sport news Arbitration hearing over LIV golf set to take place this week trends now
A key fight in golf’s civil war will take place in London this week with the long-trailed arbitration hearing that will effectively determine if LIV players can continue to moonlight on the DP World Tour.
Starting on Monday and running through Friday, Sports Resolutions will attempt to unpick the tangled legalities that have been thrown up since LIV upset the traditional ecosystem with their launch at Centurion Club in Hemel Hempstead last June.
While no verdict is expected for several weeks from its conclusion, the optimistic hope is the hearing before a three-man panel will offer some semblance of clarity for what happens next in the bitter battles that have occurred since Greg Norman’s Saudi-backed breakaway crashed the status quo.
The Tour’s argument, laid out in legalise by CEO Keith Pelley and his director of communications Scott Crockett, centres on interpretations of their ‘conflicting event release regulation’, which requires a player to receive permission to play on a rival tour at a given time.
When a number of players from the European circuit, including Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter, teed up at Centurion eight months ago without a release, they were hit with suspensions for three events and a £100,000 fine.
Lee Westwood is among those whose future on the DP World Tour is set to be decided
Those sanctions were stayed by Sports Resolutions in July pending the outcome of this hearing, and in the meantime LIV players have been allowed to continue on the DP World Tour, leading to the tensions around ‘teegate’ between Rory McIlroy and Patrick Reed in Dubai last week.
The aim around the forthcoming hearing, pitting lawyers for 13 LIV golfers against those from the Tour, will establish if those days of uneasy co-existence become a thing of the past.
Predictably, both sides have been bullish of their chances, though there is a growing sense that the LIV rebels have an especially strong case as independent contractors, citing the long established trend of elite golfers operating across multiple tours.
Mischievously, but with a grain of plausibility, there is also a school
