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      PGA Tour Wanted Greg Norman Ousted as Part of Saudi Deal

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      The American circuit’s efforts were made public in documents that Congress released on Tuesday.The PGA Tour sought the ouster of Greg Norman, the two-time British Open champion who became the commissioner of the insurgent LIV Golf league, as a condition of its alliance with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, according to records that a Senate subcommittee released on Tuesday.The tour and the wealth fund did not ultimately agree to the proposal — crafted as a so-called side letter to a larger framework agreement — and, for now, Norman remains atop LIV. But the deliberations reflect an enmity forged over decades of hostilities between the tour and Norman, one of the most talented players in professional golf history who often chafed at the sport’s economic structure.And they underscore the tensions that could linger if the deal closes.The glimpse into the negotiations between the tour and the wealth fund came as the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations began its first hearing into the arrangement, which calls for the business ventures of the tour, the wealth fund and the DP World Tour to be brought into a new, for-profit company.The plan is facing significant scrutiny in Washington, where some lawmakers have castigated the tour, once willing to condemn Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights abuses, for abruptly growing cozy with an arm of a coercive government. Beyond any congressional misgivings about the wealth fund’s ties to the Saudi government, Justice Department officials are also interested in whether the deal violates federal antitrust laws and whether they should try to block it.Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in his opening statement on Tuesday that his subcommittee’s hearing was about “much more than the game of golf.”“It is about how a brutal, repressive regime can buy influence — indeed even take over — a cherished American institution to cleanse its public image,” Blumenthal, the subcommittee’s chairman, added, citing the kingdom’s record of killing journalists, abusing dissidents and having “supported other terrorist activities, including the 9/11 attack on our nation.”“It is also about hypocrisy, how vast sums of money can induce individuals and institutions to betray their own values and supporters, or perhaps reveal a lack of values from the beginning,” he continued. “It’s about other sports and institutions that could fall prey, if their leaders let it be all about the money.”The proceeding, held in a crowded Capitol Hill room that previously hosted Supreme Court confirmation hearings and meetings of the 9/11 Commission, included two senior PGA Tour leaders: the chief operating officer, Ron Price, and a board member who was intimately involved in the negotiations that led to the tentative deal that was announced on June 6.In an opening statement, Price argued that the tour, faced with the threat of competing with one of the world’s mightiest sovereign wealth funds, had little choice but to seek some measure of coexistence after months of acrimony in court and in jockeying for the allegiances of the world’s best players.“It was very clear to us — and to all who love the PGA Tour and the game of golf as a whole — that the dispute was undermining growth of our sport and was threatening the very survival of the PGA Tour, and it was unsustainable,” Price said. “While we had significant wins in litigation, our players, our fans, our partners, our employees and the charities we support would lose.”Tour leaders have acknowledged that with negotiations for a final agreement still unfolding, board approval is no certainty. Over the weekend, one member of the board, the former AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson, resigned. In a letter about his exit, Stephenson said “the construct currently being negotiated by management is not one that I can objectively evaluate or in good conscience support.”Tour executives have been eager to show how the agreement leaves them positioned to run professional golf’s day-to-day operations. The tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, has been tabbed as the chief executive of the new company, expected to be called PGA Tour Enterprises, and the tour is expected to fill a majority of the company’s board seats.They have been far less keen to discuss how Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, will serve as the chairman of PGA Tour Enterprises and how the framework agreement envisions sweeping investment rights for a Riyadh-based fund whose power and value have swelled in recent years.Neither al-Rumayyan nor Norman agreed to testify at Tuesday’s hearing, citing scheduling conflicts. But documents released by the subcommittee suggest that both will be factors in an inquiry that could last months.The effort to remove Norman was underway by May 24, when the PGA Tour board’s chairman, Edward D. Herlihy, sent a proposed side letter to Michael Klein, a banker working with the wealth fund. The proposal called for Norman, as well as a British outfit central to developing LIV, to “cease” working on LIV within a month of “the management transition to the PGA Tour.”Although Norman’s long-term fate has been uncertain — he was not a part of the negotiations that led to the preliminary deal, stoking questions about his relevance — it was not until Tuesday that it became clear that his future had been a subject of the talks.LIV did not comment on Tuesday, but three people with knowledge of the negotiations, who requested anonymity to discuss private talks, said the wealth fund had rejected the tour’s proposal.The documents that the Senate released also detail the deliberations over when and how to announce the deal; Klein was among the figures who said the tour and the wealth fund should not wait for a final agreement to disclose their newfound peace.And the records show how a British businessman with ties to the wealth fund and its advisers reached out to James J. Dunne III, now a tour board member and one of Tuesday’s witnesses, in December. In an email, the businessman, Roger Devlin, suggested that there could be a pathway to an armistice between the tour and the wealth fund.Dunne, at least at first, declined to engage in a substantive way.Devlin re-emerged in April, warning Dunne that there was “a window of opportunity to unify the game over the next couple of months” before, he thought, “the Saudis will doubledown on their investment and golf will be split asunder in perpetuity.”Although committee investigators told senators in a briefing memorandum that they did not know for certain how Devlin’s April message influenced Dunne, the tour board member contacted al-Rumayyan within days.Dunne, al-Rumayyan and a handful of others met in Britain soon after, starting negotiations that included a number of ideas that did not make it into the five-page text of the framework agreement. Those concepts, outlined in a presentation titled “The Best of Both Worlds,” included Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, who had pledged fealty to the tour, owning LIV teams and a “large-scale superstar” team golf event that would feature the world’s top men’s and women’s players.Although the initial deal between the tour and the wealth fund did not include some of those proposals, the final agreement is still being hammered out, a process that could take months.At least as of April, according to documents the Senate released, there was even talk of a deal including memberships for al-Rumayyan at Augusta National Golf Club and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews — two of the most prestigious golf clubs in the world, but ones that are not controlled by the PGA Tour. More

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      Billie Jean King Supports Talks With Saudi Arabia on Women’s Tennis Events

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      The LatestBillie Jean King, the leading architect of women’s professional tennis who is widely regarded as the first female athlete-activist, said Friday that she supported talks between the women’s tour and Saudi Arabia on holding competitions in the kingdom, despite its abysmal record on human rights.“I’m a huge believer in engagement — I don’t think you change unless you engage,” King said Friday at an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the WTA, the women’s professional tour. “I would probably go there and talk to them.”After King’s comments, Steve Simon, the chief executive of the WTA Tour, said women’s tennis was seriously evaluating partnerships with Saudi Arabia. He suggested that potentially holding events there would be a way to support “progress” for women, while the country is trying to become a destination for major sports.“Sometimes when you are in the position we are in, you need to support the change,” Simon said, referring to the tour’s commitment to gender pay equity and its loss of revenue during the pandemic and an 18-month suspension of operations in China over Peng Shuai.He said Saudi Arabia had “a long way to go,” especially in its laws banning homosexuality, but that change was underway in the country. “You want them to do what they are doing” and support that, he added.“I’m a huge believer in engagement — I don’t think you change unless you engage,” Billie Jean King said Friday.Kin Cheung/Associated PressWhy It Matters: Saudi Arabia continues to expand its footprint in sports.The comments from King and Simon were the strongest signal yet that Saudi Arabia is expanding and accelerating its efforts to become a part of not just men’s tennis but also women’s, among other sports like soccer, Formula 1 and golf. The Saudi wealth fund’s LIV Golf circuit recently agreed to a merger with golf’s PGA Tour after an acrimonious rivalry that included litigation and the loss of a handful of the tour’s biggest stars to the upstart league.Looking to avoid that scenario and always on the hunt for new investors, tennis executives have spoken openly of their ongoing discussions with Saudi officials about holding tournaments there as soon as this year. Saudi Arabia is bidding to become the host of the Next Gen Finals, a men’s event for 21-and-under players scheduled for December. Saudi Arabia’s bid includes the option of holding a women’s Next Gen event there as well.Simon traveled to Riyadh in February with other WTA executives and players for meetings with Saudi officials.Background: Players have expressed concern for their safety.The issue is especially complicated for the women’s tennis tour in part because there are a number of openly gay players, including Daria Kasatkina of Russia, who is ranked No. 11 in the world and often travels with her partner. The men’s tour does not have any players who are openly gay.Sloane Stephens, a member of the WTA Tour Players’ Council, said it was important for L.G.B.T.Q. players to feel safe while competing in Saudi Arabia.“That is part of the evaluation,” Stephens said. “We want to make sure everyone is safe and comfortable and feels supported.”King is openly gay as well, but she cited the WTA’s decision to play in Doha beginning in 2008 as a precedent for supporting countries who say they want to become more progressive. Simon said that, during his visit to Riyadh, he had noticed some of the same changes that Doha had said it wanted to make 15 years ago when women had “zero rights” and there were concerns about whether the players would be safe wearing short, sleeveless tennis outfits.“It’s about celebrating the betterment of women, that there is change coming,” Simon said. “I’m not Saying Saudi Arabia is a place we should be doing business with. They have a long way to go, but they are making changes.”What’s Next: The timetable is uncertain.Simon said there was no timetable for making a decision about the WTA going to Saudi Arabia. However, the tour has yet to announce a location for its season-ending Tour Finals. The tour and the Chinese government are currently negotiating the future of that event. The WTA suspended its operations in China for 18 months after player Peng Shuai was seemingly silenced after she appeared to accuse a former top government official of sexually assaulting her and the tour was unable to contact her. More

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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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      Women’s Tennis Tour Approves Deal for Pay Equity by 2033

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      The WTA Tour approved a plan to achieve pay equity at its biggest tournaments. But it won’t be fully implemented until 2033.The women’s professional tennis tour took another step on Tuesday toward closing the gender pay gap, as players and tournament officials committed to bringing their prize money in line with the men for the most significant tournaments, though the shift won’t be complete for 10 years.The move came after months of negotiations within the WTA Tour, which includes tournament organizers, as well as years of complaints from players and foot-dragging by tournament officials who for decades have paid female professionals a fraction of what they pay the men even in tournaments where they play the same best-of-three-sets format.In Rome, in May, the men competed for $8.5 million while the women competed for $3.9 million. The Western & Southern Open, the main tuneup for the U.S. Open, paid men $6.28 million while women competed for $2.53 million. The National Bank Open in Canada offered the men $5.9 million last year, compared with $2.53 million for the women.“More and more players have been getting restless with this,” said Jessica Pegula, the world’s fourth-ranked player and a member of the WTA Players’ Council. “Equal pay started with the Slams, and I think a lot of people thought that meant every tournament.”Women and men have received equal prize money at all of the Grand Slam tournaments since 2007. As part of this deal, organizers of the next two tiers of tournaments — the 1000-level tournaments, which are the biggest competitions outside of the Grand Slams, and the 500-level tournaments — have committed to pay equity as well.All events featuring both men and women at those two levels will pay prize money equal to that on the men’s tour, the ATP, beginning in 2027. By 2033, all events at those two levels will offer the same prize money.Tour executives and tournament officials say the phased-in approach is essential for raising the additional revenue to fund the pay increases, but that has not sat well with all players.“I don’t know why it’s not equal right now,” Paula Badosa of Spain, who has been ranked as high as No. 2 in the world, said last month.Sloane Stephens, another Players’ Council member, said she understands the impatience of players who don’t want this benefit to kick in only after they have retired, but there are many existing contracts that prevent an immediate shift.“It may not be the fastest pathway, but we will get there,” she said. “If I wasn’t on the council, it would be hard for me to understand. This process takes time.”In an interview this spring, Steven Simon, the chief executive of the WTA Tour, said the time frame is necessary to allow the market to catch up with player sentiment, as the tour expands its marketing and renegotiates existing media contracts. Tournament organizers will also be able to take advantage of new rules that will make player attendance essentially mandatory at the biggest tournaments. Tournament organizers have long used the lack of a mandatory attendance requirement and a slight difference in the number of rankings points that players received as excuses for not providing equal pay. All of the tournaments with men and women will also now offer the same rankings points for both, making the competitions equal in every way and less confusing for fans.But while the pay equity deal offers an eventual solution to an old problem for tennis — and in all sports — it is hardly a panacea. With Wimbledon set to begin on Monday, women’s tennis continues to grapple with challenges.“I don’t know why it’s not equal right now,” Paula Badosa has said about the gap between men’s and women’s prize money at most tournaments.Ettore Ferrari/EPA, via ShutterstockMost immediately, the tour has yet to announce the location of its season-ending tour finals in November. That issue was supposed to have been settled after the tour announced earlier this year that it would end its 18-month suspension of operations in China over the country’s treatment of the former player Peng Shuai. In a social media post in 2021, Shuai accused a government official of sexually assaulting her, and tour officials were subsequently unable to contact her.Simon said its boycott proved ineffective. But when the tour released its fall calendar earlier this month, it gave no location for the finals, though it included several tournaments in China. Tour officials have said they intend to hold the event there, but negotiations are continuing with the Chinese over the details of its existing 10-year deal that guaranteed nearly $150 million in prize money.There is also the larger issue of whether the WTA Tour will be able to further unify with the men’s tour, a move that experts say is vital for maximizing the potential of pro tennis. And looming over all of this is what role, if any, Saudi Arabia may play in the sport.Saudi Arabia, whose LIV Golf circuit recently agreed to a merger with golf’s PGA Tour, already hosts a lucrative men’s exhibition event, but so far it has shown an inclination to grow its investments in tennis without the acrimony and litigation that accompanied its aggressive push into golf.Saudi Arabia is a leading candidate to become the host of the ATP’s Next Gen Finals, a season-ending 21-and-under tournament that has been held in Milan since its inception in 2017, according to people with knowledge of the bidding process. The proposal to stage the competition, beginning later this year, includes a plan to launch a similar women’s event.The WTA has yet to commit to that or to staging any competitions in Saudi Arabia, where women only recently gained the right to drive and where an abysmal human rights record includes the murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Simon traveled to the kingdom earlier this year for talks with government officials, though it’s not clear whether the WTA’s idea of further unification with the ATP includes a new tournament in Saudi Arabia.For now, erasing the pay gap is the first step, though some players do not understand the slow pace of change.“I don’t see why we have to wait,” Ons Jabeur of Tunisia, who is ranked No. 6, said recently.In response, Simon has pointed to the deal the tour struck earlier this year with CVC Capital Partners, a private equity firm, which bought 20 percent of a WTA commercial subsidiary for $150 million. Much of the investment will be used to enhance sales and marketing efforts at a time when many of its players remain unknown to casual sports fans.Doing that may require some work on the part of the tournaments that goes beyond giving women more money.“We have to build these personalities,” Simon said.Women in tennis have also been increasingly vocal in recent months about the disparate treatment they have received. At the French Open, organizers put a men’s match in the featured prime-time slot on nine of 10 nights.The mixed tournaments almost always conclude with the men’s final on the last Sunday — an implicit peak — with the women’s final played the day before. At the Italian Open in May, Elena Rybakina and Anhelina Kalinina took the court at 11 p.m. local time in a largely empty stadium after rain and the men’s semifinals delayed their match for hours.After Tuesday’s announcement, at least the money will be equal — eventually.“It’s time for change,” Simon said. “The pathway is now there.” More

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      Details of PGA Tour and Liv Golf Merger Reveal What’s Left to Settle

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      The five-page agreement provoked a furor but included only a handful of binding provisions.The PGA Tour’s tentative deal with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund included only a handful of binding commitments — such as a nondisparagement agreement and a pledge to dismiss acrimonious litigation — leaving many of the most consequential details about the future of men’s professional golf to be negotiated by the end of the year.The five-page framework agreement was obtained Monday by The New York Times. The proposed deal, announced on June 6 by the tour and the wealth fund, the financial force behind the renegade LIV Golf circuit, has caused an uproar throughout the golf industry. But a review of the agreement points to the rushed nature of the secret, seven-week talks that led to the deal and the complex path that remains ahead for the new venture, a potential triumph for Saudi Arabia’s quest to gain power and influence in sports and, its critics say, to distract from its reputation as a human rights abuser.Most crucially, the tour and the wealth fund must still come to terms on the values of the assets that each will contribute to their planned partnership. Bankers and lawyers have spent recent weeks beginning the valuation process, but the framework agreement includes no substantive details of projected figures or even the size of an anticipated cash investment from the wealth fund.Instead, much of the agreement focuses on the basic structure of the new company that is to house what the accord describes as all of the “commercial businesses/rights” of the PGA Tour and the European Tour, now known as the DP World Tour.The wealth fund is expected to contribute its “golf-related investments and assets,” including the LIV circuit that split the sport, and will have the first opportunity to invest in the new company. The tentative agreement says that the PGA Tour is to maintain “at all times a controlling voting interest” in the new company, but that Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, will serve as the chairman of the new joint entity. Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner who recently went on leave because of an unspecified “medical situation,” is in line to become its chief executive.The new company, according to the agreement, could pursue “targeted mergers and acquisitions to globalize the sport” and may look to incorporate “innovations from LIV,” such as the team golf concept that the league has championed since it debuted last year.Those provisions, though, are not binding until the tour and the wealth fund strike a final agreement. Instead, the only ironclad caveats of the agreement involve seeking the dismissal of litigation, a mandate fulfilled on June 16; a ban on recruiting players to rival circuits; a deadline of Dec. 31 to sign final accords, absent a mutual extension; and confidentiality and nondisparagement clauses.The effective gag agreement appears far-reaching and prohibits the tour and the wealth fund from “any defamatory or disparaging remarks, comments or statements” about the other side and any “ultimate beneficial owners” — a phrase that could be interpreted to include the Saudi government, which the tour had previously condemned for its human rights record.“I recognize everything that I’ve said in the past and in my prior positions,” Monahan, a leading architect of the deal, said this month. “I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite. 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.”Saudi officials have denied that their investments in sports, which include efforts in soccer, Formula 1 racing and boxing, are intended to sanitize the kingdom’s reputation. Instead, they have depicted those investments as a glossy component of a sweeping effort to diversify the country’s economy under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto leader who is also the wealth fund’s chairman.Al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, signed the agreement on behalf of the Saudis, with no evidence of direct involvement by Greg Norman, LIV’s commissioner.Monahan and Keith Pelley, the DP World Tour’s chief executive, effectively represented the golf establishment when they signed the deal behind closed doors in San Francisco on May 30. It was sprung upon almost the entire golf industry, including most of the PGA Tour’s board, a week later.The board, which has been considering the deal that it was largely shut out of negotiating, is expected to discuss the pact’s initial terms during a meeting in Detroit on Tuesday. The 11-member board is not believed to be planning a vote yet because the final nuances of the accord may not be hammered out for months.The deal faces scrutiny well beyond the tour’s board. In Washington, Justice Department officials and congressional investigators are preparing to pore over the details of the accord, which antitrust regulators could ultimately try to block. The tour shared a copy of the agreement with a Senate subcommittee on Monday evening, just more than two weeks before a hearing on Capitol Hill that many expect to become contentious.But tour executives concluded in recent months that the new economic order that LIV’s swift rise provoked — swelling legal bills, larger prize purses, a diluted product with the world’s most marketable players competing against one another only four times a year at golf’s major tournaments — was unsustainable. They sought a détente with the Saudis and found a receptive audience in and around the wealth fund, where some officials were frustrated by a series of legal setbacks connected to LIV and uneven success in gaining traction in the crucial American sports market.The second paragraph of the framework nodded toward the turmoil, with the tour and the wealth fund saying they were interested in “ending divisions.” Some elements of the deal amounted to olive branches. In one section, for instance, the two sides agreed to “cooperate in good faith and use best efforts” to bring secure Official World Golf Ranking accreditation for LIV events.The fate of LIV, which sapped the PGA Tour of some of its star players after offering exorbitant contracts and prize purses, is not included in a binding part of the deal. Instead, the new company, if it comes to pass, is expected to “undertake a full and objective empirical data-driven evaluation of LIV and its prospects and potential.”The framework does not outline any financial penalties if the deal does not ultimately progress, but it says the tour and the wealth fund “can revert to operating their respective businesses” if the agreement collapses. More

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      Lionel Messi, Saudi Arabia and a Contract to Promote the Kingdom

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      A contract between Messi and Saudi Arabia’s tourism authority offers a glimpse at the details of their multimillion-dollar relationship.As the sun set over a seemingly endless expanse of open sea, Lionel Messi took a seat at the edge of a boat, stretched out a leg and posed for the photograph that would announce the beginning of his public partnership with Saudi Arabia.The image, shared with Messi’s 400 million-plus followers on Instagram on May 9, 2022, was accompanied by a dual-language caption that read, “Discovering the Red Sea #VisitSaudi.” Hours earlier, he had been welcomed to the kingdom by Saudi Arabia’s tourism minister, who had boasted on Twitter that while it was Messi’s first visit to the country, “it will not be the last.”Messi, who is regarded perhaps as global soccer’s greatest player, was starting to cash in on the new partnership: His photo-op in the Red Sea likely earned him approximately $2 million, the first step in fulfilling his agreement with the kingdom that is worth millions more.The details of Messi’s role as a well-compensated pitchman for Saudi Arabia are contained in a previously undisclosed version of his contract with the tourism authority that was reviewed by the The New York Times.The contract shows that Messi could receive as much as 22.5 million euros, about $25 million, over three years for little actual work: a few commercial appearances, a handful of social media posts and some all-expenses-paid vacations to the kingdom with his family and children. He is expected to share images of those trips — marked with a Saudi-approved hashtag — with his vast online following.But the document also contains a condition important to Saudi officials: Messi cannot say anything that might “tarnish” Saudi Arabia, a country that has faced widespread criticism for its human rights record.Those details of the arrangement with Messi, who won the World Cup with Argentina in December, offer an inside glimpse of the oil-rich kingdom’s use of its wealth to enlist marquee athletes in its effort to burnish its global image. Saudi Arabia’s critics deride the strategy as sportswashing: using sports and sports figures to whitewash the country’s human rights record, its treatment of women, its killing of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and other authoritarian actions.For the past few years, Saudi Arabia has spent billions to take big stakes in professional sports: The purchase of a Premier League soccer team. Championship boxing matches. A stop on the Formula 1 auto racing schedule. And, most recently, a brazen incursion into professional golf.The kingdom has offered hundreds of millions of dollars more to lure Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and dozens of other soccer stars to play in the country’s domestic league. Messi recently declined a similar offer, choosing instead to join Inter Miami of Major League Soccer in the United States. But there’s no sign so far that the decision has affected his relationship with the Saudis. Indeed, he has seemed eager to stay in their good graces.In February 2021, just weeks after he signed his contract, Messi wrote a letter to Saudi’s tourism minister, apologizing for being unable to make a scheduled visit. In the previously unreported letter, Messi addressed the tourism minister, Ahmed al-Khateeb, as “Your Excellency” and, in unusually flowery prose, expressed his “deepest regrets” for his absence. Messi was then playing for F.C. Barcelona, and he wrote that as “a sportsman,” he had obligations that were impossible to skip: a league game against Real Betis followed by a match in the Spanish cup.Messi was suspended from Paris St.-Germain after he took a trip to Saudi Arabia that was not authorized by the team.Aurelien Morissard/Associated PressThe Saudis got their visits eventually. The most recent came last month, a year after his first Saudi tourism post on Instagram, when Messi took a quick, midseason vacation to the kingdom — which, like all of his previous visits, would have yielded him a seven-figure payday under the terms of his Saudi tourism contract.By then, Messi had left Barcelona and was playing for the French team Paris St.-Germain. When he returned from his Saudi sojourn, the French club suspended him for what it deemed an unauthorized absence from training. Messi apologized to his team and its fans with an explanation that suggested the trip was not optional: “I couldn’t cancel it.”Until now, the details of Messi’s contract with the tourism authority have been a closely held secret. It is not clear if the contract reviewed by The Times is the current version of the deal. It was shared by someone with direct knowledge of the arrangement between Messi and the Saudis on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to divulge details of the deal. The document, dated Jan. 1, 2021, was signed by Messi and his brother Rodrigo, who serves as his business manager, but it is not signed by Saudi officials.The terms outlined in the document are consistent with the way Messi has used his social media accounts to promote the kingdom, and also with the promotional visits he has made to the country.The contract is specific about Messi’s obligations, and about the money to be paid for fulfilling each one:About $2 million, nearly 1.8 million euros, for a minimum of one family vacation annually lasting five days, or alternately two annual vacations of three days each. The travel expenses and five-star accommodations were to be paid by the Saudi government for Messi and up to 20 family members and friends.Another $2 million for promoting Saudi Arabia on his social media accounts 10 times a year, separately from the promotion of his vacations to the kingdom.About $2 million more to participate in an annual tourism campaign. (He and the Saudi authority shared the first campaign, an elaborately shot desert video, in November.)Another $2 million for charitable work and appearances.Few people were willing to discuss the terms of Messi’s deal. Pablo Negre Abello, who is responsible for Messi’s commercial deals, cited confidentiality clauses written into all of Messi’s contracts. Abello suggested that a Times reporter contact the tourism authority. Officials there did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Rayco García Cabrera, a former soccer player who brokered the meeting between Messi’s management and Saudi officials, including the minister of tourism, said the deal was worth “a small amount” compared with the huge salaries the country is paying stars like Ronaldo and Benzema. But, García said, Messi agreed to be a tourism spokesman because “he believes in Saudi and the vision of Saudi.”“I was in the middle of this,” García added, “and I was so surprised when Messi didn’t ask for a huge amount.” García said he did not know the precise terms of the agreement.A review of Messi’s social media postings and travel show him seemingly fulfilling the terms of his contract. His Instagram account — with 470 million followers, it is one of the largest on the platform — has featured a regular stream of Saudi messaging and photographs. On his visit in May, Messi was photographed with his wife and children participating in a variety of family activities: petting horses with his sons, playing games at an arcade and sitting with a craft artist while holding a woven hat.During his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, Messi appeared in photographs with his family.Saudi Ministry of Tourism, via ReutersThe photographs were then distributed to the news media by the tourism ministry.Saudi Ministry of Tourism, via ReutersIn 2021, amid news reports linking Messi and Saudi Arabia, family members of Saudi dissidents urged the player to reject the endorsement offer that he eventually accepted. In an open letter, they pleaded with him by writing, “The Saudi regime wants to use you to launder its reputation.”Saudi officials have rejected that charge. Messi, meanwhile, has made no mention of it. Instead, he has expressed wonder at the natural beauty to be found in Saudi Arabia.One of Messi’s recent posts is a picture of the kingdom’s date palm groves and other natural attractions. The caption reads: “Who thought Saudi has so much green?” More

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      For PGA Tour Players, Betrayal and Confusion in Saudi Deal’s Wake

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      Members of America’s most famous golf tour thought they had a voice. Then came a surprise pact that could reshape the sport for years to come.The U.S. Open winner Gary Woodland had lately sensed something different in professional golf.Players were empowered and emboldened. Executives were listening. The PGA Tour was changing. With the circuit’s dominance challenged by LIV Golf, an upstart built with billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the tour felt closer to a cooperative than a dispassionate titan of professional sports.Then came the tour’s surprise announcement on June 6 that, after it had lobbied players to forsake the Saudi money it had associated with human rights abuses, the PGA Tour and the wealth fund would join forces. None of the five players who sit on the tour’s board learned of the deal more than a few hours before it became public.“It was turning toward players being heard over the last year,” Woodland, who became a professional golfer in 2007, said at the Los Angeles Country Club, where the U.S. Open will conclude on Sunday. June 6, he said, showed that the voices of tour players had suddenly been “thrown out the door a little bit.”Woodland is not an outlier. In interviews and during news conferences at the Open, top players described a shaken faith in a PGA Tour they believed had recently offered them more meaningful agency and greater influence. The tour’s ability to ease the restive atmosphere could influence whether the deal, which is facing significant skepticism inside the tour and in Washington, advances in the coming months.Compared to other prominent professional sports leagues in the United States, the PGA Tour, a tax-exempt nonprofit, has an unusual structure.Unlike in, say, the N.B.A. or the N.F.L., there are no team owners, and there is no labor union. Instead, players are independent contractors who earn eligibility for PGA Tour membership. Tour members do not generally have financial guarantees — they may, however, earn money through assorted sponsorships — but receive tour paychecks tied to their on-course performances. (When Viktor Hovland won the Memorial Tournament this month, he earned $3.6 million of the event’s $20 million prize fund. Golfers who did not play well enough to secure places in the final two rounds collected nothing.)In return for access to tour events and purses, players allow the circuit to negotiate television rights deals on their behalf, among other conditions. Even without a labor union, players theoretically have a say in tour operations: The 11-member board includes five seats for players, and there is a 16-player council that “advises and consults” with board members and the tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan.But when tour leaders negotiated a framework agreement to reshape the sport in the most consequential ways since the modern tour’s founding in the 1960s, players were not in the room. Rory McIlroy, the world’s third-ranked golfer and a member of the tour’s board, learned of the deal a week after it was signed behind closed doors at a Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco.Deepening the turmoil, the tentative deal makes little about the future clear, mostly because lawyers and executives are still haggling over the fine print that stands to determine much about how the sport will be organized, funded and operated.“It’s just not easy as a player that’s been involved, like many others, to wake up one day and see this bombshell,” Jon Rahm said.Marcio J. Sanchez/Associated Press“I think the general feeling is that a lot of people feel a bit of betrayal from management,” said Jon Rahm, the winner of this year’s Masters Tournament.“It’s just not easy as a player that’s been involved, like many others, to wake up one day and see this bombshell,” he added. “That’s why we’re all in a bit of a state of limbo because we don’t know what’s going on and how much is finalized and how much they can talk about, either.”The sense of duplicity, some players suggested, might not be so severe had they not grown confident in the notion that they were increasingly central to developing the tour’s path for the years ahead.As Tiger Woods receded from golf’s spotlight, Woodland observed, players found their sport searching for figures to help set its tone and direction.“When I first started, you just went out and played and who knows what was going on,” said Woodland, who remains close to Woods. “It was pretty much everyone jumped on Tiger’s coattails and we just went.” More recently, Woodland said, “guys are starting to get a little more of their own voice, and you’re starting to see different opinions.”Faced with the rise of LIV Golf, players had helped devise changes to the tour’s format and schedule. During a private meeting in Delaware last summer they tried to hash out adjustments that could help curb an exodus to LIV. Afterward, Monahan declared that the Delaware meeting “represents a remarkable moment for the PGA Tour and showcases the essence of what being a membership organization is all about.”By the middle of last month, though, Monahan was in Venice for secret talks with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi wealth fund. Two board members, neither of them players, were on the trip to Italy. The men later gathered in San Francisco over Memorial Day to finish up the framework deal. Afterward, the circle of people who knew about the planned partnership expanded, but did not include any players until June 6, when tour and Saudi officials announced the pact. Some players learned about it on Twitter.The mood inside the tour only worsened as it became apparent that the deal had been constructed in extraordinary secrecy, with players’ representatives on the board shut out of the talks.Joel Dahmen said he recognized that voices of midlevel players like him would receive only so much priority in the tour’s strategic deliberationsEtienne Laurent/EPA, via Shutterstock“We were given the impression that we were being heard,” said Joel Dahmen, a professional player since 2010 whose public profile soared this year when he appeared in the Netflix documentary series “Full Swing.”Dahmen, a self-described “midlevel” guy, said he recognized that voices like his would receive only so much priority in the tour’s strategic deliberations. But many golfers were flabbergasted that even its greatest headliners were kept away from the negotiations, even as some of their colleagues said they understood that it was impractical to expect tour officials to confer with the entire membership in advance.“If you have to consult every player, then probably nothing’s ever going to happen, and that’s the balance for any organization,” said Adam Scott, the 2013 Masters winner and former world No. 1 player who chairs the tour’s Player Advisory Council. “It’s like the golf club at home: They’ve got the members’ committee, and a few on that committee get to influence decisions.”“It’s a player-centric tour,” Scott added, “but it depends where you’re sitting and how you look at things.”PGA Tour officials have rushed to quell the outrage, mindful that frustrations with the organization helped prepare the ground for LIV to entice players away from what is America’s flagship men’s golf circuit. Senior executives have been at the U.S. Open, and Monahan, who began a leave of absence this past week after what the tour described only as “a medical situation,” held a contentious meeting with players hours after the deal’s announcement.Players with some of the closest ties to Monahan and other executives said they had received a barrage of feedback unlike any they recalled. Webb Simpson, a board member who won the 2012 U.S. Open, said, perhaps with a dose of hyperbole, that he had probably heard more from players since June 6 than he had in his 15 years as a tour golfer.“We want to have unity, but we also want to trust our leaders,” said Simpson, who added that he had been calling players to hear out their misgivings and aggravations. “I think as a whole they are struggling with these decisions.”“It’s a player-centric tour,” Adam Scott said, “but it depends where you’re sitting and how you look at things.”Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesAlthough McIlroy has signaled his support for the deal, other players with board seats have been publicly 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,” Simpson said.He sounded much like Patrick Cantlay, another board member, who said that “it seems like it’s still too early to have enough information to have a good handle on the situation.”The board is scheduled to meet later this month, but it is not clear whether the pact will be ready for a vote by then. At the very least, board members are expecting a briefing that might allow them to answer more detailed questions about the tour’s future.All players can do for now, many said, is to try to imagine what the tour might look like and where they might fit into a changed ecosystem.“Where I think I am — and a lot of other players are — is we’re going to show up at the biggest and best events that we have tee times at, the ones that pay the most money, and we’re going to go play until someone tells us we can’t play in those events anymore, and then we’ll go find other events,” Dahmen said.They are also settling in for a protracted period of uncertainty, grappling with the possibility that the tour could be in turmoil for another year or more. It is an unfamiliar road for many of them, after all of these years in which the tour was the unquestioned destination of choice for many of the world’s top golfers, its business model familiar.“As members or as players,” Scott said, “we haven’t had to deal with anything like this before.” More

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      The Titanic PGA and LIV Golf Deal Stokes Anger on Capitol Hill

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      American lawmakers and officials are studying the pact between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.One of golf’s greatest tests will unfold starting on Thursday, when the U.S. Open begins at the Los Angeles Country Club. It might be an easier lift — it will assuredly be a shorter one — than the test that is emerging in Washington.The abrupt announcement last week that the PGA Tour will tie itself to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and its LIV Golf league is provoking American officials in ways as predictable as they might be persistent in the months ahead.Antitrust experts are insisting that the Justice Department should consider suing to stop the agreement, which calls for the business operations of LIV and the PGA Tour to be brought into one new company, if the deal closes in the coming months. Lawmakers are complaining that the Florida-based PGA Tour is lurching into business with an arm of the Saudi state that it roundly condemned until last week. Political strategists are scrambling to shape perceptions of an agreement that was forged in secret and, upon its release, promptly criticized as a well-heeled exercise in hypocrisy and whitewashing.Whether the commotion will amount to anything beyond a few news cycles of fussing — a successful assault on the PGA Tour’s tax-exempt status comes to mind — may not be clear for months. But a week into golf’s latest maelstrom, a deal that could eventually prove lucrative for players and executives is already promising a booming era for lawyers, lobbyists and political sound bites, too.Although golf had been under pressure inside the Justice Department, where antitrust regulators were looking at the PGA Tour, the announcement last week brought the tumult to Capitol Hill.In the House, Representative John Garamendi, Democrat of California, swiftly introduced a bill to revoke the PGA Tour’s tax-exempt status. And in the Senate, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, announced on Monday that a subcommittee he chairs would conduct an inquiry into a deal that he said “raises concerns about the Saudi government’s role in influencing this effort and the risks posed by a foreign government entity assuming control over a cherished American institution.”At the U.S. Open in Los Angeles this week, PGA Tour golfers like Jon Rahm will be playing with men like Sergio Garcia, who defected to LIV last year.Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesThat there would be a battle was never much in question. The principal short-term matter to resolve was who, exactly, would be picking which fights.The golf side of the battle features two forces with formidable records across decades in Washington. Even though Saudi Arabia has had plenty of bipartisan tangles, the kingdom’s officials and allies have often enjoyed an uncommon rapport with their American counterparts, as was on display during a visit from Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken last week. And the PGA Tour has usually found the capital to be a wellspring of courtesy, especially when its supporters helped short-circuit a Federal Trade Commission inquiry in the 1990s.The trouble for the wealth fund and the tour is that Washington also has a bipartisan affection for lawmakers imitating sports executives, and browbeating actual ones, in public and in private. It can be good politics to glower at the commissioners who draw more jeers than many elected officials, and headline-making hostility from Congress could complicate the golf industry’s quest to sell the deal to the public — and then move past it.The tour and the wealth fund can take some comfort in history, which suggests a successful congressional effort to thwart the deal directly is unlikely. The Hill, though, could still seek to make the transaction painful beyond a feisty public hearing or two. A change to the tour’s tax status, like the one envisioned in the bill introduced in the House, could cost it millions of dollars a year because it has been structured as a “business league” that is exempt from taxes under section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code.Groups like the PGA Tour have combated legislative headaches surrounding their tax-exempt status in the past, with one effort to end the practice for sports leagues vanishing from a 2017 tax bill at the last moment. In the past 18 months, years after the N.F.L. and Major League Baseball surrendered their exempt statuses, public records show that the tour has spent at least $640,000 on lobbying, with much of that work tied to “tax legislation affecting exempt organizations.”As a part of his inquiry, Blumenthal on Monday demanded documents related to the tour’s tax-exempt status and, in his letter to the tour, wondered whether the deal would allow a foreign government to “indirectly benefit from provisions in U.S. tax laws meant to promote not-for-profit business associations.”Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, similarly seethed that the tour had “moved itself right to the top of the leaderboard in terms of most questionable tax exemptions in professional sports.”But Wyden has also suggested that the deal should run into resistance before the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a Treasury Department-led committee that examines national security implications of foreign investments in real estate and American companies.Whether there are serious national security concerns about a deal involving golf tours, or whether the committee will even review the agreement at all, is unclear. Janet Yellen, the secretary of the Treasury, said last week that it was “not immediately obvious” to her that the agreement related to national security. But Wyden, who is planning a congressional investigation of his own, has signaled his interest in the department’s exploring whether the deal could give “the Saudi regime inappropriate control or access to U.S. real estate,” most likely through the tour’s Tournament Players Club collection of golf courses.And those are just the spats that have erupted since last Tuesday.The PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, left, and Jimmy Dunne, a board member, were closely involved in the merger negotiations.Getty ImagesUrged on by LIV’s lawyers, Justice Department regulators have spent months examining whether the PGA Tour’s tactics to discourage players from defecting to the Saudi-backed league were illegal, and whether the tour’s coziness with other leading golf organizations — like Augusta National Golf Club, the organizer of the Masters Tournament — violated federal law. Instead of quieting misgivings about golf, the deal has only intensified them and might have even armed the department with a new lever: suing to stop the pact, which the tour and wealth fund deny amounts to a merger.“Generally, we want to encourage parties to settle their disputes outside of the judicial process, but it doesn’t mean that settlements are immune from antitrust,” said Henry J. Hauser, a former antitrust lawyer at the Justice Department who now practices at Perkins Coie, one of the capital’s best-connected firms. “If companies try to resolve a legitimate dispute by agreeing to common conditions that stifle competition, that could be a problem.”The Justice Department has declined to comment.The tour is moving aggressively to curb Washington’s irritation, going as far to suggest that Congress and other parts of the federal government could have done more to help it rebuff a Saudi challenge.“While we are grateful for the written declarations of support we received from certain members, we were largely left on our own to fend off the attacks, ostensibly due to the United States’ complex geopolitical alliance with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, wrote in a letter to lawmakers last week. “This left the very real prospect of another decade of expensive and distracting litigation and the PGA Tour’s long-term existence under threat.”In the penultimate sentence of his letter, Monahan described the tour as “an American institution,” just as Blumenthal would on Monday. But like many executives before him, Monahan is finding that Washington is forever eager to scrutinize American institutions, especially when sports are involved.He may ultimately find that the shouting has only just begun.Lauren Hirsch More