PGA Tour Payouts Soar as Saudi-Backed LIV Golf Rains Down Riches

The tour’s pivot toward greater payouts, executives insisted, was in the making long before LIV overtly upended the golf marketplace, with the bigger purses traceable to a new television-rights deal announced in early 2020. They acknowledge, though, that LIV’s emergence prompted them to accelerate and adjust some of their plans, which are being helped along by tour reserves and increased payments from tournament sponsors.

The tour, like all professional sports organizations, relies on a gumbo of moneymaking ventures, including television contracts, sponsorship deals and licensing arrangements, which are often becoming much more lucrative. But the tour’s most stalwart supporters, such as Tiger Woods, concede that it will struggle to keep pace with LIV Golf as long as wealth-fund leaders in Riyadh sustain their investment in the new circuit.

“We’re running a business here, and the money that our players are playing for are monies that we’re generating,” Monahan said.

“You have to operate prudently in the short- and long-term,” he added. “But there are ways to grow within each year, to create more opportunity, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

The heightened purses, including one next week at the Genesis Invitational in California, are among the less-disputed strategies the tour has embraced in its quest to preserve its power. Others are entangled in an antitrust lawsuit that will not be tried until at least next year, but LIV has acknowledged that some of the tour’s tactics are having significant effects, even as it has questioned their propriety or legality.

In a court filing on Monday, when LIV renewed its objections to the PGA Tour’s indefinite suspensions of players who defected, lawyers for the Saudi-backed league wrote that the tour’s “anticompetitive conduct” had “damaged LIV’s brand, driven up its costs by hundreds of millions of dollars and driven down revenues to virtually zero.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/sports/golf/pga-phoenix-open-liv.html