PGA & LIV merging, plus Messi is changing things up in MLS.

So the PGA Tour and the Public Investment Fund that funds live golf, they have formed a working arrangement. We'll see if it's even legal. We already had that discussion with Dan Lust earlier in the program, a sports attorney. It does not appear that it is necessarily legal, but also I just don't know who the aggrieved parties are since the two people or the two entities that are in charge of those two entities, if you will, the people who are in charge of those have decided to come together. So I have no idea who would be, I mean, I understand there could be business pushback on this, but if they decide to have to end the hostilities, then they end the hostilities. Otherwise, I mean, we're basically going back to business as usual.

And in this case, nobody complained about the PGA Tour before, but things were said. So we got that to talk about. We have the arrival eventually of Lionel Messi at Inter Miami and Major League Soccer. And let's get to our friend Luke Tkach of The News and Observer. He is with us as he is on Fridays. All right, sir, so you and I have not spoken in a couple of weeks because I was not here on Friday, and Liv Golf gave us, for those of us who are fans of golf and drama, the Public Investment Fund PGA Tour Alliance certainly gave us a lot to discuss and think about on Tuesday.

What are your thoughts as we sit here today based on the news of the day on Tuesday? I mean, one, I think my sort of top line thought is I feel bad for the players who took a stand and were sold out by their own tour, whether it's John Rom or Rory McIlroy or Tiger Woods, that these guys said, you know, we believe that golf should be something else. And, and they got sold out by their own tour. And to me, Adam, this is the fascinating part of this for me, these wall street players, these guys, Jimmy Dunn, Ed Hurley, he, these guys who are members of these clubs so fancy, they won't even host PGA Tour tournaments somehow ended up on this policy board with the power to sell out the entire tour over the, over the, without talking to the players. And I just, I'm fascinated how the players let themselves essentially be powerless in the management of their own tour. They basically had it sold out from under them in a way that they didn't want to do. And I just, it just shows that, you know, the rich get richer. It's the law of the land.

And these guys, these wall street guys find ways to turn nickels into dimes and dimes into dollars. And if I'm Rory McIlroy, I was, I just want to look at these guys and tell them, you know, I don't, I don't want to be your guest at Seminole. I don't want to be your guest at Fisher's Island. I want my tour back. Yeah. You're right.

Jimmy Dunn, I believe who helped broker this deal has to choose when he wakes up in the morning. Do I play at Augusta? Do I play at Pine Valley? Do I play at Cypress Point?

Do I play at Seminole or do I play at Shinnecock Hills? Those are his choices. Look, those are pretty good choices to have. Yeah. The other part of it, Adam, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's just, I don't understand how these guys got this power to make decisions for the players with no oversight at all from the players. And, you know, Jimmy Dunn, especially, this is a guy who lost half his firm on nine 11. And now he's out there saying, well, if I knew any of the Saudis who were responsible, I'd kill them myself.

Like, could you, could you be a bigger jackass? Well, here's the thing about this. And I mean, Rory McIlroy, I think if you watch the press conference on Tuesday, you could tell that Rory and has never been comfortable with the source of the money with Liv. I don't know that that's the reason why he decided to not be a part of it, but I think it's, there's a little bit of him that doesn't, that doesn't feel good about that, even though he may have played in a Saudi international or some of the other events in the, in the Middle East, which also are, you know, in large part are funded by governments that, you know, have not been great.

Anyway, but here's the thing about this whole story that maybe we haven't talked about enough. It was pretty clear based on Rory's press conference and everything else you read underlying that the PGA Tour and what they wanted to do in terms of reshaping the tour to compete with the, with LivGolf financially, that they couldn't pull off. That asking sponsors for, to essentially double their input financially could work for some, but not enough. So where was that money going to come from? Well, that money is now going to come from the public investment fund and they're getting no return on their investment from LivGolf.

Zero, way more money is going out than they could possibly bring in. And they're not raising awareness because that whole thing is about sports washing and they're not getting enough sports washing from, they're not getting clean enough from LivGolf because it's always viewed as a rogue tour. Now their money will be invested, if you will, in the PGA Tour. And it's much easier to cleanse your image when you're going to be in front of millions of people and viewers as opposed to, you know, a couple hundred thousand.

That's what I think. I think this is simply, it's simply a good business deal for both sides. And Rory said he's come to terms with it. And this is where you get back to it with Rory and even Tiger and these guys who have a lot of money. The Saudis are always going to have more money.

That's not even an issue. If you own an NHL team or an NBA team and you want to sell it to the Saudis, a soccer team, they're always going to have more money or the quick Qataris or whoever. They have more money.

All right. Dimes to rich guys are pennies to them. They're always going to have more money.

And you have to look at it like Messi and say, is the money worth it? And I think the choice for the PGA Tour here, unless there's something buried in discovery, that's an absolute neutron bomb that was going to lose their case against LivGolf is there's a point where you say at the PGA Tour, we have enough money. And if guys want to go to live and chase the money, let them, because we haven't lost anyone yet.

We couldn't afford to lose. And the one exception is Brooks Koepka. And he's a moron because he thought he was done and he wasn't.

And then he was over there and now he wants to come back and he can't. He does. Right. No one misses Phil. No one misses Bryson DeChambeau.

Now a nine 11 apologist on top of all his other galaxy brain. Yeah. Enough. There's enough money in the PGA Tour.

And if there wasn't enough and guys wanted to go chase Saudi bucks, Hey, look, I talked, you know, Harold Varner was out trying to qualify for the U S open a little Chatham on Monday because he went to the live tour, but he's been completely open. I had a price. They met it. It's generational wealth.

It changes my family's future. So he went and get it. Rory doesn't need that money. Tiger doesn't need that money. Phil shouldn't need that money, but he obviously does let those guys go and build a tour around players who want to be here. And you know what?

I think most people would have been fine with that, but a couple of people got a sniff of bigger dollars and decided they would take the money. And that's the way it's always going to be. The Saudis are always going to have more money.

And look, this is just the beginning. They're going to buy the Ottawa senators. If all these bids fall through, they're going to buy some crappy NBA team because they don't care. It's all tip money to them. They spend this $2 million for an NHL team, whatever.

We'll give you a three. It's what we spend at Starbucks on a Tuesday until people realize that the money is not an issue for them. They have unlimited money.

I do understand that by now. Well, and then these guys basically told the Saudis, here's our price, whatever that turns out to be. And the Saudis said fine. Here's the pro until people like messy start making decisions saying it's not, I don't want their money.

They're just going to keep buying anything because people want the money. I don't, I don't want to let's flip it to Lionel Messi here because I think we should probably hold off on thinking that Messi decided he didn't want Saudi money. He represents the Saudis and the Qataris publicly.

So he's taking their money. I think that he just looked at the Saudi pro league and said, that league stinks. It's not worth 450 to 600 million euros a year to play in a bad league. And I would rather go to major league soccer, which is not a great league, but it's a better league than the Saudi pro league. And Adidas made it worth his while financially live is to the PGA tour.

What the Saudi soccer league is to any real league in the world, there's money in one and there's credibility in the other. And you can take your pick. You can take your pick all day and people have made their choices. So are you now a fan of inter Miami? Have you given up Everton to become a fan of inter Miami?

No, I know firsthand as an Everton fan, just what Phil Neville can do. Well, he's not there anymore. You've already gotten rid of that franchise. It's it's a, no, I have no interest in, in any interim Miami.

You know what I mean? Honestly, Adam, when MLS started in 94, 95, 96, it was 95, 96. I was a big DC United fan.

They were the old, I was in Philadelphia at the time. They were the only team that had, you know, it wasn't the whiz or the clash and they didn't have a stupid logo. They had a nice classy traditional Jersey. They had the best players, you know, they had actually very, and John harks and Raul Diaz, our say, and Jeff, a goose, they had all these ACC guys, half the team went through Virginia and they played real soccer. I mean, they played a good brand of football. So in the early days I was a big DC United fan.

So if I had to pick an MLS team, I'd say there's a lot of water under that particular bridge. And then I spent time covering the Colorado Rapids after that. And those guys were great. Mooch Myernick, Marcello Balboa, Anders Limpar briefly. It was, that was a really fun franchise to be around.

I don't know any of the people you're talking about here, Luke, here's the thing I do know. I was, I was, you know, I grew up in the New York area and I remember when Pele came to play for the cosmos. I was not necessarily aware of the impact on the sport.

I do know that I suddenly cared about the cosmos. And I also knew that following Pele, we had the Franz Beckenbauers, maybe the one of the best, maybe the greatest center back that ever played and Giorgio Canalia and Steve hunt. I, so I remember what happened after Pele. If that can happen to a lesser degree, probably after Lionel Messi comes, maybe major league soccer can just take the next step forward. It's already a good league.

It's probably the sixth or seventh best league in the world. Those days, the days of, of signing a marquee veteran player and having it change your league are over. And I think Messi gives the Miami franchise some credibility, but MLS doesn't need him. Um, you know, that's the old model was signing these older celebrity players to be your marketing focus and analysis path forward. And they figured this out a long time ago is good young players getting better. It's it's it's like, uh, for lack of a better word, it's a developmental league, but in a great way. And I, you know, this is the old MLS. This is, you know, the Metro stars signing people with big names who were 38 years old. That said, look, Messi's great. You know, the greatest of all time, maybe the greatest of all time.

Sure. He's a clearly a human being unlike Ronaldo and all of that, you know, it goes into it, but, but MLS doesn't need messy the way that the cosmos and NSL needed pay lay. This is just an addition to MLS. It helps MLS, but it's not a league saver or a league changer.

It's a, it's a veteran player deciding he wants to play out as last year's in the U S which is an old, old story. It just happens to be the most famous of them all. Yeah. I mean, it's major league soccer is not a league that needed saving, right? It's it, it doesn't need saving.

It doesn't need a boost. But when, I mean, I mean, I don't know where messy ranks in terms of best players in the world today, but I mean, I'm sure he's in the top 15 of greatest players currently playing even at age 35. I mean, he's going to shine when he eventually gets on the pitch and starts to play for inter Miami. I'm looking forward to what it, I mean, I don't watch major league soccer now, but I'll check out what, you know, maybe, and maybe I'll start to like Charlotte FC probably not, but, or maybe I'll just become an inter Miami fan, which is okay.

Here's the one thing about messy. That is a bit of a game changer with MLS putting their games essentially behind a paywall on Apple TV this year, not getting that ESPN Fox mainstream exposure. They actually probably needed someone who was appointment viewing to get people, not in the longterm, but to get people to say, Hey, where are these games? Oh, they're on Apple TV. And just sort of act as a, you know, like a shot of vodka for everybody to sort of wake them up and say, Oh yeah, it's, it's, it's Apple. That's right.

Well, I want to go see messy. And even if they only do it once, then they remember that MLS is there because I think as the NHL saw, and you know, when you're not on ESPN and you're, you're, you're on a, a fringe network, you, you lose your place in the debate. And this certainly gets MLS it's placed back in that debate. I mean, we're talking about it. You and I have never talked about Charlotte FC, except maybe in the very beginning, but where you're talking about today, it does do that.

It does that for sure. I thought the only time I've ever talked about Charlotte FC is when I point out to people that the city of Charlotte didn't really care about major league soccer until David Tepper decided that he wanted 20 dates at bank of America stadium. Therefore, I have billions. It doesn't matter.

I'll pay whatever your entry fee is. Give me a team. They were well down the list for MLS expansion. And all of a sudden, I mean, somebody with, with billions of dollars now they're on top of the list, even though the org, you know, the community didn't really pine for it, but in fairness to them, they've embraced it. Their team's not amazing, but they've embraced it.

No, they've done a nice job with it. And, and it's, it's given the soccer culture there, which was, you know, sort of fragmented, something to coalesce around, you know, I, I still say, and you, you may disagree, but going back to even 2001, the failure of an owner to emerge here in a timely manner, who is willing to pursue MLS. It's one of the great tragedies of the triangle, from a sports perspective, it really was if the hurricanes had had an owner who had a nickel to his name, that you could have had incredible synergies with a winter summer double franchise, the same way that the Panthers have. And I, this market, I think, pre Charlotte FC, pre David Tepper was just right for MLS for a lot of the same reasons, because there's a strong soccer culture.

You saw what happened when the Kurds were good and relevant, before they, you know, turned on people in toxic. Yeah. And, and, you know, you bring all these various fan bases, college soccer teams, European soccer teams, you give them that that's a huge, you know, sort of element of soccer fandom in the triangle, you give them a central, you know, sort of pivot to revolve around, you've got something I really think that would have been a tremendous success, even playing at wake med, if they could just finally get the bridge built to what is now Fenton for a long time was just wetlands.

Yes. You know, but that ship has sailed because MLS is going to need to get to about 50 teams in two divisions. By the time they put two teams in North Carolina, we just we missed our shot. People were it was perfect. And we missed our shot. We missed it.

Steve, man. Hey, look, man, I was I was ringing that bell since 2004. I still have the shirts that says that say MLS tonight or 919 to MLS. I still I still have even that was. Yeah, that was even that was too late.

The time to strike was was when MLS was a younger league. And you could have put down roots and put that built a foundation in the sort of 2010 era. And then by now you'd be an established franchise. It's too bad.

It's sad. If Steve Malik was a billionaire, not a millionaire, and I'm not knocking Steve Malik. I believe that we would have vote. We would have won that race. We would have won that race to a franchise. They would have had to have improved Wake Med Soccer Park and built ultimately built another soccer specific stadium, probably downtown.

We saw all the all the kind of renderings of that. But that's what they knew is just wasn't there wasn't an owner. You mentioned, you know, if Peter Karmanos had been interested or if Tom Dundon had been here early and recognize that this is about the team in 2011. It's a different story. But, you know, given what's happened with the courage, maybe it's a good thing.

Malik wasn't. All right. Final thing. You're rooting for city tomorrow or Inter Milan. Oh, Inter Milan. I've got so many friends who are Inter Milan. Really? OK, go, go enter.

Go international now. Shout out to my classmate, Gabe Marcotti, a big Inter fan. Oh, I didn't know you were a classmate of Gabe Marcotti. How about that? All right.

Well, maybe you can broker an introduction. Hey, I thank you very much, Luke. I'll talk to you later. Have a good weekend. See you. But I should have congratulated him.

I did this via text. You know, he is a he's an Everton fan. They stayed up on the last day. So Everton, who has never been relegated to the second tier, survived. Nice. Good for them.