Two rival bodies battle each other, both using the language of fairness, each complaining that the other is failing to deliver fair opportunities for participants.
This is the world of golf, now it has been turned on its head by the arrival of Saudi Arabian money in the form of the LIV Golf tour. To an outsider, it seems the least likely sport to be discussing level playing fields, but that is what is happening – at least in a metaphorical sense.
The verdant greens of golf courses are amongst the oddest sights in dry and sandy Middle Eastern nations, but that hasn’t hindered Saudi willingness to spend millions in petrodollars on the elite end of the sport. The nation’s LIV Golf has offered huge sums to a small handful of professional golfers to create a new tour with a team competition built in. Just 48 men – who also received millions in joining fees – compete over a $4 million prize pot at each tournament. A number have been very happy to take the money; others have declined, citing both concerns about the human rights record of Saudi Arabia and the importance of existing competitions.
Money has always played a significant role in elite golf. The mythology of the Open championship is all the greater for the fact that it offers a rare opportunity for a few amateurs (chosen through qualifying competitions) to compete with the pros; successful amateurs – such as Justin Rose, 4th in the 1998 competition – typically instantly become professionals. The Ryder Cup, the biannual rivalry between the US and Europe, is frequently riven by complaints that the teams are not paid for the privilege of playing – complaints we were reminded of at this year’s contest by the apparent hat-free protest by Patrick Cantlay. Europe’s thrashing of the US team this year did not appear to be hampered by the absence of three senior European players who had accepted LIV Tour places, Sergio Garcia, Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter.
But the creation of the LIV Tour, and the advent of its millions of Saudi petrodollars, has supercharged the money available and the distortions that it brings. This is of course just another way in which Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have parlayed their oil wealth into sporting activity, which ranges from the purchase of various European football clubs, Qatar’s hosting of the men’s football World Cup in 2022 and Saudi’s bid for the 2034 tournament, adoption of athletes from other countries and hosting of tournaments in cricket and tennis among many others. There seems some irony that the European golf tour, which is battling the impact of the LIV Tour, is now named after its major sponsor, UAE logistics company DP World.
Many talk about Middle East money flooding into sport as sportswashing – enhancing cloudy reputations through association. Certainly, a number of the countries do have cloudy reputations, arising from issues such as poor treatment of women and LBGTQ people, the wide use of the death penalty, and specific incidents such as the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Looked at through another lens, it can be seen as part of wider moves to rapidly diversify economies away from their reliance on fossil fuel revenues, using the current economic power that oil wealth provides to occupy significant areas of the future economy that will exist in a less carbon-intensive world.
Whatever the drivers for its creation, the row about whether participants in the LIV Tour can still be considered for Official World Golf Rankings, as published by the eponymous organisation (abbreviated as OWGR), is all about fairness, apparently.
In October, OWGR rejected LIV Golf’s application to be an eligible tour. Its formal response (letterhead pictured above) started with the positives: “While the Board Committee’s decision is based on the cumulative weight of the deficiencies, after a thorough review and consultation with the Technical Committee, the Board Committee has determined that certain of the concerns regarding the format of how each LIV event is played can likely be fairly managed through an appropriate mathematical formula.” These elements that could be managed through an adjustment mechanism included the size of field, number of holes played, and absence of a cut. But the core of the conclusion was that two elements could not be adjusted away. These are that player turnover will be constrained, and that there will be a team competition alongside the individual one, which may cloud views of individual performance.
The first appears to be the greater concern. It is certainly covered in more depth in the letter. The simple point is that there is limited relegation from the LIV tour and so limited fresh access for others. As most recently disclosed, 14 players would be retained regardless of performance (there’s a niggle about the slowness to reveal this, and earlier indications that the number would be much smaller, but this isn’t the heart of the issue), and “as few as 4 new players” would be allowed to join, with LIV management potentially choosing others (presumably not wholly on performance merit). The OWGR view on this is clear: “the Board Committee has determined that the current structure is not consistent with the underlying principles of fairness and meritocracy on which the OWGR system is based”.
It goes further: “Simply put, the Board Committee does not believe it is equitable to thousands of players who strive every day to get starts in OWGR Eligible Tournaments to have a tour operate in this mostly-closed fashion where it is not possible to fairly assess what it means to win a LIV event relative to other tournaments around the world.”
The conclusion is very simple: “under our current Handbook, the Board Committee has not found what it believes is a fair and equitable way to assess the performance of players at LIV events relative to players playing on OWGR Eligible Tours”. As an aside, it’s not clear that this Handbook is a document available to the public.
LIV Golf’s response also uses the language of fairness: “A ranking which fails to fairly represent all participants, irrespective of where in the world they play golf, robs fans, players and all of golf’s stakeholders of the objective basis underpinning any accurate recognition of the world’s best player performances.”
For them, the fight isn’t over: “LIV will continue to strive to level set the market so fans, broadcasters, and sponsors have the assurance of an independent and objective ranking system and the pure enjoyment of watching the best golf in the world.”
Among the individual players quoted in a follow-up press release from LIV a couple of days later, American Dustin Johnson said: “I feel like you can’t really use the world ranking system anymore…Hard to use the world ranking system if you’re excluding 48 guys that are good players. The rankings are skewed.”
Frankly, it feels odd to be lectured on unfairness and skewed incentives by a man whose career earnings are believed to top $140 million. Especially as this doesn’t seem to include the reported $125 million he was paid to sign up for the LIV Golf tour in 2022. The main desire of the LIV Golfers appears to be that they should still be eligible to play at golf’s four ‘major’ tournaments, the sport’s most prestigious – and lucrative – events.
The typical justification for the extraordinary amounts that sports stars can earn is that this is a genuine meritocracy where only the best rise to the top, and they must remain at the peak of their skills in order to stay there. This meritocratic system relies on players’ performances being visible to the viewing public from week to week and month to month, so that players can be regularly compared with one another and the underperformers will be winnowed out. Those who remain and succeed must be worthy of the money they are paid (at least, that’s how the justification goes – it doesn’t always work that way). The core of OWGR’s argument is that the LIV model has undermined this: by selecting a small group of players and strictly limiting the access of others to join them, while the performance is visible, it cannot readily be compared externally – and underperformance doesn’t lead to a winnowing out (the weakest performer in each LIV tournament apparently is paid $120,000 a go, and as the OWGR decision makes clear many individuals will be retained in the LIV Tour regardless of performance).
Not only is the LIV Tour distorting the marketplace with its extraordinary payments, it is distorting what purports to be a meritocratic system. It feels very wrong that those who have made or taken huge payments that distort meritocracy now purport to lecture the world on fairness. Of course, it may be that LIV will yet triumph – negotiations continue between the rival golf tours and it seems likely that more money will be deployed to enable some deal to be done – but at present OWGR’s arguments about fairness seem much the stronger.
See also: Playing fair: the oddly inequitable world of team sport
Thanks to my friend Ben for nudging me to write about this.
OWGR denies LIV Golf’s Application for Eligible Tour Status, OWGR, October 10 2023
Statement from LIV Golf on today’s Official World Golf Ranking Decision, LIV Golf, 10 October 2023
LIV Golf players react to OWGR Decision, LIV Golf, 12 October 2023
What do LIV Golfers get paid?, Golf Monthly, February 10 2023
The Sense of Fairness blog 