The hidden motivation behind the PGA Tour’s massive new building

A stroll through the PGA Tour’s brand-new studio building in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., evokes an unmistakeable comparison.

If the building’s next-door neighbor, PGA Tour HQ, is the Death Star — then this building, PGA Tour Studios, is the Death Star II. They’re mirror images of one another, each hulking along the skyline in masses of dark-tinted glass, and each arming the PGA Tour to achieve its goals of interplanetary dominance.

If you ask those at the Tour, the brand-new campus, which opened officially on New Year’s Day, will be the Tour’s bridge (or should we say moat) to the future. Tour HQ will house the day-to-day operations of golf’s largest professional tour, and its next-door neighbor will house the day-to-day operations of the Tour’s moneymaking business: media.

“Look, the point of the building beyond anything is to bring better content to our fans. To increase the level of production, the quality of production, and the quality of content that we bring to our fans,” says Luis Goicouria, the Tour’s SVP of media. “Because ultimately, it all stems from that, right? That’s number one. We feel like, if you do that, your business grows.”

With the critical exception of the editorial operations of network TV broadcasts (those will remain with NBC and CBS), everything touched by PGA Tour “media” will pass through the Death Star II. That includes YouTube, player content, PGA Tour Live and International broadcasts, studio shows, and anything else that isn’t already paid for by CBS, NBC and Golf Channel. In a world where sports leagues are much closer to media companies than ticket salesmen, that makes the new PGA Tour Studios the most valuable space in the Tour business without a tee box or a putting green.

Nobody will dispute that the new facility is dazzling. The building features 165,000 square feet of space; seven studios (with the capacity to grow to 12), six studios with massive LED walls, eight control rooms, eight voiceover rooms, and, yes, a movie theater. Now that it is open, the new facility will house the entirety of PGA Tour Live broadcast production, allow for the creation of several international-specific broadcast feeds, and give the Tour the capacity to create multitudes more content than ever before, including for sports far outside of golf. In a twist, perhaps the most impressive piece of the whole facility is what isn’t in it: the Tour built 25 percent of the new facility to sit empty on opening day, future-proofing the building for whatever sparkling new gadgets become a part of the Tour’s media business in the next 25 years.

But those sparkly stats fail to close a critical plot hole: Why build another Death Star? Even among those in the know in sports media, there is little consensus for why the Tour elected to spend untold millions building a new facility for media, particularly as other leagues are shrinking the size of internal media, consolidating content efforts, and, in the NFL’s case, threatening to disband certain pieces of their state-run operation altogether. Even if the untold millions for the Tour’s new facility were greenlighted in 2019, long before golf’s cash craze reached a fever pitch and these sports-wide trends became established, the business case is curious. In a world where sports media companies are learning to construct whole programming schedules with fewer voices, smaller overhead and tighter budgets, is it smart for the Tour to be quadrupling down in those same businesses?

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Perhaps that thinking fails to understand a critical piece of the PGA Tour’s. The point of a brand-new studio building isn’t about high-tech studios or tech-company-adjacent office space; it’s about something much simpler: Control.

“I think it’s not just production control. I think it’s overall control of our product,” says Goicouria, the Tour’s SVP of media. “That includes the product and it includes production of our live events.”

It is no secret that media is the golden goose at PGA Tour headquarters — or any other moneymaking sports league in the modern world. Years of strong ratings and consistent viewership demographics have made sports some of the advertising world’s most valuable terrain, which means more money for the networks broadcasting sports, the governing bodies organizing them, and the athletes competing within them.

The good news for the Tour is that the value of sports television rights has never been higher. The collapse of the cable television model has only strengthened the value of sports rights, because sports rights have proved the only telecasts reliably able to deliver big audiences to networks in a post-cable world. As a result, leagues have made money hand-over-fist — and in increments multiplying every few years — for the better part of the last decade.

But that upper hand has established an undercurrent of risk. As the value of sports TV rights has skyrocketed, so has the percentage of the PGA Tour’s overall revenue tied to TV deals. If something were to happen to the value of those rights, or the networks paying for them, the Tour would be in big trouble.

This type of risk exposure thinking is, to be clear, a good problem for the PGA Tour, which has made billions off the new sports rights paradigm. It is also an unlikely problem; there is no evidence that we are living in a so-called “sports rights bubble,” and networks have still managed to turn profits off the outrageously inflated cost of TV rights. But, like an X-Wing flying into the center of the Death Star II, it is a problem with grave consequences, which brings us back to the new building in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.

In this sense, PGA Tour Studios is a physical piece of PGA Tour control. The building allows the Tour to dictate all pieces of its TV and media rights without outside production assistance. In one way, the new facility is a piece of risk mitigation, allowing the Tour to protect its rear should something happen to one of its longtime broadcast TV partners, NBC or CBS, at the end of the current rights agreement in 2029. In another, it is a piece of old-fashioned leverage, giving the Tour the freedom to pursue any future TV partner should another offer beat NBC or CBS’s. This kind of leverage is particularly key given the exploding world of sports streaming, where tech companies like Amazon, Netflix and Apple have shown a willingness to throw around silly sums of cash for sports rights, but have preferred not to entangle themselves with expensive production staffs.

Still, the new PGA Tour Studios isn’t solely a missile deployment in a proxy war. The building will serve real purposes in 2025 and beyond, including the expansion of ESPN’s PGA Tour Live and the continued growth of the Tour’s digital and social media offerings. These are real changes that the Tour hopes will shape public perception of pro golf, and by extension, add value to future rights deals no matter who comes to the negotiating table.

“It’s important that the Tour knows how to produce golf, and we produce more live golf than anybody in the world,” Goicouria says. “If you think about our next round of media negotiations, we may well do a deal with a company that doesn’t produce sports at all, or that does produce sports but doesn’t produce golf. [With PGA Tour Studios] we can essentially give them a turnkey product.”

Of course, control has other benefits for the Tour. Owning the levers of editorial and production gives the Tour a say in how most of its content looks to the world, allowing the Tour to protect its players, brands and sponsors. Control also protects the Tour from current and future competitors, ensuring Tour telecasts will have their own distinct, repeatable feel.

“The networks still have the talent. They still have the front bench with [NBC Sports lead producer] Tommy Roy and [CBS Sports lead producer] Sellers Shy, and that’s important to us,” Goicouria said. “But this building is really part two of a two-part process that started last year when we launched this new fleet of trucks. We felt like, this is too important for us to license. We need to own it.“

For now, though, there is nothing to do but wait until the fruits of this five-year PGA Tour gamble come fully to life.

The doors are open, and the Death Star II is fully operational.

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