, will together form an industry powerhouse that is expected to transform the sport, executives announced Tuesday.The rival circuits had spent the last year clashing in public, and the tentative agreement that emerged from secret negotiations blindsided virtually all of the world’s top players, agents and broadcasters. The deal would create a new company that would consolidate the PGA Tour’s prestige, television contracts and marketing muscle with Saudi money.The new company came together so quickly that it does not yet even have a name and is referred to in the agreement documents simply as “NewCo.” It would be controlled by the PGA Tour but significantly financed by the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund. The fund’s governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, will be the new company’s chairman.The deal, coming when Saudi Arabia is increasingly looking to assert itself on the world stage as something besides one of the world’s largest oil producers, has implications beyond sports. The Saudi money will give the new organization greater clout, but it comes with the troubling association of the kingdom’s human rights record, its treatment of women and accusations that it was responsible for the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a leading critic.The agreement does not immediately amount to a Saudi takeover of professional golf, but it positions the nation’s top officials to have enormous sway over the game. It also represents an escalation in Saudi ambitions in sports, moving beyond its corporate sponsorship of Formula 1 racing and ownership of an English soccer team into a place where it can exert influence over the highest reaches of a global game.“Everybody is in shock,” said Paul Azinger, the winner of the 1993 P.G.A. Championship and the lead golf analyst for NBC Sports. “The future of golf is forever different.”Since LIV began play last year, it has used some of the richest contracts and prize money in the sport’s history to entice players away from the PGA Tour. Until Tuesday morning, the PGA Tour had been publicly uncompromising: LIV was a threat to the game and a glamorous way for Saudi Arabia to rehabilitate its reputation. The PGA Tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, had even avoided uttering LIV’s name in public.But a series of springtime meetings in London, Venice and San Francisco led to a framework agreement that stunned the golf industry for its timing and scope. Monahan, who defended the decision as a sound business choice and said he had accepted that he would be accused of hypocrisy, met with PGA Tour players in Toronto on Tuesday in what he called an “intense” and “certainly heated” exchange.The deal, though, proved right the predictions that there could eventually be an uneasy patching-up of the sport’s fractures. The PGA Tour’s board, which includes a handful of players like Patrick Cantlay and Rory McIlroy, must still approve the agreement, a process that could be tumultuous.It was only a year ago this week that LIV Golf held its inaugural tournament, prompting the PGA Tour to suspend players who competed in it. But by the end of the year, even though the circuit was locked in an antitrust battle with the PGA Tour and its stars were confronting uncertain futures at the sport’s marquee competitions, LIV had some of the biggest names in golf on its payroll. Its players have included the major tournament champions Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson and Cameron Smith.LIV Golf’s chief executive, Greg Norman, left, applauded Yasir al-Rumayyan, governor of the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, at LIV’s tournament near Chicago in September.Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressThe players were familiar, but LIV’s 54-hole events — the name derives from the Roman numerals for that number — were jarring, with blaring music and golfers in shorts not facing the specter of being unceremoniously cut midway through. The PGA Tour, meanwhile, defended its 72-hole events, where low performers do not compete into the weekend, as rigorous athletic tests that adhered to the traditions of an ancient game.The less-starchy LIV concept drew plenty of headlines, and the league won even greater attention because of its links to former President Donald J. Trump, who hosted LIV tournaments and emerged as one of its most enthusiastic boosters. The league, however, was still largely dependent on the largess of a wealth fund that had been warned that a rebel golf circuit was no certain financial bonanza. It stumbled to a television deal with the CW Network, and big corporate sponsorships were scarce.The league accrued some athletic successes, even as its players faced the risk of eventual exclusion from golf’s major tournaments, which are run by organizations that are close to, but distinct from, the PGA Tour.Last month, Koepka won the P.G.A. Championship, which was organized by the P.G.A. of America. Koepka, Mickelson and Patrick Reed were among the LIV players who fared especially well at the Masters Tournament, administered by Augusta National Golf Club, in early April.Within weeks of the Masters, though, after a run of mutual overtures and months of bravado, PGA Tour and Saudi executives were convening in secret to see if there was a way toward some kind of coexistence, in part, Monahan suggested, because he did not think it was “right or sustainable to have this tension in our sport.” The result was an agreement that gives the tour the upper hand but is poised to make permanent Saudi Arabia’s influence over golf’s starry ranks.Monahan, the tour’s commissioner, is in line to be the chief executive of the new company, which will include an executive committee stocked with tour loyalists. But al-Rumayyan’s presence, as well as the promise that the wealth fund can play a pivotal role in how the company is ultimately funded, means that Saudi Arabia could do much to shape the sport’s future.In a memorandum to players on Tuesday, Monahan insisted that his tour’s “history, legacy and pro-competitive model not only remains intact, but is supercharged for the future.”That was hardly a consensus view. Mackenzie Hughes, a PGA Tour player, acidly noted on Twitter that there was “nothing like finding out through Twitter that we’re merging with a tour that we said we’d never do that with.” And Terry Strada, the chairwoman of 9/11 Families United, who had assailed the Saudi foray into golf because of misgivings about the kingdom after the 2001 terrorist attacks, said Monahan and the tour had “become just more paid Saudi shills, taking billions of dollars to cleanse the Saudi reputation.”Jay Monahan, the tour’s commissioner, will be the chief executive of the new company.Rob Carr/Getty ImagesThe tour and the wealth fund both had incentives to forge an agreement, besides the prospect of concluding a chaotic chapter marked by allegations of betrayal and greed.LIV had faced setbacks in civil litigation against the PGA Tour that threatened to drag al-Rumayyan into sworn testimony and force the wealth fund to turn over documents that could have become public. The tour has been under scrutiny from Justice Department antitrust investigators, who had examined in recent months whether the tour’s tactics to counter LIV had undermined golf’s labor market.The litigation between the tour and LIV will end under the terms of the agreement announced Tuesday. The fate of the antitrust inquiry was less clear — experts said the new arrangement would not automatically immunize the tour from potential legal trouble — but LIV’s standing as its leading cheerleader evaporated.For this year, the world’s professional golfers are unlikely to see seismic changes in their schedules or playing formats, with LIV and the PGA Tour expected to hold competitions as planned. There may be far more consequential changes later, though, chiefly because the new PGA Tour-controlled company will determine whether and how LIV’s team-oriented format might be blended with the tour’s more familiar offerings.LIV players are expected to have pathways to apply for reinstatement to the PGA Tour or the DP World Tour, circuits from which some had resigned when faced with fines and suspensions, but they could face residual penalties for leaving in the first place. Through a spokeswoman, Greg Norman, the two-time major tournament champion who has been LIV’s commissioner, declined to be interviewed on Tuesday.No matter what comes of the LIV brand or style, Tuesday’s announcement is a singular milestone in the Saudi quest to become a titan in global sports. With the deal, the kingdom can move, at least in golf, from a well-heeled disrupter to a seat of power at the establishment’s table.Saudi officials have repeatedly denied that political or public relations motives undergird their eager pursuit of sports investments. Instead, they have framed the investments as necessary for shoring up the resource-rich kingdom’s finances and to enhance its standing on the world stage.Professional golfers on both the PGA and LIV tours are unlikely to see changes in their schedules this year.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBeyond its imprint on golf, the wealth fund previously purchased Newcastle United, a potent English soccer team, and a company with close ties to the fund has eyed investments in cricket, tennis and e-sports. And Saudi Arabia has tried to become a host of major sporting events, from boxing matches to its pending bid to host the World Cup in 2030.But when Saudi Arabia barged into golf last year, it was nearly unthinkable that al-Rumayyan would so swiftly become a formal ally of Monahan and the sport’s other power brokers.“Anybody who thought about it logically would see that something was going to have to happen,” Adam Hadwin, a PGA Tour player, said on Tuesday. It was inconceivable, he suggested, that the world’s best players would only compete against each other at the four major tournaments, but an armistice “happening this quick and in this way is surprising.”For much of the last year, LIV players have deflected questions about Saudi Arabia’s history on human rights and other matters that helped make the kingdom’s surge into golf an international flashpoint. They were, they often said, merely golfers and entertainers.Until Tuesday, Monahan had tried to use the stain of Saudi Arabia to undercut the new league and its golfers.“I would ask any player that has left, or any player that would ever consider leaving: Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?” he said last year.On Tuesday, when Monahan declared that the leaders of golf’s factions had “realized that we were better off together than we were fighting or apart,” it was his tour’s players facing questions about lucrative connections to Riyadh.“I’ve dedicated my entire life to being at golf’s highest level,” Hadwin, the tour player, said. “I’m not about to stop playing golf because the entity that I play for has joined forces with the Saudi government.”Reporting was contributed by More

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      in Soccer

      Saudi Soccer League Creates Huge Fund to Sign Global Stars

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      A coordinated effort financed by the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund is offering huge paydays to some of the sport’s biggest stars if they join Saudi Arabia’s best teams.The lists have been drawn up and the financing secured. Saudi Arabia is looking to lure some of the world’s best known soccer players to join Cristiano Ronaldo in its national league. And to close the deals, it is relying on money, the one commodity it knows it can offer more of than any of its rival leagues.Similar in ambition to the Saudi-financed campaign to dominate golf through the new LIV series, the plan appears to be a centralized effort — supported at the highest levels in Saudi Arabia, and financed by the kingdom’s huge sovereign wealth fund — to turn the country’s domestic league, a footnote on the global soccer stage, into a destination for top talent.To make that happen, Saudi clubs are already approaching players receptive to moving to the kingdom with some of the highest annual salaries in sports history. The deals could require in excess of $1 billion for wages for some 20 foreign players.Cristiano Ronaldo, a five-time world player of the year, has led the way. He joined the Saudi club Al-Nassr after the 2022 World Cup, in a deal reported to be worth $200 million per season. Last month, Al-Nassr narrowly missed out on the league championship on the penultimate week of the season, but for those running the Saudi league Ronaldo’s presence alone was a victory in that it ensured unprecedented attention on the country’s top division, the Saudi Premier League.Cristiano Ronaldo signed with the Saudi club Al-Nassr after the World Cup in Qatar.Ahmed Yosri/ReutersSince Ronaldo arrived, the Saudi league has been considering whether to centrally coordinate more big-money signings in order to distribute talent evenly among the biggest teams, according to interviews with agents, television executives, Saudi sports officials and consultants hired to execute the project, the details of which have not previously been reported. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because the deals involved were private.In recent weeks, leaks about huge offers to famous players have mounted: Lionel Messi, who led Argentina to the World Cup title in December, is said to have been tempted by a contract even richer than Ronaldo’s Saudi deal; and the French striker Karim Benzema, the reigning world player of the year, has reportedly agreed to leave Real Madrid for a nine-figure deal to play in Saudi Arabia.The Saudi league’s British chief executive, Garry Cook, a former Nike executive who briefly ran Manchester City after it was bought by the brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, has been tasked with executing the plans. Cook did not respond to an email seeking comment. League officials also did not respond to requests for comment about the plans.The project comes on the heels of a surprisingly strong performance by Saudi Arabia at last year’s men’s World Cup in Qatar. The team’s run included a stunning victory over the eventual champion, Argentina, which stoked pride on the Saudi streets and in the halls of power in Riyadh. The project’s goal is not so much to make the Saudi league an equal of century-old competitions like England’s Premier League or other top European competitions, but to increase Saudi influence in the sport, and perhaps boost its profile as it bids for the 2030 World Cup.But the effort also is reminiscent of a similar scheme a decade ago in which China sought to force its way into the global soccer conversation through a series of high-profile and high-dollar acquisitions. That bold plan, eventually marred by broken contracts, economic implosions and the coronavirus pandemic, is now seemingly at an end.The plans for the Saudi league to become the dominant domestic competition in Asia are similarly subject to the whims of the country’s leadership, and could yet be derailed by a sudden change of direction, or an ability to sign the kind of elite talents being pursued. The players, too, would be committing to contracts with teams that in the past have been regular attendees at arbitration hearings claiming unpaid fees and salaries.According to the interviews with people familiar with the project, the league, and not the clubs, would centrally negotiate player transfers and assign players to certain teams, in a model similar to one used by Major League Soccer as it built its global profile. Centralized signings would be a departure from what is typical in much of the rest of the world, where clubs directly acquire and trade players independently.The size of the Saudi war chest is unclear, but officials briefed on the subject say it is as hefty as the list of players the league has identified as potential recruits. Much of the money invested in the league and the clubs in recent times has come from the Public Investment Fund, the country’s sovereign wealth fund chaired by the kingdom’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.The fund has signed 20-year commercial agreements worth tens of millions of dollars with the four most popular clubs in the Saudi Premier League. Those deals will require the teams, two from Riyadh and two from the port city of Jeddah, to play games at new arenas in entertainment complexes being built by PIF subsidiaries. The PIF also sponsors the league itself through one of the companies in its portfolio, the real estate developer Roshn.A fan shopping for an Al-Hilal jersey in May, after published reports that the Argentina star Lionel Messi was considering signing with the decorated Saudi club.Ahmed Yosri/ReutersAccording to one of the people briefed on the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them publicly, the goal is for the four biggest teams to field three top foreign players each, and for another eight players to be distributed among the remaining 12 teams in the league.The move for greater centralization of the league would end a period of autonomy granted to the clubs, and is further indication of the Saudi state’s interest in using sports as part of a drive to alter perceptions of the kingdom on the global stage, and diversify its economy away from oil. Saudi Arabia has been among the biggest spenders in global sports in recent years, bringing major events to the kingdom and investing in sports properties.PIF has been the driving force behind much of that, too. Two years ago it acquired Newcastle United, an English Premier League club, and through its funding and smart recruitment helped it to achieve its best league finish in decades and a place in next season’s Champions League. The Saudi oil company, Aramco, is a major sponsor of the Formula 1 auto racing series. But perhaps the PIF’s splashiest efforts have been in golf, where it has poured billions into creating LIV, the rival competition to the established tours in North America and EuropeAll of those projects have attracted scrutiny amid claims Saudi Arabia is using its investments in sports to divert attention from its human rights record. But the golf series, in particular, has shown that Saudi Arabia’s interest in sports may not be deterred even if the promised financial bonanza does not arrive. And Saudi officials have vigorously denied “sportswashing” allegations, arguing that some of the motivations behind their push into global sports include catering to their sports-loving population and encouraging greater physical activity in a country where obesity and diabetes are common.Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, watching the King’s Cup final between Al-Hilal and Al-Wehda in May.Saudi Press Agency/via ReutersDiscussions with potential soccer recruits and their agents are underway. Saudi Arabia’s sudden and cash-soaked presence is likely to create further chaos in soccer’s typically frenzied summer trading window, which typically runs from June through August.Beefing up the four best teams may not be universally popular in the kingdom which has its own rich soccer history and where the sport is passionately followed. Teams not considered to be counted in the elite group are already expressing frustration at the prospect of being left behind.The sense of unfairness has been felt most visibly at Al-Shabab, the third-largest club in the capital, Riyadh, which has had to contend with living in the shadows of its prominent rivals Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal and their two Jeddah-based counterparts, Al-Ittihad and Al-Ahli.“I have buried the ‘big four’ myth with my own hands,” the Al-Shabab president Khalid al-Baltan told reporters at the end of last season, when Al-Ahli was relegated to the second division for the first time in its history. Al-Baltan’s team dominated the Saudi league in the 1990s, when it was home to stars such as Fuad Anwar Amin and Saeed al-Owairan, who led Saudi Arabia to the knockout stage in the kingdom’s first World Cup appearance in 1994.While Saudi Arabia’s ministry of sports is currently funding a major renovation of Al-Shabab stadium in northern Riyadh, al-Baltan has complained bitterly about a lack of support — while taking care to avoid criticizing the government or the PIF by name.“The gap is getting too large, the financial situation does not allow us to compete with other clubs,” al-Baltan said during a news conference last week, as he wondered aloud how Al-Shabab was supposed to compete when Ronaldo’s salary for one season is four times the size of his club’s annual budget.“Am I expected to close that huge gap myself?” he asked. “My car is a small Japanese sedan, and I’m somehow expected to race against Lamborghinis and Ferraris. If I don’t win then I’m bad? This is not logical.” More