European Tour Can Punish LIV Golfers, Arbitrators Decide

AUGUSTA, Georgia – Golf’s European tour could penalize players who defected to the rival Saudi Arabian-funded LIV Golf series, an arbitration panel in London ruled in a decision made Thursday, the first day of the Masters tournament. released.

With lawsuits in the United States potentially years from a conclusion, the panel’s decision on the European series, the DP World Tour, was the subject of immense anticipation and anxiety among players and executives. All sides saw it as a crucial test to see whether long-term tours could easily discipline players who joined LIV, the league funded by billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

The ruling in Europe has no effect on the Masters, where 18 LIV players are on the field. But it was a blow to a rebel league that had hoped the days of tournament play would be a springboard to more credibility, not a renewed debate about the appeal and risk for big pros.

The decision is also likely to affect Europe’s roster for the Ryder Cup, the hugely popular US vs. Europe competition to be held in Italy this fall. To be eligible for the European team, players must be members of the DP World Tour.

The case before the London arbitrators dealt with a limited issue: the conflicting events policy of the DP World Tour, formerly known as the European Tour, which prohibits players from participating in certain tournaments without approval. In their ruling, announced after a five-day hearing in February, the arbitrators concluded that Rebel players had committed “serious violations” of tour rules.

The arbitrators found that the violations “increase the likelihood that commercial partners would be tempted to terminate or limit the relationship with the tour.” Citing “the magnitude and significance of the potential damage” to the tour, the panel said Keith Pelley, the tour’s CEO, had acted “entirely reasonable” in denying the players’ requests to perform at LIV events. appear declined.

In a statement hours before the start of the Masters, Pelley embraced the ruling.

“We are pleased that the panel recognized that we have a responsibility to our full members to do this and also determined that the process we followed was fair and proportionate,” said Pelley.

Matthew Schwartz, an attorney for LIV, complained in a statement that the arbitrators’ opinion “failed to reasonably indicate why competitive forces should be maintained.”

“By penalizing players for playing golf, the DPWT is trying to unreasonably control players and it is the sport and the fans that suffer,” he added, referring to the European tour. “There are no winners.”

While the case only concerned a specific tour policy, many sports lawyers predicted its outcome could shape ambitions to create alternatives to major leagues, tours and federations. A win for the tour, it was thought, would lend new support to the kind of rules leading sports organizers have put in place to protect their television rights deals and market power. A ruling for the players could have encouraged athletes — and not just in golf — to weigh up more serious overtures from upstart leagues and leagues with richer paydays.

The topic has cropped up repeatedly in recent years, with particularly fraught cases involving soccer, skating and swimming, and could become more prevalent as athletes claim more autonomy and wealthy Persian Gulf states look to invest more in sports. For example, in the women’s golf world, speculation is rampant that Saudi Arabia will eventually endorse a women’s league similar to the LIV, a league that has broken the men’s game.

That split became noticeable at a track near London last June, when longtime tour players like Ian Poulter, Charl Schwartzel and Lee Westwood showed up at LIV’s inaugural event. The tournament offered a first glimpse of how much money golfers could make if they eschewed traditional tours in favor of the Saudi-backed circuit: Schwartzel won $4.75 million in the three-day event, thanks to his individual and team performances. He had earned nearly 17.7 million euros, or more than $19 million, during his touring career, where he scored his first win in 2004.

Tour officials, wary of allowing individual golfers to undermine their multimillion-dollar television contracts and sponsorship deals, responded with suspensions and fines. However, Poulter was one of the players who won a stay of penalties, pending the ruling of the referees. This week’s decision ultimately involved 12 players – four others having given up their appeals – competing in either the LIV event in Great Britain or a subsequent event in the United States, a group consisting of Poulter, Westwood, Martin Kaymer, Graeme McDowell and Patrick Reed. Schwartzel and Sergio García were two of the players who had withdrawn from the case.

García, Reed and Schwartzel, who are all former Masters winners, are among the LIV players competing in Augusta this week.

LIV’s skeptics routinely view the circuit, with its 54-hole no-cut tournaments, as promoting a watered-down version of golf and as a way for Saudi Arabia to distance itself from its track record. of human rights. LIV executives insist they are merely trying to electrify and repopularize a sport they see as stagnant, and the league’s players, many of whom signed contracts guaranteeing them tens of millions of dollars, see themselves as independent contractors free to should be to compete wherever and whenever they choose.

“It doesn’t matter if I’m on the PGA Tour or LIV, I’ve always played two tours,” Reed said in a January interview at a DP World Tour event in Dubai, wearing a LIV hat on a driving range. “So all those guys saying you can’t actually double-dip, you can’t — What’s that cake phrase they like to use?” Make your own cake and eat it, or something? – well, Rory, myself, all these guys have played on multiple tours. (Rory McIlroy, a star of the PGA Tour and DP World Tour, was one of LIV’s most outspoken detractors.)

In their decision, the arbitrators emphatically said that the independent contractor’s argument was “exaggerated.”

“Individual players must accept any restrictions on their freedoms inherent in tour membership,” the panel said. No player, the arbitrators noted, “suggested that he had given up his independence by signing up for onerous (albeit rewarding) obligations to LIV.”

The tour, the arbitrators ruled, had not violated any competition or trade restriction laws.

“It is not part of competition law to require incumbents not to resist – they have a right to react and retaliate even if they are dominant,” the panel added.

The arbitrators’ ruling is unlikely to have a direct effect on the legal battle in the United States, where LIV and the PGA Tour are embroiled in bitter and expanding litigation. The US dispute will not come to court until next year.

British newspaper The Times had reported on Tuesday that the arbitrators had ruled in favor of the DP World Tour, sparking a flurry of chatter around the Augusta National grounds. With the text of the ruling unreleased at the time, McIlroy largely postponed comment, but said, “If that’s the outcome, it certainly changes the dynamic of everything.”

If LIV players resign from the tour, their chances of making the Ryder Cup squad will disappear under the eligibility rules. Sticking around may not guarantee a place on the roster either.

“I can only do what I can, which is play the tournaments that I can play, try to play them in the best way I can, and then everything else is out of my hands,” García said on Tuesday. “So the decisions of whether we can get picked or will get picked or anything like that, it doesn’t come down to me.”

Instead, he said, his fate in the Ryder Cup could be determined by whether Europe’s captain, Luke Donald, “thinks I’m good enough.” We will see.”