Power games with dirty money (nd-aktuell.de)

»Naive, stubborn, selfish, ignorant. Disappointing and sad as well.« The Northern Irish golf pro Rory McIlroy came up with many harsh adjectives with which he described his US colleague Phil Mickelson just over a week ago. Golfers don’t usually call each other that, there’s an unwritten code of courtesy. So it was shocking, and yet everyone saw it coming. At some point, the pressure simply had to be released from the boiler. And the players quickly agreed: Mickelson deserved the hearty words. After all, he was partly responsible for the fact that a long-simmering dispute had broken out.

McIlroy, Mickelson and hundreds of other players are multi-millionaires. They earned their money on the PGA Tour, a year-round tournament series that distributes at least $3.7 million in prize money to around 150 players every week. It is not uncommon for it to be more than ten million. In the 2022 tournament, the winner alone will rake in a whopping $18 million. So the players who make it to the PGA definitely don’t have financial worries. And yet this argument was about pocketing even more money. No matter where it comes from.

Reports first surfaced in 2019 that a competitive series was planned. Behind the scenes, she lures stars with starting fees in the millions. So you don’t have to play well anymore. This tour also includes fewer tournaments, vacation times would be longer. That seemed tempting. There was only one problem: The organizer LIV Golf Investments is financed by the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund PIF. For years, the latter has been involved in »sportswashing« by buying European football clubs or organizing various major events. Countries like Qatar or most recently China at the Winter Olympics in Beijing have often been accused of this form of polishing up a country’s dirty image through brilliant events. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had no problem with that. Footballers in England, France or Germany also play for money that comes from dubious sources. But a few golf pros suddenly had problems with it. As early as 2019, McIlroy rejected a multi-million dollar tournament invitation from Saudi Arabia with the words: “I don’t want to play there. It’s morally impossible.«

The kingdom has been accused of human rights violations. Nevertheless, rumors persisted that almost 40 players were considering a move to the Saudi league. “Pretty much everyone in the top 100 in the world rankings has been approached,” Mickelson claimed in early February. But nobody wanted to defect at first, because the PGA Tour threatened severe consequences: At the beginning of 2020, your commissioner Jay Monahan threatened anyone who joined the competition with a lifelong ban on the PGA. It is doubtful whether he can legally enforce this, but at least the threat meant that no professional dared to jump publicly.

It is also still unclear whether Phil Mickelson, who won the PGA Championship again last spring at the age of 50, one of the four major tournaments, actually wants to change. However, it seems certain that he wanted to play the PGA and the Saudis off against each other. In November he called journalist Alan Shipnuck, who is working on a biography of him, to provide material for the work. A week ago, Shipnuck released statements – quite useful as a little teaser for his book – in which the golf star admits that the new tour is pure “sportswashing” by a brutally repressive regime. “They’re scary assholes you don’t want anything to do with. We know they have a terrible human rights record and killed Jamal Khashoggi. They kill people because they’re gay,” Mickelson reportedly said. “So why would I even think about doing it? Well, because it’s a unique opportunity to change the PGA Tour.” After all, it’s run like a dictatorship and guided by “disgusting greed,” Mickelson continues. “The money from the Saudis finally gives us leverage with which we can push through changes in the PGA Tour.”

In doing so, he may have wanted to bring the PGA Tour down to the moral level of the Saudi rulers, but he achieved exactly the opposite. Within a week almost all the stars, from the Spanish world number one Jon Rahm to the Olympic champion Xander Schauffele (USA) announced their membership of the PGA Tour. With relish, Rory McIlroy asked at the end of the wave, “Who’s left? Who do they want to start a new tour with?’ Mickelson, on the other hand, clearly gambled. The six-time major winner was thrown off guard by his plans and eventually released an apology. “I have always had the best interests of golf, my colleagues, sponsors and fans in mind,” he wrote. He did not authorize Shipnuck to publish his statements – which Shipnuck vehemently denies – and they were taken out of context. But since Mickelson also didn’t provide any context and doesn’t deny having said all that, the apology didn’t make anything better.

“I regret my words that were inconsiderate and offended people,” he wrote. He left open whether he meant the Saudis or the leadership of the PGA. He didn’t even mention the latter, instead saying that his partners at LIV are visionaries. “They love golf and share my desire to improve the game.” The fact that they want to use blood money for it apparently still doesn’t bother Mickelson.

Book author Shipnuck had cited money problems caused by gambling addiction as a motive for Mickelson’s participation in the competition tour. And that, although the golfer is said to have earned around 800 million dollars in his career, almost 90 percent of it from sponsors alone, after all he was considered the darling of the public in the eternal duel with Tiger Woods. However, the fact that there is actually something to the gambling addiction theory could be concluded from the concluding words of Mickelson’s statements: »In the past few years I have felt how pressure and stress have increasingly influenced my life. I really need some time off to work on becoming the man I want to be.«

In terms of content, Mickelson showed no remorse: “Golf urgently needs change, and real change is always preceded by shocks,” he drew a self-portrait of himself as a martyr. “I went to the front lines to initiate change, even knowing that I would be publicly attacked for doing so.”

In fact, he had picked up some of the legitimate criticisms many players have of the PGA Tour, which are also hotly debated at other levels of world sport – especially the right to one’s own image. For example, the Tour prohibits players from posting videos of outstanding shots online on social media and making money from them. »For many years, the tour has taken the position that it owns all media rights, including the highlights. These could be converted into NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens, in this case one-time digital trading cards, author’s note) and sold to fans,” Alan Shipnuck wrote of Mickelson’s ideas.

The basketball pro league NBA started doing this almost a year ago, and since then iconic moments in the form of NFT have already traded for more than 600 million dollars. The five percent transaction fee on each sale is then distributed among the players. “The Tour is sitting on billions in potential NFT,” Mickelson said. »We players could earn millions more with the digital content on our social channels. We should own it all. We played the shots, we created those moments, we should capitalize on them. The PGA Tour doesn’t need the money. They’re already sitting on a mountain of $800 million.”

But it is not that easy. The sale of media rights, especially for television broadcasts, is the main source of income for the PGA Tour. This in turn finances the horrendously high prize money that is then paid to the players. A comprehensible argument is that TV broadcasters would no longer pay as much for the rights if fans could simply view the images later on the players’ platforms. “If a league doesn’t control its media rights, the structure would collapse and the money wouldn’t get into the system. Every big sports organization does it that way,” said Rory McIlroy, who sits on various committees of the tour as a player representative.

After all, the big sports leagues in the USA give the athletes a share of the income through prize money or wages negotiated by the unions. At the IOC, things are very different. That, too, takes most of the money from media rights. Demands from athletes to be involved have always been completely rejected. Cross-country skier Victoria Carl would certainly like to earn some money from an NFT of her gold run from the Beijing Winter Games. But who created this moment? The TV producers with exciting directing, tracking shots and the stirring live commentary by Jens Jörg Rieck, the IOC with the preparation and implementation of the competition or the athletes with their performances? As long as athletes just take part and don’t fight for participation, they have the shortest leverage of all.

Phil Mickelson knows this too, which is why he saw the Saudis’ money as an extension of his leverage. Videos of his most famous shots should be worth at least six figures. The Saudis’ tour would have transferred the rights to their own pictures to the players, it said. Whether this is true cannot be verified. However, an internal memo recently stated that the PGA Tour was working on its own NFT platform to be used as a source of income for players.

So did Mickelson win after all? That can only be answered with a clear no. The fallen star has lost several longtime promotional partners and faces a suspension. For the time being, he will not benefit from the increased prize money due to new TV contracts. Above all, its image has suffered. The once celebrated audience favorite accused others of “disgusting greed” and became a symbol himself. He also lost the support of his colleagues. Peter Malnati, another players’ representative at the PGA, now judged: “Phil calls others greedy and at the same time he sabotages those others just to make more money for himself. That’s pure irony.«