‘Gigantic victory for sportswashing’: old truths will haunt golf’s new dawn

For nearly two years, the battle for golf’s soul has raged across fairways and in courtrooms, between Middle East and west, oil money and established tradition. But on Tuesday the sport’s bitter civil war came to an abrupt end as the PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed rival LIV golf agreed to merge in a deal that was immediately condemned as a “gigantic victory for sportswashing”.

The merger, which came on the same day that Real Madrid’s striker Karim Benzema was unveiled by the Saudi champions Al-Ittihad as their latest star signing, will lead to the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, PIF, pumping billions of pounds into a new commercial golf venture. But the deal is less about money and more about making a statement. There are no doubts now. Saudi Arabia is a major player in global sport.

It already owns Newcastle United, who qualified for the Champions League last month, and has also staged multiple major events, including Formula One and heavyweight championship boxing. This gives it legitimacy – and significant influence – over one of the biggest sports in the world.

Related: PGA’s ‘merger’ with LIV can’t be seen as anything other than a Saudi victory | Ewan Murray

The deal was hailed as a victory for golf by both parties with the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, claiming: “After two years of disruption and distraction, this is a historic day for the game we all know and love. The game of golf is better for what we’ve done here today.”

Donald Trump, whose courses have hosted LIV events, wrote on his social media network Truth Social that it was: “A big, beautiful and glamorous deal for the wonderful world of golf.”

However, Ben Freeman, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said the Saudis were the clear winners. “This is a gigantic victory for sportswashing,” he said. “In fact, it is the biggest sportswashing win that any authoritarian regime has ever had. They have effectively bought the whole of international golf in one swoop.”

That message was echoed by Terry Strada, the national chair of 9/11 Families United. “The PGA and Monahan appear to have become just more paid Saudi shills, taking billions of dollars to cleanse the Saudi reputation so that Americans and the world will forget how the kingdom spent their billions of dollars before 9/11 to fund terrorism, spread their vitriolic hatred, and finance al-Qaida and the murder of our loved ones,” he said. “Make no mistake – we will never forget.”

The surprise deal, which was brokered in London between Monahan and Yasir al-Rumayyan over lunch and a game of golf, will also lead to an immediate end to the legal battles between both sides. In August, LIV filed an antitrust suit against the PGA Tour – which hit back with a lawsuit that claims LIV committed “tortious interference” by encouraging golfers to violate terms of their existing tour contracts.

However the bad blood between the two tours is bound to linger. Last year, relationships were so bad that LIV Golf accused the PGA Tour of secretly coordinating attacks on it by 9/11 victim groups. The PGA Tour made its displeasure clear that the likes of Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau had been lured away by a regime with a dubious human rights record in deals worth up to $100m each.

Most players were blindsided by the news, with Canada’s Mackenzie Hughes among those voicing their surprise. “Nothing like finding out through Twitter that we’re merging with a tour that we said we’d never do that with,” he wrote. However the LIV defector, Phil Mickelson, who last year claimed that the Saudis were “scary motherfuckers to get involved with” welcomed the news. “Awesome day today,” he tweeted.

Related: Trump and Mickelson praise LIV-PGA merger as 9/11 families hit back

Meanwhile Rumayyan stressed that the merger was part of a wider strategy to encourage Saudi Arabia, a country that has never won an Olympic gold medal, to play more sport and to open the country up as part of the country’s Vision 2030 plans.

“A huge percentage of our population is under the age of 35,” he said. “We have a lot of young people who are interested in sports and entertainment and that’s basically part of the offering. That’s the reason why we would like to invest in sport, in addition to the financial returns.”

The Saudis deny allegations of sportswashing, and insist that the kingdom has changed for the better, due in part to sport, in recent years. They say that between 2021 and 2023 the registered number of female footballers has gone up 86%, while the number of boxing gyms has risen from seven to 48 in four years.

However Freeman, who is an expert on foreign influence operations, said that the LIV deal should be seen purely as a power-play by the Saudi state.

“You can promote sports in your country without buying out one of the most prestigious global sports brands,” he said. “This is unmistakably a sportswashing power grab. And their goal is to normalise Saudi Arabia on the international stage.

“At the end of the day, when people across the globe think about Saudi Arabia, their government doesn’t want them thinking about [murdered journalist] Jamal Khashoggi,” he added. “It doesn’t want people thinking about the atrocities that they committed in the Yemen war. It doesn’t want them thinking about their terrible human rights record at home. They want them thinking about things like professional golf.”

Simon Chadwick, professor of sport and geopolitical economy at the Skema Business School, said the merger was in the interests of both sides given LIV was struggling for viewers and sponsors, while the PGA Tour was facing a rival with far deeper pockets.

“When it came to golf, Saudi Arabia was the outsider and disrupter,” he said. “But it didn’t want to be. In essence, its ambition is to be mainstream. And literally overnight it has done that. So for them it is job done.

“The source of the PGA’s power is its history and governance, while the source of PIF’s power is its money. So now, essentially, PIF has been able to acquire legitimacy by paying for it.”

For now it remains unclear what the new venture will look like, and whether LIV rebels such as Koepka and Johnson will be invited to play for the US Ryder Cup team this September.

One thing, though, is certain. Saudi Arabia’s influence on the sporting stage is showing no signs of slowing down. Next stop, the World Cup in 2030?