2/3/2024 0 Comments Violation aufbau principle![]() Jemele Hill: The PGA tour’s stunning hypocrisy Even if the PGA Tour was not a monopoly before the proposed merger, the new entity certainly would create one. The merger would leave just a single, dominant association controlling almost the entire world of professional golf. To now claim that a combined PGA-LIV entity is something less than a monopoly would lack any semblance of credibility. ![]() LIV Golf eventually joined its golfers as a plaintiff in this very lawsuit. The antitrust suit originally filed last year by a group of LIV players alleged that without “any meaningful competition (prior to LIV Golf’s entry), the Tour has failed to innovate and its product has grown stale.” The PGA Tour, they argued, “has used its monopoly position to extract substantially increased revenues from broadcasters and advertisers” while paying players less “because there is no competition for players’ services.” It is very difficult to characterize the PGA-LIV merger in any other way. The most basic principle of antitrust law is that companies with large market share can’t make agreements to avoid competing against each other. In this case, it’s also most likely an illegal one. That’s a very understandable reason to do a deal. ![]() The merger, he explained, was a way “to take the competitor off the board, to have them exist as a partner.” “We were competing against LIV,” Monahan said after the deal was announced. And the two organizations were enmeshed in an expensive lawsuit. To keep up with the Saudis’ lavish spending, it was forced to pay out bigger prizes and dip deeper into its reserves. The PGA Tour was feeling pressure from LIV Golf, which had poached some marquee golfers. The announcement brought sudden peace to a bitter, dramatic conflict. Meanwhile, the PGA Tour and its commissioner, Jay Monahan, had blasted LIV Golf for partnering with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, which is largely controlled by the Saudi royal family and has been accused of funding terrorism. Until recently, LIV Golf, an upstart league founded in 2021, had portrayed the PGA Tour as a monopoly that illegally controlled the market for professional golf competitions. O n Tuesday morning, the PGA Tour and LIV Golf announced a planned merger that ended nearly a full year of antitrust litigation between the two rivals.
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