The PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund are racing to reshape their plans to combine their rival golf circuits, emboldened by President Donald J. Trump’s eagerness to play peacemaker for a fractured sport, according to four people familiar with the matter.
Since the start of secret talks in April 2023, PGA Tour executives and their Saudi counterparts have been weighing how they could somehow blend the premier American golf circuit with the Saudis’ LIV Golf operation. But negotiators have struggled to design a deal that would satisfy regulators along with players, investors and executives.
Mr. Trump’s return to Washington has offered a new opening: After an Oval Office meeting this month that ethics experts have said tested the bounds of propriety, the two sides are considering options that might have stalled during Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidency but that the Trump administration’s antitrust enforcers could offer a friendlier glance.
The details of any prospective agreement, including LIV’s fate, remain in flux. In general, regulators would see any transaction that led to the dissolution of one of the leagues as anticompetitive; under Mr. Trump, though, antitrust regulators could take a more relaxed view.
The two sides are looking beyond a simple cash transaction, though it is unclear how exactly the deal would be structured. The PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, has said they are looking at a “reunification,” but there are many complicating factors, including how to value both ventures.
There is also the matter of how to handle any deal alongside a separate $1.5 billion investment in the PGA Tour by a band of American sports magnates.
The people familiar with the deal talks spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are confidential. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Before Mr. Trump returned to power on Jan. 20, Mr. Biden’s Justice Department had been reviewing term sheets that called for the Saudis to invest $1.5 billion in a new commercial arm created by the PGA Tour. Regulators sat for months poring over reams of documents, but talks were at an effective standstill.
The chance now to explore potentially cozier terms is a remarkable turnabout and underscores how the legal and political realities of deal-making can quickly change under Mr. Trump, especially when he acts as mediator.
The Saudi-backed LIV league roared into the golf world in 2022 with huge contracts for established stars and a shorter, livelier tournament format that challenged the PGA Tour. But it effectively split the stars of the golf world across two circuits, fracturing the audience and weakening the business prospects for both leagues. The Saudi wealth fund is valued at about $925 billion, but its golf operation has bled money for years, even as LIV sought to cut a swaggering public profile.
In an Oval Office meeting two weeks ago, Mr. Trump met with Mr. Monahan and spoke by telephone with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the Saudi wealth fund’s governor.
Mr. Trump’s lifelong love of the sport and his family’s ownership in more than a dozen golf properties around the world suggest his involvement could raise conflicts of interest.
The PGA Tour has not held a tournament for its flagship circuit at a Trump property since 2016, and Mr. Trump has been especially close to LIV and its power brokers. His company’s courses have hosted LIV tournaments, and another is planned for Trump National Doral, near Miami, in April. Mr. Trump has often appeared at LIV events.
Mr. al-Rumayyan and Mr. Trump are both expected to attend a meeting of investors and executives hosted by the Saudi wealth fund in Miami Beach this week. It is not clear whether they will try to complete a golf deal at the conference, which is about far more than sports. But Tiger Woods, the greatest player of his generation, sounded a broadly optimistic note over the weekend.
“We’re going to get this game going in the right direction,” Mr. Woods, a member of the PGA Tour’s board, told CBS on Sunday. “It’s been heading in the wrong direction for a number of years, and the fans want all of us to play together, all the top players playing together, and we’re going to make that happen.”
Mr. Woods also said another meeting with Mr. Trump was “coming up.”
The clock on the Justice Department’s review of the original agreement expired this month, according to two of the people familiar with the talks. Ordinarily, that would have meant the parties could just proceed with the agreement.
Instead, they have turned toward the possibility of better options.
Even the possibility that golf’s turmoil could end with an antitrust whimper, rather than a regulatory thunderclap, shows how much the environment has shifted over the last two years.
In 2023, LIV officials encouraged a federal inquiry into professional golf, arguing that the PGA Tour’s efforts to stem defections to other leagues threatened the labor market’s integrity. Investigators examined cellphones and interviewed LIV players, including Bryson DeChambeau and Phil Mickelson, as they studied the tightknit structures of men’s professional golf.
Then came the surprise agreement between the Saudis and the tour to pursue a joint venture. Mr. Monahan stunned observers the day it was announced when he publicly declared that a deal could “take the competitor off of the board,” a comment that antitrust experts saw as a flagrant red flag. The Justice Department pressured the two sides to abandon the no-poach clause they had included in their preliminary accord.
The PGA Tour’s television ratings have declined sharply, and Mr. Monahan told reporters last week in California that people wanted to see the world’s top players competing against one another again. (For the most part, tour and LIV players meet only at the four major tournaments: the Masters, the P.G.A. Championship, the U.S. Open and the British Open.)
Asked whether the talks could lead to the end of LIV, Mr. Monahan did not answer directly.
“What it means is the reunification of the game, which is what we have been and are focused on,” he said.
Mr. Monahan added that he could “certainly see a day where we’re adding Trump venues to our schedule.”
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