LIV Golf’s announcement that it will extend tournaments from LIV holes to LXXII holes not only burdens its Lilliputian audience with XXXIII percent more of a fecal product, it illustrates how furiously the league is bobbing and weaving for relevance that it can breezily jettison the format from which its numerical brand derived. While the bots and bootlickers struggle to polish this ordure, LIV’s CEO, Scott O’Neil, went to Harvard Business School and has learned how to shamelessly position a volte face.
“The next chapter in our mission to grow and celebrate the sport for a new era,” he wrote of the news on social media, displaying a level of moxie that makes one think he could begin an election day as a diehard MAGA and end it cheering a Mamdani victory.
The reason behind the format change is to simulate compliance with the Official World Golf Ranking, though the number of holes wasn’t an impediment to LIV being recognized for points. But this is one of the few gestures LIV can make in hopes that the OWGR will overlook more pressing concerns that it can’t easily remedy — like concurrent team events and the fact that some players are contractually exempt from relegation despite poor performances. O’Neil is trying to carve an opening in the wall that his predecessor, Greg Norman, thought he could simply bulldoze. Which explains why LIV’s stooges have quieted their self-serving whining about the entire OWGR system being worthless and corrupt.
Norman promised those who signed with LIV that they’d be eligible for ranking points (a crucial means of entry to major championships) but that was not within his gift. When bluster and threats failed, Norman abandoned the OWGR application but players kept pressuring their employer on the issue. If LIV complies with the OWGR criteria and processes, it should receive recognition. But points are not a panacea — the amount on offer at a tournament is determined by strength of field and LIV events will provide meager rewards because so many of its competitors have plummeted down the ranking. Tweaking the format in pursuit of ranking points is akin to slapping lipstick on a hospice patient. It isn’t addressing the fundamental issues.
LIV simply has no positive indices.
The team format — to which LIV’s underwriter Yasir Al-Rumayyan is resolutely wedded — has failed to engage fans. The broadcast has found neither an audience willing to pay attention nor a media partner willing to pay a serious fee. Commercial sponsors, at least those not eager to protect existing ties to the Saudis, have steered clear. The door to the executive suite revolves at a dizzying pace with a procession of mediocrities. The overall product is so tacky that it makes the Bethpage boors seem urbane by comparison. And the financial void only expands. LIV’s regulatory filings suggest well over $5 billion has been spent so far, costs that will not be reduced as tournaments add another 18 holes.
A soft landing for this Saudi folly won’t be provided by the OWGR. It needs more than that.
LIV has repeatedly tried to muscle the DP World Tour into a deal, and that won’t stop even if it no longer requires the Europeans to platform it for ranking points. The olde world circuit has game-changing assets the Saudis covet: a credible media rights deal, sponsors of stature, and half of the Ryder Cup. But the DP World Tour has held to the strategic alliance it signed with the PGA Tour, which means that the only road out for Al-Rumayyan runs through Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.
What motivation would the PGA Tour’s CEO, Brian Rolapp, have for tossing a lifeline to LIV with a deal? His organization doesn’t need money, unlike his opposite number at the LPGA, Craig Kessler, who has wasted no time in signing his players up for a sportswashing event with Golf Saudi. (Cue a stampede to enter that field by women whose concern for the rights of the sisterhood will take a week off). The crux, like much of what’s to come with the PGA Tour, depends on what its investors at Strategic Sports Group want, and the extent to which they’ve convinced themselves that LIV no longer represents a threat. Do the whiz kids of Greater Fenway thirst for a cash infusion by the Saudis? Would they settle for an agreement that cedes the ex-U.S. market in return for a promise that each will stick to their own patch? Short-term thinking risks a longer-term crisis.
The latter arrangement would be as asinine as it would be naive. Every change LIV makes — even hopping from LIV to LXXII — exposes that the plan was never to grow the game with innovation but to buy it wholesale. That effort has failed so far, but it’s a mistake to assume it has ceased. Gifting an opening to Al-Rumayyan would embolden his ambitions and stunt the Tour’s potential to grow its global business for decades. The only sensible option is to wait them out, for two reasons. Firstly, because the Tour has zero urgency to act. Secondly, even the Saudis have a limit on how much money they’ll torch for a vanity project, and those losses are already at a number that’s a hell of a lot more complicated to render in their beloved Roman numerals.