Many years before Greg Norman was seen posing with big checks on driving ranges around the world, a small group of businesspeople in England thought they knew how to change professional golf. The rules were based on shotgun starts and team competition, and they used spreadsheets, franchise models, and player contracts. It looks like they didn’t have a way to stop someone else from using it all.
That is at least what a lawsuit in London’s Commercial Court says right now. The British companies World Golf Group and Premier Golf League are suing LIV Golf, Saudi Arabia‘s Public Investment Fund, and several named people for damages that range from $210 million to $630 million. Among the charges are breach of confidence and conspiracy to commit an illegal act. This is the kind of legal language that sounds dull until you read what is being said.
A man named Andy Gardiner came up with the idea of a world golf league in 2009. This is where the complaint comes from. By 2016, he had hired Richard Marsh as a consultant. By 2018, thirty founders had officially set up the World Golf Group. They weren’t just talking out loud their dreams. They had a business plan that worked, marketing materials, financial models, and draft contracts for Phil Mickelson, Justin Rose, Patrick Reed, and Adam Scott, among other potential players. It is said that eleven golfers were offered contracts in June 2020.
The story really gets cloudy after what happened next. In 2019, the leaders of PGL met with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, who was governor of the PIF, to talk about how Saudi Arabia could invest in their new league. At some point during those talks, people from PIF and Golf Saudi were reportedly given access to an online data room that held the PGL’s private business documents. Al-Rumayyan signed a letter of intent to invest $490 million, but it wasn’t binding because he wanted to get top PGA Tour players. It turned out that that condition was very hard to meet. The players were tense. There were threats of bans from the PGA Tour. It was impossible to be first.
When you look at the timeline, it seems like this is where trust started to break down badly. One of the founders of WGG, Jed Moore, had already talked to Golf Saudi’s CEO. In the end, Richard Marsh quit PGL in May 2021 and joined the Saudis. When PIF and the PGL founders couldn’t agree on a price to buy the company, LIV Golf was built anyway, using what the lawsuit calls a “bare facsimile” of the PGL’s original idea. Events with 54 holes and shotgun starts. Forms for teams. There is a captain and four players in a franchise structure. The people who are suing say that their blueprint was taken without their permission.
When LIV Golf held its first tournament in June 2022, it did so with a lot of fanfare and even more money. Norman was in charge of a league that signed Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Jon Rahm, and Bryson DeChambeau to deals that were so good that even the most skeptical agents couldn’t say no. For about two years, it looked like the whole thing might work. The founders of the PGL may have watched all of this with a mix of shock and anger.
Things have changed a lot since then, though. After giving more than $5 billion to LIV Golf, the PIF said earlier this year that it would no longer be funding the league. It is said that LIV CEO Scott O’Neil is trying to get $300 million just to keep the events going until 2027. Reed and Koepka are two players who have already given up. The league that seemed like it could not be stopped is now quietly making plans for what to do if the government shuts down.
It’s still not clear how far this lawsuit will go or if it will really hold anyone accountable. The courts move slowly. When sovereign wealth funds are involved in international financial disputes, they rarely end in a clean break. The filing itself, though, brings up questions that won’t go away easily. If what is being said is true, what happened wasn’t just good business. It was more like a quiet theft, done in boardrooms and data rooms with signed letters of intent and handshake agreements that seemed to mean very different things to different people.
As you see this happen, it’s hard not to believe that the last few years of chaos in professional golf were never really about money, tradition, or the PGA Tour’s grip on the sport. People made choices in 2019 and 2020 that set everything in motion. Some of those people are now named in a lawsuit that wants up to $630 million in damages. The story of how LIV Golf came to be just got a lot more complicated, whether they pay it or not.
