Nice to see Michael Venus getting to another final. Like you I'm firmly in the Alcaraz camp, can't deny Jokos skill but it's time for a change of guard.
Really looking forward to more FTA sport, sky is good but being able to see cricket away from a paywall will be great. I thought Spark had the FIH league too or was I mistaken?
The proposed PGA Tour-Liv Golf merger is far from a done deal. As more than one US sporting body can attest, US antitrust laws may have something to say. Courtesy of Marc Edelman of The Atlantic:
The most basic principle of US antitrust law is that companies with large market share can’t make agreements to avoid competing against each other. It is very difficult to characterize the PGA-LIV merger in any other way. The antitrust suit originally filed last year by a group of LIV players alleged that without “any meaningful competition (prior to LIV Golf’s entry), the Tour has failed to innovate and its product has grown stale.” The PGA Tour, they argued, “has used its monopoly position to extract substantially increased revenues from broadcasters and advertisers” while paying players less “because there is no competition for players’ services.”
LIV Golf eventually joined its golfers as a plaintiff in this very lawsuit. To now claim that a combined PGA-LIV entity is something less than a monopoly would lack any semblance of credibility. The merger would leave just a single, dominant association controlling almost the entire world of professional golf. Even if the PGA Tour was not a monopoly before the proposed merger, the new entity certainly would create one.
The proposed merger between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf is not as good as done. At a minimum, antitrust enforcers will conduct a thorough investigation before even considering letting the deal through. The time, cost, and loss of privacy associated with this process could be enough to lead one, if not both, of the associations to walk away.
Nice to see Michael Venus getting to another final. Like you I'm firmly in the Alcaraz camp, can't deny Jokos skill but it's time for a change of guard.
Really looking forward to more FTA sport, sky is good but being able to see cricket away from a paywall will be great. I thought Spark had the FIH league too or was I mistaken?
The proposed PGA Tour-Liv Golf merger is far from a done deal. As more than one US sporting body can attest, US antitrust laws may have something to say. Courtesy of Marc Edelman of The Atlantic:
The most basic principle of US antitrust law is that companies with large market share can’t make agreements to avoid competing against each other. It is very difficult to characterize the PGA-LIV merger in any other way. The antitrust suit originally filed last year by a group of LIV players alleged that without “any meaningful competition (prior to LIV Golf’s entry), the Tour has failed to innovate and its product has grown stale.” The PGA Tour, they argued, “has used its monopoly position to extract substantially increased revenues from broadcasters and advertisers” while paying players less “because there is no competition for players’ services.”
LIV Golf eventually joined its golfers as a plaintiff in this very lawsuit. To now claim that a combined PGA-LIV entity is something less than a monopoly would lack any semblance of credibility. The merger would leave just a single, dominant association controlling almost the entire world of professional golf. Even if the PGA Tour was not a monopoly before the proposed merger, the new entity certainly would create one.
The proposed merger between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf is not as good as done. At a minimum, antitrust enforcers will conduct a thorough investigation before even considering letting the deal through. The time, cost, and loss of privacy associated with this process could be enough to lead one, if not both, of the associations to walk away.
And there’s this angle/insight into the motivation for the merger from the Saudi perspective:
https://open.substack.com/pub/popularinformation/p/the-saudis-buy-professional-golf?r=2nv2g&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post