Saudi golf takeover is blueprint for what they want to do everywhere else | Jonathan Liew

The Saudis came for golf. Will your favourite sport put up any more of a fight?

Perhaps you were invited to the exclusive Venice wedding of a billionaire's daughter where Jay Monahan and Yasir al-Rumayyan are reported to have met for the first time. Perhaps you happened to be playing a round at Beaverbrook Golf Course at the same time as Rumayyan and the PGA board member Jimmy Dunne were thrashing out the early stages of a deal that would change golf for ever. Perhaps you happened to be eavesdropping at the next table as they ate dinner or at least close enough to hurl a well-aimed bread roll or slip something into the ceviche.

Short of that, however, there is very little you or I could have done to prevent the effective merger of the PGA Tour with the rebel LIV Golf organisation, backed by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. Your opinion was not consulted. Your vote was not canvassed. Players who had turned down eye-moistening sums of Saudi money out of what they laughably believed was a reciprocated loyalty to the PGA Tour found out, like everyone else, when their phones started pinging.