‘Please stop’: Why glaring Adelaide absence and $554m snub exposes LIV Golf’s biggest myth

OPINION

The future of golf.

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It’s the tagline LIV Golf uses throughout all its marketing and broadcasts and while it claims to be louder, richer and faster, it forgot one key element that would truly elevate it to ‘future’ status; women.

It’s frustrated me from day one of LIV, with all its fanfare and splashes of cash, it claimed to be the blueprint of what golf should be. Yet if it wanted to do something truly innovative, truly different, one that would galvanise all golfers… then involving women would be a great place to start.

It’s unusual in this era to have a new elite sports competition that doesn’t involve women by expanding to include female athletes, either within the series or as a separate tournament. It’s a commercial reality that stakeholders, sponsors and fans want to see that in new sports tournaments. Yet four seasons in, there’s still no word on whether a women’s tournament will be developed, or women included in the competition.

I’m not saying men’s and women’s sport should always come together in tournaments. For many, I prefer to keep them separated.

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But don’t say this event is the future of golf when it ignores women who make up 50 per cent of the population and have proven they are viable investment in sport.

LIV is funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), who do invest in women’s golf through the Ladies European Tour (LET). They fund five events on the tour collectively worth US$13million in prize money. Not a small amount of money but it does looks like small change when compared with the prize pool of LIV events which is US$25million per event, collectively US$350million (A$554m). That also doesn’t take into account the sign on fees — Jon Rahm alone was rumoured to be US$600million.

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This raises another key point that investment in a women’s competition would need to be equal, or else the riches of the PIF — no matter how life-changing — threaten to widen the gender gap in sport even further.

Saudi Arabia has embarked on an aggressive sponsorship agenda and in 2024, the Danish research company Play the Game cited the nation sponsoring 910 tournaments globally. While women’s competitions are included in that list, the majority of the funds have been spent on male sports. And as more sporting bodies around the world seemingly line up to gain the lucrative Saudi dollars on offer, unless it’s done equally — and in golf’s case it hasn’t — then it threatens to set women’s sport back by increasing the pay gap just as it was beginning to narrow.

Add in the South Australian government’s investment hosting LIV Golf against the backdrop of this funds ratio, it’s hoped there would be some equal investment in women’s sport and golf to balance it out and enable a way for women’s sport to fulfil its potential, rather than assisting male sport to stretch the scale further from reach.

Full disclosure: I do sit on the board for the WPGA Tour, and this is not a push for LIV Golf to have a women’s competition.

My issue isn’t with the PIF. It isn’t really with LIV Golf either.

My issue is that there was an opportunity for LIV to do something innovative and game-changing when it was empowered by money and the world’s attention. Yet, they chose to keep the status quo and ignore women.

When you support LIV Golf this weekend in Adelaide, it’s worth remembering this isn’t the prototype of an ideal version of golf it’s spruiked to be.

Please stop calling it the future, it’s not the future of golf without women.