The logic of the deal is easy to see. The PGA Tour was feeling pressure from LIV Golf, which had poached some marquee golfers. To keep up with the Saudis’ lavish spending, it was forced to pay out bigger prizes and dip deeper into its reserves. And the two organizations were enmeshed in an expensive lawsuit. “We were competing against LIV,” Monahan said after the deal was announced. The merger, he explained, was a way “to take the competitor off the board, to have them exist as a partner.”

That’s a very understandable reason to do a deal. In this case, it’s also most likely an illegal one.

The most basic principle of antitrust law is that companies with large market share can’t make agreements to avoid competing against each other. It is very difficult to characterize the PGA-LIV merger in any other way.

[Especially when its principals expressly admit it to be the case. Wanna bet that the Saudis are currently hiring all of the best anti-trust legal talent available, just in case? — Ed]