When the P.G.A. Tour announced last week that it was merging with LIV Golf, its Saudi Arabia-backed rival, the reaction from the sports commentariat was uniform. “Money wins,” Jason Gay wrote in the Wall Street Journal, quoting “Succession” ’s Logan Roy. The New York Times’ Kurt Streeter wrote, “They said it was about principles, but it was always about money.” He continued, “Human rights, it turns out, are a bore and obstacle. Sportswashing, as it is known, is powerful and effective.”
The sportswriters have a point. In pro sports these days, it is nearly always about the money. Since televised sports replaced religion as the opium of the masses, we’ve grown accustomed to seeing billionaires, major corporations, and sovereign wealth funds buying up teams and franchises. On Saturday, in the final of the UEFA Champions League, Manchester City, which is majority-owned by the royal family of Abu Dhabi, defeated Inter Milan, which is majority-owned by a Chinese retail conglomerate. Gulf Oil Money 1, China’s Nouveau Riche 0.
It’s also true that the P.G.A. Tour and LIV Golf both had good reason to reach an arrangement. LIV Golf was struggling to make much impact, and the P.G.A. Tour, which LIV sued in federal court last year, claiming that the Tour had engaged in anticompetitive practices and restraint of trade, wasn’t relishing a lengthy legal battle with a deep-pocketed adversary. The P.G.A. Tour has also been eager to put the entire controversy behind it. With the 2023 U.S. Open taking place at the Los Angeles Country Club this week, Jay Monahan, the commissioner of the P.G.A. Tour, is doubtless hoping that public attention will switch away from Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist whom Saudi government operatives murdered and dismembered in 2018, and back to Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, and the other players at the top of the world golf rankings. But the collective memory is perhaps not as short as Monahan thought. And, over the past few days, we have seen his ascent to the top of the world hypocrisy rankings.
Last year, after LIV signed up some top American players—including Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, and Phil Mickelson—Monahan and his colleagues played the 9/11 card. They warned other P.G.A. Tour players to consider the ethical repercussions of jumping to LIV. “As it relates to the families of 9/11 . . . I would ask any player that has left . . . have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the P.G.A. Tour?” Monahan told CBS.
“The P.G.A. Tour had staked its ground on making the moral case against LIV and the Saudis,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, an advocacy group that Khashoggi founded, told me. “To discover that was nothing but a negotiating tactic to get a higher price for the P.G.A. came as a bit of a shock, because it was a tactic that came with costs.”
One of those costs is that the P.G.A.Tour-LIV merger is now attracting critical scrutiny on Capitol Hill. “So weird,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, commented on Twitter. “P.G.A. officials were in my office just months ago talking about how the Saudis’ human rights record should disqualify them from having a stake in a major American sport. I guess maybe their concerns weren’t really about human rights?” In the House, California Democrat John Garamendi has introduced a bill to strip the P.G.A. Tour of the tax-exempt status it has retained despite raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from broadcast deals and corporate sponsors. “Jay Monahan should be ashamed of the blatant hypocrisy and about-face he and the rest of P.G.A.Tour’s leadership demonstrated by allowing the sovereign wealth fund of a foreign government with an unconscionable human-rights record to take over an iconic American sports league and avoid paying a penny in federal corporate income tax,” Garamendi said.
At a press conference last week, Monahan tried to justify his one-eighty by saying that “circumstances change” and arguing that a merger with LIV will be good for the P.G.A. Tour—and for golf generally. He also said that it was attractive to “take the competitor off of the board.” But that statement brought up a second hurdle facing the P.G.A. Tour-LIV merger: U.S. antitrust laws. Even before the deal was announced, the Justice Department had been investigating the P.G.A. Tour for possible violations of competition statutes. “I think they’ve waved a red cape in front of the antitrust enforcers by doing a merger to create a monopoly,” Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor who served in the Biden White House as an adviser on technology and competition policy until January of this year, told me.
In announcing the deal, the P.G.A. Tour and LIV Golf said that they have agreed to set up a new for-profit partnership, with Monahan serving as chief executive and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of Saudi Arabia’s seven-hundred-billion-dollar sovereign wealth fund, serving as chairman. But they also said that the P.G.A. Tour will continue to administer its tournaments. Wu expressed skepticism about this arrangement. “They may say that the P.G.A. Tour will continue to operate separately from the P.G.A. Tour-LIV partnership, but whenever two entities that previously dominated a market join together, that’s a potential antitrust issue,” he said. As a possible precedent, Wu pointed to the Justice Department’s successful lawsuit to block a 2020 agreement between American Airlines and JetBlue that had seen them coördinate their operations in the Northeast. “They called it an alliance, but the Justice Department treated it as a merger and blocked it,” Wu said. “The government doesn’t care what you call it. They care if two competing entities stop competing.”
The final hurdle that the P.G.A. Tour needs to clear is the perception that it is selling an iconic American institution to a government headed by Mohammed bin Salman, who has accepted responsibility for Khashoggi’s death while denying that he ordered it. Whitson said that the issues raised by the P.G.A. Tour-LIV merger go well beyond golf. “The Saudi investment in U.S. sports assets is not an isolated thing,” she said. “It is part of an unprecedented investment in diverse sectors of the American economy, from gaming to entertainment to fashion to finance. The list goes on and on. It’s partly about sportswashing, or artswashing, or entertainment washing, but it’s also a hedge to prevent a repeat of what happened after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, when some American businesses started withdrawing from anything to do with Saudi Arabia. This infiltration is an effort to prevent U.S. businesses from ever doing that again.”
Whitson also pointed to recent Saudi efforts to buy influence in the American political system, most notably through large investments in private-equity funds run by Jared Kushner and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury Secretary. “Our laws never anticipated that we would have a murderous dictator not only buying up parts of our economy but also our cultural institutions and our elected officials,” she said. In the face of the deluge of Saudi petrodollars, it is easy to become cynical and adopt the sportswriters’ attitude that money always wins out. But Whitson is resisting the urge to treat this as a foregone conclusion. “This deal has only made us redouble our efforts to make Americans understand that the problem with Mohammed bin Salman and Saudi Arabia isn’t just about how its human-rights record affects people thousands of miles away,” she said. “This is about preserving and protecting democracy here in the United States.” ♦
