With his carefully curated image of a man swaggering across the global stage disrupting industries, dictating terms and settling scores, Greg Norman exhibits a delusion common among courtiers who imagine themselves in the vein of those for whom they labor. But far from earning comparison to MBS, or even with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the Crown Prince’s bagman at Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, Norman increasingly calls to mind another legendary figure from the region: Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf.
Al-Sahhaf is better remembered as “Comical Ali,” a derisive moniker he acquired while serving as Saddam Hussein’s spokesman during the Iraq War two decades ago. His every utterance defied ample evidence to the contrary, most memorably his insistence that American troops had been slaughtered outside Baghdad, even as U.S. tanks rolled through the very neighborhood in which he stood. The hapless shilling for middle eastern autocrats and a refusal to acknowledge reality seems eerily familiar today, although Norman lacks the levity provided by Al-Sahhaf’s obvious lunacy.
After a year during which it made a splash, LIV’s novelty value is diminished and the time is nearing when it will sink or swim. Thus Norman is grasping for positives with the same determination he did on many a Sunday night at major championships.
This week, he gamely presented the fact that Justin Thomas took a meeting with LIV—and didn’t immediately squat on the concept—as evidence of the league’s success, while omitting that the conversation took place some time ago and that Thomas has since been vocally loyal to the PGA Tour. The contortions continued when Norman said that Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy “have no idea what they’re talking about” and accused them of being childish for saying he had to be replaced as CEO, before adding that the door to LIV remains open for them, much as a drowning man’s arms are open to anyone who wishes to toss him a life vest.
Despite reports that he could be replaced by former TaylorMade CEO, Mark King, Norman insists his position is secure. “I have got the full support from my chairman. One hundred percent. One thousand percent. There has never been one thing to suggest otherwise. I’m totally confident,” he said, with the blithe assurance he often displayed on Saturdays. But security is scarce in LIV’s well-fed food chain, and Norman knows it.
At the league’s recent season finale in Miami, the chief operating officer, Atul Khosla, was wheeled out to talk about plans for a broadcast rights deal and corporate sponsorship of teams. This week, he was shown the door, leaving a business landscape largely unchanged from when Sean Bratches quit as chief commercial officer seven months ago: no TV deal, no traction with fans, no audience for live streams, no sign of mass player defections, no sponsor interest. Still, Norman’s perfunctory statement confirming Khosla’s departure took care to trumpet LIV’s “successful inaugural season.”
The off-boarding of another key executive followed a damaging New York Times report on Dec. 11 that detailed the struggle facing Saudi golf ambitions, based on a 2021 report by the regime’s consultant of choice, McKinsey and Company. McKinsey has long flattered odious clients—the company previously helped identify Saudi dissidents on social media who were later targeted by the government—yet even its dependable toadies couldn’t manufacture a plausible path to success for LIV, at least not as a conventional investment.
McKinsey took pains to note that it wasn’t challenging the laughable assumptions underpinning LIV’s projections. On that basis, the most optimistic scenario—one that required signing every top player, obtaining a broadcast deal, and experiencing no pushback from the PGA Tour—suggested earnings (not profit) of several hundred million dollars annually by 2028. Failing to meet those benchmarks, which is how things stand, would see losses in excess of $350 million a year. That study was completed before LIV had to throw grossly inflated sums at players to sign on.
In the cagey language of consultancy, the report was a throbbing, neon stop sign. McKinsey created a decision matrix that was then ignored, and LIV was launched with no market research to determine whether it was a product craved by anyone other than Norman and the players and agents who would burrow into MBS’s purse. That McKinsey’s assessment was ignored illustrates just how few people in Riyadh needed to be sold a bill of goods for LIV to get this far. Concomitant to that is how few people must lose faith before the plug is pulled.
Regardless of whether their ultimate ambition was to use golf for reputational enhancement rather than commercial returns, even the Saudis have an inflection point at which they will no longer be taken for fools. It’s farther along the road than most, but it exists. For all of his indefatigable bluster in public, Norman must realize that LIV is moving inexorably toward a reckoning when his words will cease to matter against the sobering reality of the numbers.
