The staid game of golf is not the usual backdrop of an international controversy. But since the PGA Tour stunned the world by announcing a merger with LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed upstart that had been luring players with lucrative contracts, it set off an immediate and intense backlash—with many of the sport’s players and fans expressing outrage over what it could mean for the future of the game.

Yet the deal is facing more headwinds than aggrieved golfers and an enraged public. There’s a formidable obstacle that could put the proposed venture at existential risk: American antitrust law.

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The admission flabbergasted some antitrust scholars. “You’re supposed to say this will increase competition, this will help consumers. You’re supposed to use all of this coded language. You’re not supposed to say this is gonna help us remove a competitor and that’s great. You don’t say that, and you certainly don’t say it publicly,” Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly think tank, tells TIME. “So I can only imagine what’s in the internal correspondence and discovery about the deal itself. Does this Saudi sovereign wealth fund want their internal correspondence exposed in a trial?”

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The PGA Tour is also likely to claim that they were losing money and struck a deal to save their business. “They could argue, ‘We’re a failing firm, if we don’t do this merger, we’ll go out of business,’” Stoller says. “I don’t know if that’s credible, but they could argue that.”

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