PGA Tour and LIV Golf TV ratings reveal striking audience data

At the halfway point of the 2025 golf season, there’s an awful lot of talk about momentum in pro golf, and for good reason. For both sides of golf’s great Tour War, it’s an advantage to be rolling downhill.

The problem is that there isn’t a clean definition for how “momentum” looks. Is it locking down sponsors? Delivering big crowds? Social media engagement?

For better or worse, TV audience data is the best way to know how golf’s tours are performing in the real world — and in this week’s Hot Mic newsletter, we’ve got a treasure trove of it ready for your consumption.

Below is a collection of Nielsen ratings data for LIV and the PGA Tour on seven head-to-head weeks through the first part of 2025, giving us a clear view into how the landscape between the two major tours has changed at the halfway point of the 2025 season.

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Editor’s Note:

All the information you’re about to read comes from the Nielsen Big Data + Panel, which is slightly different from the traditional Nielsen audience averages you’ll see on social media.

All Nielsen data is a representative sample. Traditional audience averages are calculated using a device attached to TVs in 42,000 households. Big Data incorporates those 42,000 households with data from 45 million “digital devices” like Smart TVs. Both numbers track the same measurement — average audience — but they go about it slightly differently.

In theory, the larger sample size means that the Big Data + Panel gives a more accurate picture of sports TV audiences. In practice, Big Data numbers tend to skew slightly larger than traditional average audience metrics.

We feel okay reporting this information because the data is consistent and accurate across the entire dataset, and because the Big Data + Panel is generally accepted within the industry as accurate and consistent. It is the expectation from many within the sports TV industry that Big Data will soon replace Nielsen’s traditional averages as the so-called “currency” of TV ratings. If you’d like to read more about ratings methodology, you can click the link here.

THE HEADLINES

Through SEVEN head-to-head Sundays, the audience difference between golf’s two main tours is clear. On Sundays in which the two tours have held events in 2025, the PGA Tour is averaging 3.1 million average viewers on CBS/NBC, while LIV is averaging 175,000 on FOX/FS1/FS2.

That means the Tour’s final-round TV audiences on the two major networks (excluding Golf Channel) are, on average, 17.78 times as large as LIV’s final-round TV audiences when the two products are head-to-head.

For a cross-sport comparison, that’s about the difference between the NBA’s mammoth opening-night coverage on TNT (3 million average viewers) and late-January’s Sharks-Kraken game, which was ESPN’s lowest-rated NHL telecast of the 2025 season (175k). To get a better glimpse of how that looks, check out the handy chart I made below.

BEST-CASE SCENARIO

Things get a little better for LIV if we extrapolate the data. LIV airs the vast majority of its tournament rounds on FS1 and FS2, a pair of cable of networks that attract smaller audiences than national over-the-air networks. The upstarts have averaged 475,000 average viewers in two Sunday telecasts on FOX, the national, over-the-air broadcast network, compared with just 63,000 average viewers in five Sunday telecasts on FS1.

If we compare the Tour’s final-round averages on CBS/NBC to LIV’s final-round averages on FOX, the Tour’s broadcasts are 6.52 times as large as LIV’s — still a big victory for the Tour, but by a smaller margin than data inclusive of FS1/FS2.

This point underscores the importance of the structure of LIV’s deal with Fox Sports. A greater number of events on the FOX broadcast channel — the league will have only five of 14 events on the main FOX network — could help the league’s popularity. It also points to the challenge of LIV’s international schedule: With so many events taking place overseas and airing overnight in the U.S., it is hard to deliver consistently big ratings or the kind of schedule reliability that viewers crave.

Of course, FS1 is hardly a desert for sports TV ratings. FS1 has regularly delivered average audiences in the millions for football and basketball games. The difference is that those sports can generally attract viewership on any network, while smaller/less established leagues generally lean on big networks to help attract big viewership.

GOLF CHANNEL

Golf Channel gives us a glimpse into the battle between the PGA Tour and LIV unfolding on cable. During LIV’s North American events — the closest comparison for the two sides given LIV’s schedule — Golf Channel’s PGA Tour lead-ins are drawing 506,000 average viewers, while LIV is drawing 101,000 average viewers on FS1/FS2. That means the PGA Tour’s cable lead-in draws five times the audience as LIV’s full-length cable (FS1/FS2) telecasts, roughly in line with the Tour’s lead over LIV when comparing broadcast networks.

Down-to-the-minute data

PEAKS AND VALLEYS

Average viewership is the measurement of the average viewers per minute, but golf telecasts have another important metric: Peak viewership, or the number of people watching during a broadcast’s most-watched moment.

If a golf telecast is performing the way it should, the audience graph will look a bit like the S&P 500 during a bull run: Consistently rising as time moves on. The “peak” of the graph should come right around the completion of the final round, as a tournament’s most dramatic moment occurs and a champion is crowned.

While average audience is the currency of TV ratings, peak audience is also important to the finances of golf TV. Some tournaments will sell advertising based upon the hour, with some advertisers paying specifically for final-hour spots in the hopes of reaching the largest possible audience.

STRANGENESS

It is odd, then, to see the minute-by-minute data for LIV Miami, the most-watched LIV broadcast to date. The peak audience from that telecast on FOX came at 2:12 p.m., an hour into the network’s five-hour broadcast window, before dropping off for the remaining four hours.

While any number of reasons can impact a telecast’s viewership, one theory behind Miami’s early peak and subsequent decline is that LIV lost viewers to the PGA Tour. On the Miami Sunday, LIV’s peak came just minutes before NBC’s telecast from the Valero Texas Open went live, and its audience dipped by 18 percent in the three hours after NBC went to air.

The minute-by-minute data takes on a more traditional shape for LIV Mexico City on FS1, with a smaller (but still noticeable) peak at the conclusion. Still, that telecast (137,000 average viewers) was one-third the size of Miami’s.

NEWSLETTER

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ON THE OTHER HAND

In the broadcast windows opposite LIV’s North American events in Miami and Mexico City, the PGA Tour’s minute-by-minute charts multiplied sharply as the tournament reached its conclusion.

At the Valero Texas Open, which ran counter to LIV Miami on FOX, the audience jumped from less than a million at the telecast’s 2:30 p.m. start to more than 4 million at its 5:54 p.m. peak.

In that Valero Texas Open telecast — the clearest TV battle between LIV and the PGA Tour to date — 3.4 million average viewers tuned into the 45-minute stretch from 5:15-6 p.m. resulting in Brian Harman’s victory — a 54.5 percent increase over the day’s average of 2.2 million. During LIV Miami’s closing stretch that afternoon from 2:30-5 p.m., 570,000 average viewers tuned in, less than the day’s average of 603,000.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.