Greed is good is the label once affixed to football’s Premier League when the Murdoch money started to roll in. Now similar wealth is being heaped upon golf, and surprise, surprise, it is Saudi Arabia splashing the cash.

Not content with taking over Newcastle United and staging mega events such as multi million dollar world title fights, the Saudis have mischievously bankrolled a series of invitational golf tournaments which now rivals the long established PGA Tour.

Understandably this has angered the golfing establishment.

Seduced by the Saudi shekels, a number of leading players, among them Phil Mickelson, Lee Westwood, Dustin Johnson and Graeme McDowell have jumped ship to join the "rebel" LIV Tour, which was launched last week at the Centurion Club in Hertfordshire. 

Apparently it was something of a shambles, despite the $20 million (£16.5 million/€19.2 million) lobbed into the kitty by the Saudi paymasters.

No matter. The sportswashing will continue to hang on the line with golfers now expensively employed not simply to win tournaments or enhance their careers but to help transform the image of a despotic regime, and mask Saudi Arabia’s medieval practices and contempt for human rights.

I am not a golfer but I do enjoy watching what is surely the most pleasant of all pastimes.

Major tournaments are always played in salubrious settings, like Florida, never in the back end of Kazakhstan. Anyone who has been to Augusta, home of the US Masters, will tell you that it is sport’s Garden of Eden.

Like the majority of courses, it is breathtakingly picturesque. Golfers surely are the most privileged of the sporting fraternity.

Wherever they go the golfing elite are feted, cosseted, showered with freebies from sponsors and at the highest level handsomely rewarded.

Golf does not need another major tour. Those participating are mercenaries. They do the sport an injustice. Don’t they know when they are well off?

Already those who have elected to join what has been described as a "sordid circus" (fronted incidentally by Australian legend Greg Norman) have become golfing pariahs.

Mickelson for instance has been labelled a "Saudi stooge" in America where the New York Post carried a picture of him in a Masters green jacket with dollar signs and headlined "Greed Jacket."

There is no doubt that golf has been split asunder at a time when the sport is in a bunker. TV ratings have fallen and attendances are down, notably for the European Tour events, one of which was held in the United Arab Emirates.

Yet the money keeps pouring in, swollen almost obscenely by Saudi Arabia’s seemingly limitless petrodollars.

Good to know that one player who has resisted leaving the PGA Tour is Northern Ireland's Rory McIlroy. He says he is disappointed that some players "took the easy way out" by defecting but understood why some older ones like 50-year-old Mickelson were tempted and succumbed to the millions on offer.

"But this couldn’t have come at a worse time," he added. "The sport is already fragmented and this situation makes it worse" he told Sky News.

The International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach says that while the rebel golfers may be barred from many tournaments they still will be welcome to participate in the Olympic Games.

Really. With no money involved how many will tee off in Paris remains to be seen.