When sports are repackaged as investment vehicles, a turning point is reached

P erhaps you were invited to the exclusive Venice wedding of a billionaire’s daughter where Jay Monahan and Yasir al-Rumayyan are reported to have met for the first time. Perhaps you happened to be playing a round at Beaverbrook Golf Course at the same time as Rumayyan and the PGA board member Jimmy Dunne were thrashing out the early stages of a deal that would change golf for ever. Perhaps you happened to be eavesdropping at the next table as they ate dinner or at least close enough to hurl a well-aimed bread roll or slip something into the ceviche.

Short of that, however, there is very little you or I could have done to prevent the effective merger of the PGA Tour with the rebel LIV Golf organisation, backed by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. Your opinion was not consulted. Your vote was not canvassed. Players who had turned down eye-moistening sums of Saudi money out of what they laughably believed was a reciprocated loyalty to the PGA Tour found out, like everyone else, when their phones started pinging.

Let’s be reasonably firm about this at the outset. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like golf. You don’t have to harbour a shred of affection for the PGA Tour, which was essentially birthed in similar circumstances: an audacious power grab by the game’s top players in the 1960s. The finer details of how the new shared enterprise will work and what becomes of the beloved Milton Sewage Solutions Open at Grundle Pines should not overly detain us.

The wider significance here is in the concussive speed and devastating lack of transparency with which this transaction was conducted, the way intractable obstacles were simply bulldozed or bought away, the utter indifference to public opinion, outcry, backlash.