So it was interesting to see that people do sort of believe in maybe it is a rising tide there.ĪKIKO FUJITA: Saudi's coming out the biggest winners in all of this.U.S. I will say those golf stocks were up today. So I guess the theory would be get more money in, you get the players to be more interested in the off-season, and then it grows. It's not as popular as some of the other major sports. Outside of those four majors that we talk about, that includes the Masters Tournament and the British Open, we don't really talk about the tour that much from a broad sports perspective. That's where the PGA has really struggle when you think about why LIV Golf came about. So then you can maybe have a longer season, and you can grow beyond the majors. And I think, at a high level, I guess you could say that would make the players more motivated, right. JOSH SCHAFER: Yeah, the take is essentially now they'll just be more money in the game, right. Some of the names, like Topgolf Callaway obviously one of those best positioned to benefit from this.īut I still have question marks just in terms of how much bigger we're really going to see the sport of golf grow, even if it does have all of that funding from Saudi Arabia. And there is an argument out there- Jefferies is one of the companies that came out with an analyst note today saying that the golf- the sport, in general, is going to benefit. He got in a couple of back-and-forths with Phil Mickelson over the last several weeks.īut when you take into account what's happening at the end of the day, I think a lot of people are asking what this will do to the game of golf. He was one of the most vocal in defending the PGA TOUR criticizing those players who did decide to leave. I don't know because they were able to retain at least, for now, a lot of their top talent. And then- was it the fear the PGA was the players sort of all of them leaving? I don't know, but it's just the thought I had. Is that why they did this deal?īecause we talked about this before in player-run leagues like tennis and golf, you can actually kind of core in the market very easily. But then it makes me think that was the PGA scared that all their players are going to leave. I got to see- I mean, some of them must be like- Rory McIlroy must be dumbfounded by this move. Yeah, I mean, I look at it from the player's point of view. It was about we would never go near that at. And then, on the PGA side, it was about the Saudis. And you look at both sides on the LIV side, to your point, it was all about, well, we're offering competition here. It is hypocrisy.ĪKIKO FUJITA: I mean, that's, kind of, the bottom line of it, right. And I'm personally just pretty shocked by the merger as a whole.ĪKIKO FUJITA: I think you're putting it gently. There well, now they're taking that money.Īnd I think that's the broad takeaway I have today, Akiko, is that you basically have both sides doing what a year ago they said they wouldn't do. And then you had the PGA saying we don't need Saudi money. They never even got a good streaming deal. LIV Golf said that the PGA wasn't good enough for it, and they could find their own media rights and they could succeed on their own. And really, what the take I think here is broadly is we have both sides doing what they said they weren't going to do last year. And what was announced today is a partnership between LIV golf, and the PGA TOUR, and the DP World Tour, which is the European world tour, World Golf tour.Īnd essentially, what this deal does is it creates a new entity that is going to be funded by the Saudi public investment fund exclusively right now, funded by the Saudi public investment fund. It's backed by the Saudi public investment fund. So LIV Golf was the new startup league that we've been covering since last year. You got to think, a lot of those athletes, a lot of the golf players, extremely upset over this. You've been closely following this story since day one. Josh, you have been digging into this story. And that's a huge announcement that shocked the golf world. We've got to start with one of the big headlines out today. We've got Josh Schafer and here to help us break it all down. Let's take a look at some of the top trending stories of the day.
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