LIV Golf Hires Madison Square Garden Exec During PGA Tour Talks

An attorney who spent 30 years with Madison Square Garden’s parent company has taken a job as senior legal counsel for Saudi Arabia-backed upstart LIV Golf.

Marc Schoenfeld “has been retained by LIV Golf on a contractual basis,” LIV said in a statement. The move makes him LIV’s first US in-house lawyer. Most of LIV’s current legal staff led by general counsel Louise Savage are based in London.

Schoenfeld was most recently a senior vice president and associate general counsel for Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp., a sports and live entertainment company that owns the New York arena of the same name and other venues. He leaves MSG Entertainment as its top lawyer, Jamal Haughton, also prepares to depart for the top legal job at Charter Communications Inc.

In his new role Schoenfeld enters a legal and business saga that for more than a year has generated disputes among prominent players, geopolitical intrigue, and regulatory scrutiny. LIV and the PGA Tour first fought in court before reaching a truce that saw them pursue a complicated combination that could change the top tier of the sport’s professional landscape.

Schoenfeld spent more than 30 years in a variety of legal roles at MSG Entertainment and its predecessors, all of which are led by billionaire James Dolan and controlled sports teams and cable networks.

He declined to discuss his new role. In a recent message posted to Schoenfeld’s LinkedIn profile, the former MSG lawyer called LIV an international golf league that’s “modernizing and supercharging” the sport.

“Our mission is to build on and complement the existing format of professional golf and take it to new levels of excitement and engagement with generations of fans,” Schoenfeld said.

But that mission has been complicated by how the PGA Tour, a Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.-based nonprofit organization, will integrate its operations with LIV, which is owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Riyadh-based Public Investment Fund. The proposed union between rival golf circuits is also the subject of an antitrust review by the US Department of Justice and a congressional inquiry led by Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

Legal Scorecard

Records released over the summer revealed how the deal between both golf encampments came together while also raising potential antitrust red flags that could jeopardize completion of the transaction, which calls for Saudi Arabia’s PIF to acquire a stake in a new entity formed with the PGA Tour.

A US government filing in August shows that Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld has been retained by PIF to advise it on the congressional probe. Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck is handling broader government relations and lobbying work for PIF on a one-year contract valued at $1.3 million with Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr and Covington & Burling counseling the PGA Tour.

Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz has taken the lead for the PGA Tour on corporate components of its PIF tie-up talks. Public filings show that DLA Piper has been paid $240,000 by the PGA Tour through the first half of this year to lobby for the organization on numerous issues, including the LIV deal.

High-profile litigators from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Keker, Van Nest & Peters were retained by the PGA Tour for its courtroom showdown with LIV and some of its players, which sought outside counsel from Baker McKenzie; Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. Both sides moved to dismiss that litigation in June.

PGA Tour staffers were reportedly told that month the organization had incurred roughly $50 million in legal fees and watched its reserves dwindle due to other rising costs stemming from the challenge mounted by LIV, necessitating an end to their competition. But ongoing obstacles remain to resolving regulatory concerns and creating a new framework for golf’s elite, including demands from players that they have equity in any new structure.

The PGA Tour is now considering other options. Bloomberg News reported last month that several US investors have been courted by the organization as part of an effort to ease political opposition to a deal with a foreign party like PIF.

Ari Emanuel, chief executive officer of Endeavor Group Holdings Inc., confirmed at the inaugural Bloomberg Screentime conference last week that the growing sports, media, and entertainment giant had submitted a bid to the PGA Tour.