Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau Discuss PGA Tour, LIV Merger Talks amid Delay
The PGA Tour continues to negotiate with Saudi Arabia’s LIV and the DP World Tour about a potential merger between the entities, which was officially announced in June and had an original deadline of Dec. 31 to iron out the details before talks were extended.
The lack of clarity surrounding how that merger will work—and when it will finally take place—has created a sense of uncertainty around the sport.
“I think in the end, we are in a transitional state where we now have competition and that’s leading to a lot of disruption and change but it’s also in the end product going to make golf more global where the best players travel more,” Phil Mickelson, one of the original defectors to LIV Golf, told reporters on Wednesday while discussing the state of the merger.
At some point when it gets ironed out, I think it’s going to be in a much better place where we bring the best players from the world, and it’s going to open up more opportunities for manufacturing, course design, for players in different parts of the world to be inspired and enter the game,” he added. “I think it’s going to be in a much better place.
Bryson DeChambeau noted, however, that he doesn’t want to see the merger process between the various entities drag on for much longer.
“It needs to happen fast,” he said. “It’s not a two-year thing. Like it needs to happen quicker rather than later just for the good of the sport. Too many people are losing interest.”
“The only answer is for us to somehow come together in some sort of terms where it makes sense and for us to be playing all again in somewhat of the same boat,” he added. “It’s great to have the majors where we come together, but we want to be competing, at least I want to be competing every week, with all of the best players in the world.”
The PGA Tour has not been stagnant since the merger was first announced, reaching an agreement with Strategic Sports Group—a consortium of team owners around the sporting world, led by Fenway Sports Group—to create a new for-profit PGA Tour Enterprises in January. Strategic Sports Group will pour up to $3 billion into the new enterprise—including $1.5 billion in an initial investment—and the PGA Tour will control the new company.
PGA Tour Enterprises will allow players the opportunity to become equity holders in the company, and the PGA Tour policy board—which has player directors that include Tiger Woods, Patrick Cantlay, Adam Scott, Webb Simpson and Jordan Spieth, among others—unanimously signed off on the agreement.
When LIV Golf was created in 2022 and promptly siphoned away a collection of top players, offering extremely lucrative contracts, it created something of a civil war within the sport. It has remained a controversial league, given Saudi Arabia’s poor record of human rights violations, and has been labeled as a sportswashing operation alongside the Saudi Pro League in soccer and the PIF’s ownership of sporting organizations like the Premier League’s Newcastle United.
That made the PGA Tour’s decision to merge with LIV Golf extremely controversial, especially after commissioner Jay Monahan—who will operate as the CEO of the joint venture once the merger is complete—was critical of his Saudi-backed competitors in the past.
