Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF deepens funding in girls’s skilled golfing

Saudi Arabia is deepening its funding in girls’s skilled golfing.

The Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, introduced on Wednesday that it’ll turn out to be the identify spouse of 5 occasions that can happen at the the Ladies European Tour.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

As a part of this newest deal, the excursion will revamp the 5 occasions, which shall be jointly rebranded because the PIF Global Series. The occasions happen in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Seoul, South Korea; London; Houston; and Shenzhen, China.

“PIF continues to be a catalyst for the growth of women’s sports, committed to delivering long-term transformative impact by inspiring and empowering female athletes at every level,” Alanoud Althonayan, head of occasions and sponsorships at PIF, stated in a remark.

The made over event layout will function staff and person competitions going down concurrently.

The Saudis also are injecting further cash into the prize swimming pools, with a collective handbag of $13 million around the 5 occasions.

Alexandra Armas, CEO of the Ladies European Tour, stated the partnership with PIF has helped elevate the extent of pageant within the girls’s recreation and provides gamers extra alternatives to be successful at the global degree.

Saudi Arabia has been aggressively making an investment in skilled sports activities in recent times as a part of its imaginative and prescient to diversify the rustic’s economic system clear of oil. Despite the truth that Saudi Arabia has been gradual to present Saudi girls rights, the ones investments have incorporated spending large cash on global girls’s sports activities.

Last May, the fund signed a multi-year partnership with the WTA Tour, the ladies’s skilled tennis group, to develop the sport and enhance girls’s advantages within the league.

And in March, PIF introduced it’ll totally fund the excursion’s maternity fund, which might permit girls to take as much as a yr of go away totally paid.

However, PIF’s foray into males’s golfing has been extra sophisticated.

Nearly two years in the past, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan and PIF Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan gave the impression on CNBC, pronouncing a merger between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour. But that deal has but to occur, in spite of the newest push via President Donald Trump to deliver the 2 events in combination.

The Aramco Korea Championship kicks off Friday in Seoul.