LIV Golf Is Only Part of the PIF Story. Here's What’s Changing in Women's Golf

It can be easy to forget that the Saudi-backed golf story is bigger than LIV. As news broke of a separate men's tour taking shape, Golf Saudi was already laying the groundwork for its relationship with the Ladies European Tour. That relationship started in 2020, when the Aramco Saudi Ladies International became the first professional women's golf tournament played in Saudi Arabia.

A year later, the investment began to take a more global shape, with Golf Saudi and the LET expanding their partnership through a series of tournaments and playing opportunities for female golfers around the world. By 2022, that model had grown into the Aramco Team Series, bringing LET events to markets well beyond Saudi Arabia, making stops in places like New York, Las Vegas, London, and Hong Kong. In 2025, the PIF Global Series formalized that investment under the PIF banner, eventually delivering 29 tournaments across three continents.

But as of this week, that investment is entering yet another phase.

After five years of backing women's golf through tournaments around the world, Golf Saudi is ending the PIF Global Series after 2026 and concentrating its tournament investment around The Championship in London. Starting in 2027, the event will be co-sanctioned by the LPGA and LET and carry a $4 million purse.

Golf Saudi, the LPGA and the LET released a joint statement breaking down the changes, and there are two things you need to understand before we get into what's actually changing.

The first being that this isn't a cause and effect story with LIV Golf as the catalyst. To be frank, it feels almost impossible to talk about the PIF and golf without mentioning LIV, especially given the timing of these changes with the recent news of LIV's future. And yet, I want to emphasize that there is no need to draw a direct line between these two developments, because the nature of the relationships are vastly different and the investments are different. But when you do look at these instances together, there is a broader look at how the PIF-linked investment in golf is evolving.

The second thing you need to understand is that money isn't disappearing from women's golf or the LET, it's just moving from the calendar (i.e. events) to the ecosystem (i.e. literally everything else).

Now, let's dig into the details of this new announcement.

Beginning next year, the PIF Global Series, which currently operates as five events on the LET schedule, will be scaled down to one event co-sanctioned with the LPGA and LET called The Championship. The event has been staged in the UK since 2021, but this latest iteration will seemingly take the place of two events, the Aramco Championship that debuted this spring at Shadow Creek, and the ISPS Handa Women's Scottish Open, which has been dropped from the LPGA schedule after this year.

The 2027 venue for The Championship in London has yet to be announced, but it is scheduled for July 19–25, putting it in the middle of a significant stretch of the summer women’s golf calendar, between the Amundi Evian Championship and the AIG Women’s Open. It will also feature a $4 million prize fund.

But more importantly, it becomes the centerpiece of Golf Saudi's tournament investment in women's golf. It'll no longer be tied solely to individual tournament weeks, this particular partnership extends across the LET's season-long competition.

If you're not familiar, the LET Order of Merit is essentially the tour's season-long points race. Players earn points based on their finishes throughout the year, with the player who accumulates the most points crowned the season's Order of Merit winner.

With the terms of this new deal, Golf Saudi's multi-year involvement with the Order of Merit will extend that backing to every week of the LET season. Details surrounding what that support will look like week to week have yet to be outlined.

But there's another side to this re-structuring that felt a bit underplayed in the announcement.

The PIF Global Series is contributing $15 million in prize money across five LET events in 2026 alone. The LET's 2026 schedule projects more than €39 million in total prize money across 30 events, a record for the tour. So while Golf Saudi isn't pulling its financial support from women's golf altogether, four tournament slots and the prize money attached to them are still disappearing from the LET calendar, and that distinction matters.

The new Order of Merit partnership broadens Golf Saudi's support across the season, but it doesn't recreate four tournaments. The LET now has to figure out how to replace those events as well as the sponsors, prize money, and commercial value attached to them. That's the tension sitting underneath this announcement.

Golf Saudi is making a strategic shift in how it invests in women's golf. From its perspective, the emphasis is moving toward one major championship and season-long support of the LET. Golf Saudi CEO Noah Alireza described the approach as one focused on "investing intelligently" and building an economic model that makes the women's game commercially stronger and creates a pathway that lasts, saying, "We have learnt a great deal over the past few years about what works, and our focus now is on investing intelligently and building the right economic model—one that makes the women's game commercially stronger and creates a pathway that lasts."

For the LET, though, the math is a little less philosophical. Four fewer tournaments means four fewer opportunities that someone else now has to fund. And that may ultimately be the most interesting part of this restructuring.

The question, and ultimately the problem, is now centered around whether the LET can replace the volume of investment it is losing while making the quality of the investment it is keeping work harder. Additionally, the challenge becomes finding more money while also figuring out how to make the game less dependent on any one source of it, too.