PIF Trades LIV Golf for the 2034 World Cup
Sinner's Ninth Straight Beating
Jannik Sinner did not just beat Novak Djokovic into the Wimbledon final. He beat him the way a landlord evicts a tenant who still thinks the lease is his. The score was 6-4, 6-4, 6-4. Sinner won 88 percent of his first-serve points and hit sixteen aces. Centre Court was left to wonder when exactly this stopped being competitive. Alexander Zverev gets the honor of finding out on Sunday. He is the first German man into a Wimbledon final since Boris Becker in 1995, and the head-to-head is not encouraging: Sinner leads 10-4 and has won the last nine meetings in a row. Zverev has not beaten this man since before the streak even had a name. At this point it barely functions as a rivalry. It is more like a standing appointment Zverev keeps losing. Elsewhere, Spain's 88th-minute strike from Mikel Merino eliminated Belgium and set up a World Cup semifinal against France on July 14. And Fox's telecast of the USA-Belgium round of 16 drew 30 million viewers, the largest American soccer audience on record.
PIF Trades Chaos For Ownership
Buried under all that theater is the week's more revealing move. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund that has bankrolled the kingdom's push into global sport (everyone calls it PIF), is walking away from LIV Golf funding after the 2026 season. Chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan is stepping down from the LIV board, replaced by an independent board. Four years, more than five billion dollars, and the plan to force the PGA Tour into a merger never closed. That plan is now officially retired without a wedding. PIF spent all that money without getting the one outcome it was chasing. But read the exit as strategy, not surrender. For four years, PIF was renting chaos inside someone else's league. It could disrupt the PGA Tour's world, but it never controlled the rules of that world. Now it is redirecting that capital toward the 2034 World Cup and Expo 2030, events Saudi Arabia will host and control on its own terms. That is the whole difference: no rival league to out-negotiate, no merger to chase, just a fixed date and a stadium with Saudi Arabia's name on it. Buying disruption in a mature Western league is expensive and open-ended, with no finish line. PIF walks away from a four-year, five-billion-dollar golf war with no merger to show for it, and puts that money instead into a stadium in Riyadh with a date already locked in: 2034.
LIV has until 2027 to find replacement money, with no PGA Tour merger on the table. Three doors remain: independent survival, quiet absorption into the Tour, or a slow wind-down. Riyadh already picked its own door, and it doesn't have LIV's name on it. Everyone spent four years arguing about golf. The World Cup was the actual investment thesis all along.