When LIV Golf joined the federal antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour late Friday in an amended complaint, questions quickly arose as to the legal gambit’s timing and strategy.
The timing is simple: It’s a classic late-Friday news dump on the West Coast, with the expectation that the amended filing in U.S. District Court in Northern California might go largely unnoticed as the weekend got underway.
As for the strategy, well, that’s not quite so clear, but an antitrust expert who spoke with Global Golf Post has some ideas.
In the original 106-page lawsuit filed Aug. 3, LIV Golf took on the PGA Tour via 11 of the rival tour's newly signed players, notably Phil Mickelson, as plaintiffs. They were the faces of the fight against the PGA Tour for its suspensions of players competing on the rival circuit. LIV Golf did not appear as a party in the lawsuit. So, why would LIV Golf join the complaint several weeks later?
Gerald Maatman, an attorney with Seyfarth & Shaw in Chicago who specializes in antitrust law, called the filing “very surprising.”
LIV Golf appears to be looking to be angling for a court judgment or lawsuit settlement to save its business model ...
“There is no requirement that LIV join the case,” Maatman said. “All along, most legal commentators thought LIV would file its own lawsuit against the PGA Tour on its own terms and on its own timing. Strategic reasons to do so would include: creating a two-front legal war against the PGA Tour and imposing more litigation costs on the tour; taking advantage of a different judge and venue that might be more favorable to LIV; and escaping any adverse rulings from the players’ lawsuit in San Francisco.”
The original complaint alleged that the PGA Tour has used monopoly power to try to eliminate competition and has unfairly suspended LIV Golf players from the PGA Tour. In the amended complaint, which was filed only two days after commissioner Jay Monahan announced sweeping changes to the tour for next season, LIV Golf claims that without a favorable ruling, its “ability to maintain a meaningful competitive presence in the markets will be destroyed.”
With this new salvo, LIV Golf appears to be looking to be angling for a court judgment or lawsuit settlement to save its business model, Maatman said.
LIV Golf alleges in the amended complaint that the PGA Tour’s restraints forced the rival tour, which is funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, to raise the cost of signing players and kept it from attracting other potential recruits who were worried about the threat of being suspended or banished. It also claims that the tour forced LIV Golf to delay its launch in 2022 and conduct a smaller schedule than originally planned.
Meanwhile, two more LIV Golf players dropped out of the original complaint. Jason Kokrak and Abraham Ancer, two of the original 11 plaintiffs, removed their names from the lawsuit. Earlier, Carlos Ortiz and Pat Perez had removed their names.
Maatman cited “various reasons” for LIV Golf to join the players’ complaint, including: “several of the players have lost their enthusiasm for the case after the initial round of adverse rulings and LIV needed to come in to shore it up if more players jumped ship on their lawsuit; LIV was concerned that the lawsuit was going south in San Francisco and it came in to try and turn it around; or from the beginning LIV was behind the case and financing it, and it had to join the case because the players no longer wanted to be the face of the legal war.”
Because of the amended filing, Maatman said, LIV is effectively “boxed in” from filing its own independent lawsuit somewhere else.
Staff Reports