LIV Golf to engage in almost $12,000,000 legal dispute over format - Reports
LIV Golf has other concerns besides its disagreements with the PGA Tour and Official World Golf Rankings. This Thursday, February 29, it came to the surface that the league led by Greg Norman has legal problems, quantified at around $12 million, due to its format,
The Times reported that LIV Golf has been in the middle of a legal battle, in terms of intellectual property. The heart of the matter is that the format used by the league had been previously conceived by another entity.
That is the Premier Golf League (PGL), a venture launched in 2019 by British corporate lawyer Andrew Gardiner, with financial backing from American finance company Raine Capital.
According to The Times, the PGL was conceived as a league of 48 players grouped into 12 teams that would play 18 tournaments over 54 holes, shotgun start. The purse for each tournament would be $9.5 million and there would be a Tour Championship with a $13.5 million purse.
The PGL would have a strong focus on team competition and was scheduled to begin in 2022.
Although it was incorporated in 2019, the idea for the PGL dates back much earlier. According to The Times, Andrew Gardiner broached the subject with Rory McIlroy in 2014, although the Northern Irishman was not interested.
PGL has lawyers hired to take legal action against LIV Golf, but this has not reached the courts. The two sides are expected to reach a settlement that would involve the Saudi-backed league paying about $12 million.
A look into other details of the legal battle between PGL and LIV Golf
The Times also reported that PGL sought the support of Golf Saudi, the subsidiary that handles Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) investments in golf. However, the Saudi investors decided to go another way.
It was also revealed that at least two former PGL executives later worked with LIV Golf in one way or another. They are Richard Marsh and John Lofhaggen, who both resigned from their respective directorships at PGL on the same day, in June 2021.
Marsh then went on to work as a senior executive at Performance54, a marketing agency that works closely with LIV Golf and is considered instrumental in securing PIF funding. Lofhaggen, meanwhile, was hired by LIV as its lead lawyer.
Following the start of the first LIV season (2022), Andrew Gardiner said (via The Times):
"I’m not angry at all. We see [LIV] as a testament to us because it is, for all intent and purposes, the same format that we devised."
According to The Times, at the time, the PGL was seen as a threat to the PGA Tour and DP World Tour. However, it has also been reported that the PGL explored the possibility of operating under the umbrella of both tours, and they declined.