Why this is LIV Golf’s most important weekend yet

Sometime next week, when everyone turns their gaze to the azaleas, LIV Golf will have something to cheer about. The topic will have nothing to do with the dozen of its players chasing a green jacket at the Masters, but rather it will center around you, the golf fans. 

LIV Golf is going to have its best TV ratings in its three-year history. But what does that mean?

This weekend marks LIV’s annual domestic arrival — at Miami’s Trump Doral golf course — after playing four tournaments across the globe, battling difficult TV windows and competing for viewership with PGA Tour Signature Events. Those barriers will be eliminated this weekend as LIV finishes Sunday in the premier golf-viewing window, and up against the Valero Texas Open, a middle-tier PGA Tour event featuring just two of the world top 10. It will broadcast a domestic tournament for the first time on a network TV channel, Fox, further aligning it with the status quo of pro golf on TV. 

In a way, LIV’s product will be unshackled (from its self-induced constraints) and free to shine — like a runner who had previously been running with ankle weights. But just because you remove the weights doesn’t make you as fast as your competitors. That is what we are set to find out this weekend. Can LIV run as fast as the PGA Tour? 

The answer, to this point, has been a resounding no. Overall interest in the league has plateaued, to the point that two of its biggest stars, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau, didn’t offer many specifics this week when asked about the state of the league and its popularity entering Year 4. 

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Koepka said that “we all hoped it would have been a little bit further along, and that’s no secret.” DeChambeau highlighted growing sponsor interest before kicking the question to new CEO Scott O’Neill, who himself, in a separate session with reporters, admitted that the ratings from early-season overseas events were “disappointing.” Speaking with reporters in Miami, O’Neill played up the importance of this week.

“Is this weekend important? Of course it is,” he said. “This one is important in the U.S., for the U.S. broadcast, and it’s on Fox, and that’s an exciting opportunity. I have no problem being judged. Judge me this week, for sure.” 

The golf world absolutely will. And it will have an enormous data set against which to do so. Nearly every weekend a PGA Tour event finishes Sundays in the late afternoon to early evening. Without any weather delays, LIV will crown a champion shortly after 4 p.m., roughly an hour before the PGA Tour does the same in San Antonio. That TV window regularly produces a number in the 1.7 to 3.1 million range of average viewers when broadcast on CBS or NBC.

So, what viewership number would be considered a success for the Miami event? I asked my colleague James Colgan, who writes a weekly newsletter on all things golf media (and who has written about ratings terminology here). Colgan said Fox regularly draws upward of 4 million for its NASCAR telecasts in the same time slot in which the LIV tournament will air this weekend. If LIV cannot deliver 1 million average viewers in this window, Colgan said, it would suggest — albeit one week is a small sample set — that the league will struggle to reach viewers en masse even with the advantage of a national network partner.

While 1 million sets of eyeballs would still come up short of the PGA Tour’s average mid-season performance, it would be LIV’s biggest rating to date and perhaps an indication of what is to come in its domestic events later this summer. Conversely, if far fewer would-be viewers tune in, that, too, could be an indication of the league’s viability. 

This weekend, a picture will start to take shape. The PGA Tour has its lowest-wattage field in weeks, headlined by a pair of international players in the top 10 — Ludvig Aberg and Hideki Matsuyama. The biggest ratings-creator in the field is quite a ways down the list, No. 66 in the world, Jordan Spieth. Barring a Spieth victory or dalliance in contention, the Valero Texas Open likely will land in the 1.7 to 2 million average viewers range. Last year, when Akshay Bhatia won, the Sunday broadcast earned a number around 1.9 million. 

It may be easy to roll eyes when these numbers circulate but they are an important indicator of the health and popularity of the pro game. Future television deals (with Fox, for LIV, or with NBC and CBS, for the PGA Tour) are dictated by the overall value of the product right now and however many promises can be made about the product in the future. While just months ago it seemed like two warring leagues were destined for some form of unification, recent negotiations at the White House moved in the opposite direction. O’Neill reinforced the sense of a stalemate when he told reporters this week he doesn’t view a deal between the Saudi PIF (his league’s backers) and the PGA Tour as necessary.

Instead, the future of the pro game may be more separate, in which golf fans will vote with their TV remotes. In that case, if LIV is as popular as its biggest supporters believe it is, it should be able to garner a significant number when going against a smaller-ticket PGA Tour event. According to DataGolf, LIV Miami will feature four of the top 15 players in the world, all competing on a well-known (former PGA Tour) course. Generally, the combination of host-course intrigue, a high-end field and a Sunday-afternoon EST network TV window has delivered enough viewership to make men’s pro golf a very marketable entity. 

LIV finally has all of that, making now, as O’Neill plainly said, the time to judge.