I’m sure I also read somewhere I the last couple of days that 19 “LIV” golfers have already been dropped by LIV!
They initially signed and were paid the signing on fee but now the likes of Koepka, Smith etc have come on board their services are no longer required - wonder if the PGA tour will have them back?
A lot of those names are no-marks that were probably happy to take the money and run. For some of the guys at the top of that earnings list in the second hundred of the OWGR, it's a little more complicated. They can still play in Asia, and that guy that made three million in purse money made out like a bandit. He would be lucky to make that in five years on the PGA Tour, but good luck getting into the majors other than through qualifying.
I would err on the side of spite with respect to what the Tour will do, but at the end of the day they're going to do what their attorneys tell them about the implications for the antitrust case.
Yeah me too, the only thing I know about anti-trust law is that they have a very high burden of proof. They're very hard to win.
At a glance, this meets Sherman standards. Sports leagues in the United States tend to lose these cases when they're brought. Winning against them is more about having deep enough pockets to sustain the fight than anything else, when it's this blatant. The cases are complex, and therefore expensive to litigate, and there's often little guarantee of being awarded enough in damages to make the suit worthwhile.
The problem, at least for the players, is that the Tour is going to say, "How did we harm you? You got hundreds of millions of dollars from them, ace." The players come back with, "Yeah, and our sponsors all ditched us, jerkwad, because you put pressure on them to do so." The Tour says, "Your point? Your contracts require you to advertise their tour on your shirts if you play in our events. That's a real douche move. We have a right to protect our brand and our relationships with our sponsors." The players then say, "That's exactly the problem. You're locking us out of sponsorships, your purses and the majors." Then they'll exchange similar insults about the pressure to keep the players out of the major championships, the players will put a big price on that, the Tour will contest it, yada yada yada.
Of course, it will all be written in double-spaced legalese in a very precise format, but that's what the filings will say.
