More than a year after the PGA Tour announced plans to combine forces with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund’s upstart LIV Golf league, the two sides met in Manhattan on Tuesday in hopes of — finally — making headway on getting to a deal.
Given a series of starts and stops in talks aimed at a proposed deal, an accord still remains far from certain. But executives from the tour and Saudi’s wealth fund, which backs LIV Golf, alongside their advisers, were focused on hammering out details of an agreement, three people familiar with the matter said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.
Also involved in the talks is at least one executive from the consortium of U.S. investors that has already committed to investing in the tour, the people said. The meeting is expected to continue on Wednesday, and could also spill into additional days, they said.
The flurry of activity demonstrated an eagerness by both sides to get a deal done. The standoff between the PGA Tour and its Saudi-backed rival has divided the sport, frustrating fans and players alike.
No players attended the meeting, the people said, though several have been in other meetings about the deal. A report that Tiger Woods was New York spurred speculation about his presence, but one of the people said that Woods was in town for a golf event supporting his foundation.
Plans for the meeting came together within the past week, with the hope that an in-person gathering would generate some momentum, the people said.
When they met in June, the PGA Tour and Saudi wealth fund signed a nonbinding letter of intent that effectively laid out the broad strokes of a potential deal. In a bid to head-off potential antitrust concerns, the sides have submitted a draft of that document to the Justice Department, two of the people said. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment.
The two sides have discussed a deal that would call for the Saudi wealth fund to invest $1.5 billion into a commercial arm created by the PGA Tour and a U.S. investment group. That is the same amount initially committed to the tour by the U.S. investors, which includes Fenway Sports Group, the parent company of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club; and billionaires like Steven Cohen, the New York Mets owner.
But other major questions about the agreement have held talks up, and the two sides blew through an initial deadline to complete it by the end of last year. The issues include how to combine tournament schedules, the role of the Saudi wealth fund on a PGA Tour board and how to craft a deal that would bypass regulatory scrutiny. The latter matter is particularly thorny because of the fact that the PGA Tour and LIV Golf are rivals, raising significant concerns that a merger could be anti-competitive.
Political scrutiny of the deal has also not abated. The talks have provoked outrage from many politicians and critics who say it is an attempt by the Saudi government to distract people from its human rights record.
The fact that Tuesday’s meeting was held in New York the day before the anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center also spurred criticism.
“It is disgusting, unacceptable and incredibly painful and that The Tour would do this, especially now,” 9/11 Justice, a group of survivors and their supporters, said in a statement Tuesday.
The timing was a coincidence resulting from the quick manner in which the meeting was scheduled, the people familiar with the matter said.
Despite the lack of an agreement, there have been signs of progress. Two of the PGA Tour’s biggest stars, Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler, are set to face two of LIV’s best players, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka, in a match in December.
“In a way, hopefully it is a sign for things to come,” McIlroy told ITV News of the event. McIlroy was named to a transaction committee tasked with negotiating the deal in May. “For golf to be as strong as it can be, we need all the best players competing against each other more often, and not just four times a year at the majors.”
Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, said in Atlanta last month that the tour and the Saudi fund were in “regular dialogue” and that they were “the right people at the table with the right mind-set.”
At the time, he said he was “hopeful” about the direction of the talks.
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