Welcome to Issue #24
"If you want to ask me if this business is tough, I would say, ‘absolutely’. If you ask me if we’re managed very, very tightly, I would say, ‘absolutely’. Can this be challenging? ‘absolutely’.”
Scott O’Neil, LIV Golf CEO
What’s on my mind this week
What a week for LIV Golf from rumours of shutting down to lawsuits to technical broadcast issues, Shane Lowry with another ace, when did wedges get so expensive, Ryanair absolutely murdering Scottie Scheffler on social media, will Sergio manage not to break a club this week, even I could hit the fairway on 18 at Harbour Town.
In the news
Why it matters: Reports from the Financial Times, Fox News and The Athletic this week suggested Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund is considering withdrawing financial backing from LIV Golf, triggering an emergency staff summit in New York and a defiant "full throttle" memo from CEO Scott O'Neil that conspicuously made no commitment beyond the 2026 season.
Our Take: Nothing has been officially confirmed. But the volume and credibility of the sourcing makes this more than noise. PIF published a new five-year strategy this week prioritising investment efficiency and value creation over rapid expansion, which is the real context here. At roughly $5.3 billion invested against an estimated $100 million in annual revenue, LIV remains a strategic bet rather than a commercial business. The question is whether that bet still aligns with PIF's evolving priorities. The instinct is to say they have spent too much to stop. A disciplined sovereign fund, however, treats sunk costs as sunk. The most plausible outcomes range from a funding reduction and cost restructuring to a full exit, with a revived merger conversation with the PGA Tour sitting somewhere in between. O'Neil's memo signed off with "you mattered." The phrasing raised eyebrows internally.
Why it matters: The world's 10 highest-paid golfers earned a collective $558 million over the past 12 months, led by Jon Rahm at $102 million, Rory McIlroy at $84 million, and Scottie Scheffler at $81 million, with LIV's guaranteed money placing three of its players in the top ten despite the PGA Tour claiming seven spots.
Our Take: The headline numbers obscure the more important structural story. Rahm earned $92 million on-course, almost entirely from LIV's guaranteed contract, whilst Scheffler earned $51 million in prize money from seven tournament wins. The PGA Tour model rewards performance. The LIV model rewards presence. For investors and brands, that distinction matters: one produces variable returns tied to results, the other produces predictable costs regardless of them. LIV raised its total prize pot to $470 million for 2026, whilst the PGA Tour's narrower schedule of 33 events offers $441.5 million. The tours are now roughly level on prize money. The difference is that LIV's top earners are floor-guaranteed, whilst the PGA Tour's remain ceiling-dependent. The $558 million figure does not tell you golf is healthy. It tells you two competing capital structures are both trying to win the same talent war, and neither has blinked yet.
Why it matters: The 2026 Masters final round averaged nearly 14 million viewers on CBS, up 8% year on year and the highest average viewership since 2015, peaking at 20 million, the largest peak audience since 2013, as McIlroy secured his second consecutive green jacket.
Our Take: The number that matters most is not the 14 million average. It is the 20 million peak. That is the largest peak Masters audience since 2013, when Tiger Woods was still a credible Sunday contender. Golf is now producing Tiger-era viewing figures without Tiger and doing so through a different kind of drama: a defending champion under pressure, a six-shot lead evaporating, and a one-stroke finish that kept 20 million people watching until the final putt dropped. For broadcasters and rights holders heading into the 2030 negotiation cycle, this is significant data. CBS aired just 18.5 minutes of advertising across a five-hour broadcast yet delivered its best Masters numbers in eleven years. The commercial scarcity that Augusta National demands, long regarded as a constraint, is increasingly looking like the product. When viewers stay because nothing interrupts them, the inventory becomes more valuable, not less. McIlroy's dominance is doing for golf's media economics what nobody expected: proving the sport does not need Woods to move the needle.
Pic from Sky Sports
Worth your time
Read: How AI is reimagining the game of golf - for both players and courses The Wall Street Journal examines how AI is quietly reshaping golf from the inside out.
Watch: Shane Lowry hole-in-one Lowry makes history as the only player to have multiple aces at the Masters.
Follow: Scott O'Neil I don’t think there’s a better account to follow this week. Should be a busy one.
Listen: "Is your CEO playing too much golf?" Finance professor Lee Biggerstaff discusses his research about the correlation between a publicly traded company's performance and the amount of golf played by its CEO.
Feature Story
Rory McIlroy's Nike negotiation: The deal that will reset golf's sponsorship market
Pic from Getty Images
On Sunday, Rory McIlroy pulled on a green jacket for the second consecutive year, joining Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo and Tiger Woods as the only players in Masters history to go back-to-back. Six majors. Thirty PGA Tour wins. The completed career Grand Slam. By any measure, McIlroy is now the most complete commercial asset in professional golf.
His Nike contract expires at the end of 2027. He hasn't signed a renewal. That detail, barely mentioned in the Augusta coverage, may prove to be the most consequential commercial story in golf this year.
What Nike is actually paying for
McIlroy has been a Nike athlete since 2013. The current agreement, signed in 2017, is reported to be worth between $15 million and $20 million annually in clothing and image rights, one of the most valuable apparel deals in global sport. For over a decade, the swoosh has been as synonymous with McIlroy as it once was with Woods. Same brand, same sport, almost identical visual shorthand for greatness.
The economic landscape Nike is operating in today looks nothing like 2017. The company's stock has lost more than 65% of its value over the past five years, with shares hitting an 11-year low following its most recent earnings report. The business is squeezed by tariffs, persistent weakness in China (its largest international market), and mounting competition from newer athletic brands taking meaningful share in running and lifestyle. Golf has never been the priority.
Nike Golf revenue peaked at $792 million in 2013 and never broke the billion-dollar mark. The company exited equipment manufacturing in 2016, and has since lost Woods and Tommy Fleetwood from its ambassador roster, with Fleetwood's contract expiring at the end of 2025, in what reads as deliberate retrenchment rather than coincidence.
Nike's renewal decision is the surface story. The harder question is whether the company can justify paying elite rates for a golf athlete, even the best golf athlete alive, at a moment when the internal business case for that spend is harder to defend than at any point in the partnership's history.
The other side of the ledger
McIlroy's position has never been stronger. Brands that spent years watching Nike monopolise his image rights now have a genuine window. Adidas, Ralph Lauren's RLX, Under Armour: every credible apparel brand with ambitions in premium golf would take the call tomorrow. A player who just won back-to-back Masters, remains the unambiguous face of the PGA Tour, and is still on the right side of 40 is not a depreciating asset. He is approaching peak commercial value precisely as his current deal terminates.
There is also a more structural option worth watching. When Woods departed Nike in 2024, he launched Sun Day Red in partnership with TaylorMade, trading guaranteed fees for equity upside and creative control. The template now exists. Whether McIlroy has the appetite for that level of commercial entrepreneurialism is an open question, but it is one that will be central to whatever he decides next.
What the decision signals
The Nike-McIlroy negotiation matters well beyond the two parties involved. It is a live stress test of how the golf sponsorship market prices elite talent in the late 2020s.
A renewal at comparable rates signals that Nike still believes its golf positioning is worth protecting at premium cost, that a post-Grand Slam McIlroy is a category of commercial asset with no realistic substitute.
A move, or a restructured deal at significantly lower value, confirms that even the strongest legacy apparel brands are rationalising their golf spend, and that the era of nine-figure deals anchored to a single player is closing.
Either outcome reshapes the market beneath it. What brands pay for Scottie Scheffler, Ludvig Åberg, Nelly Korda, athletes still in the earlier phases of their commercial careers, will be benchmarked against whatever Rory McIlroy signs next.
He just won his second consecutive Masters. The more interesting negotiation starts now.
One thing from history
The man who invented LIV Golf (and never got the credit)
Pic from Golf Monthly
In 2010, a London lawyer stayed up for three days straight. Sleep was irrelevant. He had an idea.
Andy Gardiner filled yellow legal pads with a vision for professional golf's future: 54-hole tournaments, no cuts, shotgun starts, team formats running alongside individual competition. He called it the Premier Golf League. He spent the next decade pitching it to anyone who would listen - players, broadcasters, investors. Most of them thought he was mad.
The Saudis thought he was onto something.
The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia became one of around 60 shareholders in Gardiner's project. They sat in on the plans. They understood the model. Then, in 2020, Golf Saudi decided to fund a new entity instead, one that became LIV Golf in October 2021.
Gardiner watched Greg Norman launch his league. He watched the Saudi money flow to DeChambeau, Mickelson and Johnson. He watched ‘his format’ become the most disruptive force in golf's history. He called it a compliment. An endorsement that his concept worked.
This week, the compliments stopped.
On 16th April, Premier Golf and its parent company World Golf Group filed a lawsuit against the Public Investment Fund, Golf Saudi, and various LIV Golf entities in the London Commercial Court.
The man who invented LIV Golf is now asking a London court to agree.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David