How womens snub by PIF exposes huge fantasy

OPINION

The way forward for golf.

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It’s the tagline LIV Golf makes use of all through all its advertising and marketing and broadcasts and whereas it claims to be louder, richer and quicker, it forgot one key aspect that would actually elevate it to ‘future’ standing; ladies.

It’s pissed off me from day one in every of LIV, with all its fanfare and splashes of money, it claimed to be the blueprint of what golf ought to be. But if it needed to do one thing really revolutionary, really totally different, one that will galvanise all golfers… then involving ladies could be an important place to begin.

It’s uncommon on this period to have a brand new elite sports activities competitors that doesn’t contain ladies by increasing to incorporate feminine athletes, both inside the sequence or as a separate event. It’s a industrial actuality that stakeholders, sponsors and followers wish to see that in new sports activities tournaments. But 4 seasons in, there’s nonetheless no phrase on whether or not a ladies’s event might be developed, or ladies included within the competitors.

I’m not saying males’s and ladies’s sport ought to at all times come collectively in tournaments. For a lot of, I desire to maintain them separated.

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However don’t say this occasion is the way forward for golf when it ignores ladies who make up 50 per cent of the inhabitants and have confirmed they’re viable funding in sport.

LIV is funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Funding Fund (PIF), who do spend money on ladies’s golf by means of the Girls European Tour (LET). They fund 5 occasions on the tour collectively value US$13million in prize cash. Not a small amount of cash nevertheless it does seems like small change when put next with the prize pool of LIV occasions which is US$25million per occasion, collectively US$350million (A$554m). That additionally doesn’t consider the signal on charges — Jon Rahm alone was rumoured to be US$600million.

GOLF BLOWING OUT THE PAY GAP

This raises one other key level that funding in a ladies’s competitors would must be equal, or else the riches of the PIF — irrespective of how life-changing — threaten to widen the gender hole in sport even additional.

Saudi Arabia has launched into an aggressive sponsorship agenda and in 2024, the Danish analysis firm Play the Sport cited the nation sponsoring 910 tournaments globally. Whereas ladies’s competitions are included in that checklist, nearly all of the funds have been spent on male sports activities. And as extra sporting our bodies all over the world seemingly line as much as achieve the profitable Saudi {dollars} on supply, except it’s carried out equally — and in golf’s case it hasn’t — then it threatens to set ladies’s sport again by rising the pay hole simply because it was starting to slim.

Add within the South Australian authorities’s funding internet hosting LIV Golf towards the backdrop of this funds ratio, it’s hoped there could be some equal funding in ladies’s sport and golf to stability it out and allow a means for girls’s sport to fulfil its potential, somewhat than helping male sport to stretch the size farther from attain.

Full disclosure: I do sit on the board for the WPGA Tour, and this isn’t a push for LIV Golf to have a ladies’s competitors.

My problem isn’t with the PIF. It isn’t actually with LIV Golf both.

My problem is that there was a possibility for LIV to do one thing revolutionary and game-changing when it was empowered by cash and the world’s consideration. But, they selected to maintain the established order and ignore ladies.

While you assist LIV Golf this weekend in Adelaide, it’s value remembering this isn’t the prototype of a super model of golf it’s spruiked to be.

Please cease calling it the longer term, it’s not the way forward for golf with out ladies.