Professional sport is strangely resistant to competition

While professional sport supposedly thrives in intense competitiveness, it is oddly resistant to competition in the business sense.

When the Saudi-financed LIV Golf Tour set up recently in competition with the long-standing monopoly of the Professional Golf Association (PGA), all kinds of controversy and hang-wringing ensued. Some nasty words were bandied around, particularly aimed at those golfers who were lured away from the fold by the big money LIV was offering, and the two sides seemed completely irreconcilable.

So, it was quite a shock when it was announced this week that the PGA and LIV were going to merge. Implacable enemies suddenly became best buddies again, and some of the loudest voices raised against the establishment of the LIV Tour suddenly became hushed and tractable. Just about the worst that was said in public was that it wasn't good but that's the way the cookies crumbles, and c'est la vie, and all that. After all, all that Saudi money was going to stay in golf, so what's not to like?

So, overnight, rivalry and competition between the two organizations was set aside, and professional golf reverted to its default status of monopoly. But it really shouldn't surprise us: monopoly is the default status of pretty much all professional sports, and historically any attempts to break these monopolies have been summarily squashed.

Consider: The American Football League was created in 1960 to challenge the monopoly of the National Football League, only to merge with it ten years later; the World Hockey Association attempted to challenge the dominance of the National Hockey Association in 1972, but the NHL ended up absorbing the WHA in 1979; the American Basketball Association was founded in 1967 in opposition to the National Basketball Association, but was swallowed by the NBA, just three year later; and, way back in 1901, the upstart American League tried to go up against the dominant National League in baseball and, while it does still exist as a separate league, the two leagues quickly decided to stop cutting into each other's profits, and instead established the (poorly-named) encompassing World Series.

It has been a long time since any of sport's monopolies have been seriously challenged, until LIV made its move this year. But, within months, the monopoly has been restored, and competition safely sidelined. Because, remember, sport is not really about sport, it's about money.