Back in 2022, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, announced that it was backing a new sporting endeavour – the LIV Golf tour. Now, LIV Golf has fallen flat on its face. What a ride it has been.
Saudi Arabia is not known for its golf – the Arabian Peninsula is not generally associated with rolling fairways of verdant links turf. And yet Saudi pumped $5bn into the LIV Golf tour, and drew in famous players from around the world, in some cases offering nine-figure signing-on fees.
The aim was to provide an alternative to the existing, admittedly quite stuffy global golf set-up. But let us be cynical here – there is a very well-known US politician who is famously partial to a spot of golf. And when you put that fact next to the sudden decision by the Saudis to invent an all-new, shiny golf tour, it is hard not to see whose attention they were trying to grab.
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But there was never a need for a new golf tour. There are already plenty across the US, Europe, and Asia. And yet LIV promised a dazzling and subversive alternative, offering golf competitions with music and – brace yourself – players wearing shorts.
What they discovered was that golf is a hard game to reinvent because it can only really be done one way. It’s as if someone came along promising to reinvent swimming, or long-distance running, or execution by sword. The response would be, quite reasonably, that the options for reinvention are a bit limited.
So it didn’t work. The LIV Tour came along promising to be different, and wasn’t. Instead, it served up the same old spectacle of mostly uninspiring multimillionaires tapping a little ball into a hole, and there’s plenty of that on offer already. LIV was the golf tour that fought a change election, and lost.
That failure is a good thing. You don’t have to be a golf fan to see that this was a bare-faced attempt at sportswashing by Saudi Arabia. Or to put it another way – it was an attempt by a despotic, theocratic regime that oppresses women and murders its opponents to buy its way on to the sports pages of the democratic west.
But it was also a piece of rank diplomatic opportunism. We know this, because in the opening season of 2022, the LIV Golf tour’s grand final was played at the National Doral Miami golf club. And I will give you three guesses who owns that golf club. No – one guess. You’ll really only need one go.
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Yup – LIV Golf was a way for the Saudis to cosy up to him, not only by getting into his favourite sport, but by paying huge amounts of money to stage golf tournaments at his swanky golf properties across the US. It was a way to give him money.
There was also, at one point, a suggestion that the LIV Tour might merge with the existing US PGA golf tour. And who do you think put himself forward as the proposed chief negotiator to make that deal? Great deal. A beautiful deal. Yup – him again.
But things started to go south. LIV golf was a colossal money sink, and the losses began to mount. But worse came when the Iran war heated up and the Houthis began attacking Saudi territory, launching missiles that hit Riyadh airport. The Saudi government asked the US for air support. But he said no – and all of a sudden that $5bn golf bauble didn’t look like such a great investment after all.
On November 4, the world woke to the news that he had been absolutely marmalised in the US midterms. On November 5, it was announced that LIV Golf was folding due to a lack of funds. It will not be missed. When the time comes, neither will he.
