PGA Tour, LIV Golf to merge

Officials on Tuesday announced that the PGA Tour will merge with its Saudi-backed rival LIV Golf following a “landmark agreement to unify men’s professional golf.”

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The PGA Tour, the European tour called DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — which owns LIV Golf — signed an agreement to create a “new, collectively owned, for-profit entity to ensure that all stakeholders benefit from a model that delivers maximum excitement and competition among the game’s best players,” PGA Tour officials said in a statement.

The new entity had yet to be named on Tuesday.

As part of the agreement, all involved groups agreed to drop pending litigation against each other. The tours had been embroiled in a public legal battle since Saudi Arabia launched Liv Golf in 2021. Last year, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan likened the conflict to an arms race and said Saudi Arabia was “spending billions of dollars in an attempt to buy the game of golf.”

On Tuesday, Monahan heralded the agreement to merge the PGA Tour with LIV Golf as “a historic day for the game we all know and love.”

“Going forward, fans can be confident that we will, collectively, deliver on the promise we’ve always made — to promote competition of the best in professional golf and that we are committed to securing and driving the game’s future,” he said.

The new organization’s board of directors will include Monahan as chief executive officer and Public Investment Fund Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan as chairman, officials said. It will also include an executive committee with both men alongside PGA Tour Policy Board Chairman Ed Herlihy and PGA Tour Policy Board member Jimmy Dunne..

The PGA Tour, the DP World Tour and the Public Investment Fund continue to finalize the terms of their agreement, officials said.

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