PGA Tour, Saudi PIF leaders to play together at Middle East golf event

If one pro-am is good, two may be better for the PGA Tour and Saudi Public Investment Fund, whose leaders are reportedly taking part in an event in Saudi Arabia this week.

This comes courtesy of Bunkered, which reported on Thursday morning (subsequently confirmed by other outlets) that PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and PIF chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan will once again be in each other’s vicinity this weekend at a Ladies European Tour event held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The event comes as part of the Aramco Series’ visit to Riyadh — named for the Saudi oil giant — as well as the Future Investment Initiative, a series of conferences held in the Kingdom to promote future growth and investment opportunities.

Bunkered reports that Monahan and Al-Rumayyan will play in a pro-am together on Thursday evening, following in the footsteps of the pair’s pro-am experience at the DP World Tour’s Alfred Dunhill Links Championship earlier this month.

Despite these public appearances, it remains unclear just how close the two sides are to reaching a definitive agreement that would reunite professional golf, even as the calendar reaches some 17 months removed from the shocking “framework agreement” announcement and 10 months removed from the two sides’ original “agreement deadline.” Still, the growing number of meetings — both public and private — indicate that there is at least progress in the negotiations between the two sides.

Still, the news comes as the PIF has announced its own intentions to reign in spending over the coming years. The Saudi government’s near-trillion-dollar sovereign investment fund has been one of the most aggressive movers in global capital investment over the last decade, but big-money Saudi domestic projects and international oil market headwinds have altered the Fund’s economic standing as it transitions toward the future.

It’s unknown how an agreement between the two sides might look, but indications are that it would involve the PIF purchasing a piece of equity in PGA Tour Enterprises — the new, for-profit wing of the Tour. Earlier this year, another group of institutional sports investors named the Strategic Sports Group agreed to invest $1.5 billion (with the potential for that to grow to $3 billion) in PGA Tour Enterprises in an agreement that valued the Tour’s for-profit wing at $12.3 billion.