Is the TGL destined or doomed? Inside golf’s polarizing new indoor league

Mike McCarley leans back in a folding chair and gazes upon his new kingdom.

After a few long seconds, he speaks.

“So,” he says. “What do you think? How is it different than you expected?”

The question isn’t intended to be difficult, but it is. Partly because McCarley has staked the latest chapter of his professional career on the answer, and partly because nothing remotely similar to McCarley’s kingdom has existed in golf’s half-millennium of existence.

We are inside a tremendous white box nestled in the palms of Palm Beach (Fla.) State College — a building neither large enough to be a concert venue nor small enough to be a tennis center. In a few weeks, the structure will have a name, the SoFi Center, and inhabitants, the first competitors of a new simulator golf league called the TGL, of which McCarley is founder and CEO.

Now the space is just loud, and not only from the steady thump of music pulsing from the speakers. Construction crews are hard at work, their tools producing the unmistakable banging of metal against metal. If the air-conditioning has been installed, it is not fully operational; a thick layer of South Florida humidity hangs over the proceedings.

Among McCarley, the noise and the heat is a scene both laughably ostentatious and impressively efficient, an unholy marriage of artificial turf and artificial golf that stretches more than 90 yards long and 50 feet high. It is the TGL’s playing field, a swirling array of gadgets, gizmos and screens that come to life every few moments like slot machines.

In a sense, that’s a fitting analogy for McCarley’s new toys, because they are gambles — the physical provenance of tens of millions wagered on an idea to transform professional golf.

Perhaps as a measure of self-preservation, everyone I speak with at the TGL is careful to point out that McCarley’s simulator kingdom has been an idea for much longer than it has been anything else. A blueprint didn’t exist for a new golf league in the internet age. Discussions began with a blank sheet of paper.

“A cocktail napkin,” McCarley says with a slight grin.

Now, though, McCarley’s vision is a physical place; the setting for golf’s metamorphosis from a lazy weekend waltz into a caffeinated primetime blitz. His kingdom is the TGL, where the golf course has a shot clock, the green spins like a record table and a 64-by-53 video screen (that’s feet, not inches) is judge, jury and executioner.

There is no question where the operation is headed — the TGL barrels closer to launch with each altered piece of rebar — but the same certainty is extended to almost nothing else. Questions swirl around the upstart league, from ownership structure to competition to long-term financial stability. TGL has tried to answer a few of these questions and has earned the right to navigate through some others, but the big questions, the ones necessary to the TGL’s continued existence? The answers to those are unknowable.

This is how, eventually, I answer McCarley’s question … with one of my own.

“I’m sorry if this is crass, but, how are you guys planning to make money with all this?”

McCarley laughs. A real, honest laugh. His face lights up, teeth glinting through a square jaw, salt-and-pepper hair set over blue eyes. He surveys his kingdom again and pauses.

“Well…”

ON THE MORNING of TGL’s media day last month, Mike McCarley’s kingdom is a circus.

Roughly a hundred attendees arrive via hotel shuttle bus to the arena (the parking lots have not been paved), where they are quickly shuffled inside through a back door. An atrium hosts a welcome lunch, and guests are encouraged to collect team-branded goodie bags before they depart. After a few minutes of chitchat, TGL executives launch a welcome program in the competition area, complete with strobe lights, a live DJ and a smoke machine. The scene is an exercise in sensory overload, like an espresso shot before a stroll through Times Square. It is so antithetical to the decorum of everyday pro golf that it takes several hours to remember the truth: The TGL’s most important investor is everyday pro golf.

PGA Tour executives are absent from the media day, but the Tour itself was one of the first TGL proponents, signing off its players’ media rights to the new league and working with the league to build a charter flight program that will transport players between Tour and TGL events during the regular season. According to the TGL, the league is presented “in partnership with the PGA Tour,” though the financial specifics of the arrangement have not been publicized.

In some ways, though, the business case for the Tour isn’t about financial growth. The sport’s professional tours understand that fan engagement ultimately funds their purses (because fans watch on television, and television networks pay the tours based on ratings). The tours also understand that LIV has made pro golf only more fragmented and confusing — a shin-kick to the fanbase at least partly responsible for falling TV ratings.

While reunification grinds through the gears of American bureaucracy, the tours have tried various efforts at bolstering the sport’s flagging entertainment product. It’s hard to say if these ideas are serious reform efforts or mostly for show while the real details get hammered out in board rooms far away from the public eye — but there is little argument from either side that pro golf as a spectator sport could use a shot in the arm.

An onslaught of commercials is at the heart of the angst, powered by hulking television contracts that will make players, networks and golf executives billions over the decade. The contracts have necessitated a volume of advertisements so intense that a not-insignificant portion of the sport’s online community treats them as a trauma bond.

In recent months, the PGA Tour unveiled its most concerted effort at improving its entertainment product, launching a pilot program aimed at experimenting with fan-recommended TV changes and soliciting the advice of a council of golf influencers on content creation, among other tweaks. These changes came in addition to the Tour’s experiments with direct-to-player incentives like the PGA Tour’s much-maligned Player Impact Program, a contest aimed at paying those who generate the most interest in the Tour, which crossed the $200 million threshold of money paid in 2024. The TGL, which reportedly will pay out a $20 million purse in its opening season, sits somewhere between these two initiatives.

At the league’s core is the belief that golf’s personality problem is a television problem. The TGL believes players haven’t reached Patrick Mahomes levels of fame because golf’s telecasts are logistically challenging, slow-moving and inaccessible. The TGL’s primetime broadcasts, live microphone feeds and nonstop action promise to fix each of these problems, theoretically clearing the way for the sport’s stars to step into the limelight and reach scores of young golfers who started playing golf during the pandemic.

McCarley is uniquely qualified to make these kinds of assessments. He spent most of his career tweaking Olympic sports for television under legendary NBC showman Dick Ebersol. In his more recent roles as the president of Golf Channel and co-founder of the TGL, golf has fallen under his purview.

“Every few years when the U.S. Open goes to the West Coast, it’s in primetime on the East Coast — ratings spike,” McCarley says. “You see what happens in the Ryder Cup, when the guys are in a team environment, and they’re really playing off each other. And then you also see the downside of it. You see, there’s weather, you’re beholden to sunrise and sunset.”

“You put it all together,” he says, looking around the TGL arena, “…and this is what you get.”

If he’s right, McCarley’s idea will double as a cash machine. The TGL will become the Tour’s foremost marketing vehicle, redefining its star players on their own terms and giving fans an entertainment-focused alternative to 72 holes of stroke play (not unlike what NFL Films has done for football). In this theoretical, McCarley will berth a new revenue stream into pro golf, make millions for the TGL’s big-wig institutional sports investors and the $50 million, purpose-built facility in Palm Beach will be the bargain of all bargains.

But that leads to another thorny question facing TGL.

What happens if McCarley is wrong?

ON A BRISK November Monday in Manhattan, four professional golfers step onto E. 43rd Street wearing an unusual kind of camouflage.

Their work clothes.

It’s broad daylight in one of the busiest neighborhoods in the Western Hemisphere, and this quartette of 17 victories, three majors and $150 million in career earnings is sporting their professional uniforms — a polo, trousers and hat each stitched with sponsored branding. The people of New York are here, too, thousands filling the streets in the pre-Thanksgiving bustle. But if these golfers are famous, it’s clear they are not well-known.

Cameras swarm the players as they reach the asphalt, part of a marketing shoot for the TGL’s hometown franchise, New York Golf Club. Because only one team member is actually from New York, the cameras seem hopeful to capture an authentic interaction between the golfers and the public — perhaps a light-hearted back-and-forth with an NYPD officer or a selfie with a wide-eyed fan. Before long it’s clear the cameras are doing the opposite, discouraging wary onlookers from engaging with the players.

For more than 30 minutes, each of the four golfers — Xander Schauffele, Rickie Fowler, Matt Fitzpatrick and Cameron Young — strolls the streets with minimal interruption.

If ever a moment explained the depth of the challenge and opportunity facing the TGL, it is this one. The league wants, and to some extent needs, regular people to know these four golfers when they walk down a New York City street. The casual golf fans, the not-really-golf fans, the 43rd St. pedestrians? This is who the TGL wants to reach.

And perhaps just as critically, the TGL needs these four golfers to reach back.

Golf is a famously lonely sport, and professional golf has long projected its loneliness as a kind of rugged individualism. Players formed the modern PGA Tour in 1968 after revolting from their previous overlords, the Professional Golfers Association, but spent years fighting to protect their status as “independent contractors.” At the new tour, players put themselves partially in charge, establishing a voting minority on the first-ever “tournament players division policy board,” but structured the competition around the concept of eat-what-you-kill.

They built the PGA Tour as a ruthless meritocracy, believing that competitive integrity and individual freedom were the best ways to ensure long-term financial solvency. Those ideals prevailed for the better part of six decades, even as the financial might of professional sports concentrated around the TV business, and most major professional sports flourished under consolidated ownership. (In an ironic twist, the same player empowerment argument would be parroted more than a half-century later — sometimes down to the exact phrasing — in creating the largest competitive threat in PGA Tour history: LIV Golf.)

Even today, with TV rights paying for well more than half of the PGA Tour’s annual revenue, professional golf preaches the economics of competition far above the ideals of centralized power. Three major professional tours lord over men’s professional golf, four separately owned and operated governing bodies run the majors, and a loose system of exemptions and favors allows the 250 or so high-level professional golfers to have varying amounts of control over their schedules.

The benefits of the system are obvious. Players are the proprietors of their own destiny, capable of earning life-changing fortunes in days and choosing to work as they wish. They directly generate most of the Tour’s revenue each year, and are free to pursue outside earning opportunities like The Match and overseas events like the Dubai Desert Classic, which pay millions in appearance fees. For the lucky few who find job security on the Tour, the windfall is lucrative. The average PGA Tour salary in 2024 was $2.1 million, and the average salary of the top 10 players on the PGA Tour was $12.1 million. Both figures exclude bonuses and endorsements.

Over the years, the downsides of the golf business, though, have also become apparent. Unlike most other major professional sports, pro golfers do not receive guaranteed contracts, and the sport is structured such that most players are no more than a few bad months away from worrying about their competitive future. (As if to emphasize the point, in 2023, LIV was denied entrance into golf’s world rankings system, and by extension the major championships, in part because the tour failed to show adequate amounts of “player turnover.“) At the player level, pro golf’s fortress of solitude has birthed a playing class of iconoclasts — players who have, at times, stymied the pace and breadth of much-needed change because it threatened their competitive interests, and chose to support their own bottom line over the good of the many. This spirit of self-preservation has yielded its own problems in the all-important worlds of fan and media engagement, where some players have opted to contribute sparingly — or not at all — with the justification that such efforts “distracted” from their golf.

LIV’s explosion into golf has provided this line of thinking with a heavy dose of whiplash. In January, the PGA Tour welcomed its first-ever group of equity investors, a group of sports scions dubbed the Strategic Sports Group, which pumped $1.5 billion into the Tour with the promise of modernizing the entertainment product. Nine months later, the Tour pushed through heavy player opposition to ratify its third batch of significant competitive changes in as many years, this time reducing the number of full-time PGA Tour cards in 2025 from 125 down to 100. The new structure aims to make the Tour’s events smaller and denser, making telecasts more propulsive and star-heavy. It also hopes to make the Tour dramatically more competitive, imbuing each week with a stark reminder that the vast majority of those who play golf professionally are paid based on their performance in one metric: their scores.

In many ways, the Tour has tripled down on its original theory in the last several years, believing that a ruthlessly competitive model will yield the most compelling product. The difference this time is that the Tour is judging the success of the changes not on lower scores but larger television audiences. (The Tour saw double-digit losses in TV audience size in 2024, according to Nielsen.)

Players and leadership are hopeful the new changes will thread a needle: making golf more centralized and more interesting. But in reporting this story, it struck me that the opposite could be true; that in a world where the Tour is considerably more competitive, players might view the public-facing functions of pro golf — emotion, media engagement, personality — as a distraction. In that world, the Tour’s efforts to fix the ailing pieces of its entertainment product would only set it further back, and the TGL’s efforts to paint pro golf in a new light would fall flat.

“I mean, we’re all aware of the general landscape of golf in the media and whatnot…” Cameron Young, New York Golf Club’s quietest star, told me a few minutes after returning inside from 43rd St. “But golf is a very difficult game, and it’s my job to be good at it. So I spend a lot more time on that part of it.”

Young has not won on the PGA Tour. His future playing status is dependent upon a top-100 slot in 2025.

THE ANSWER to the money-making question turns out to be a story.

In 2011, NBC acquired Golf Channel, and Dick Ebersol placed McCarley in charge of the new business. One day, the young NBC exec met with Arnold Palmer, who helped found Golf Channel more than a decade earlier.

Near the end of his life as golf’s most beloved entertainer, Palmer delivered a message to McCarley.

“Wherever this sport goes,” Palmer said. “Just make sure TV’s in the middle of it.”

So, how does the TGL make money? By putting TV in the middle of it. McCarley says the league’s business model is centered around extracting revenue from TV rights and sponsorships. As for how much a simulator golf league could be worth? Well, that’s a trickier question.

Here’s what we do know: A TV deal with ESPN will be the biggest piece of TGL revenue in year 1. The league will receive a rights fee from the network to broadcast events on Monday and Tuesday nights, and has signed on big-time corporate sponsors like SoFi, Samsung and Genesis to help boost the bottom line. The league will also generate smaller sums from international TV deals and ticket sales in the 1,500-seat arena.

Details about the ESPN pact are hard to come by. McCarley says it’s a “multi-year deal” but he stops short of providing details on the rights fee size — the real sign of ESPN’s confidence in the TGL.

“You can look at other comps from other sports, but the reality is this is brand new,” he says. “You’re not gonna say, X plus Y equals Z — it’s just not gonna work that way.”

Like most start-ups, the TGL is likely to lose money in its first year. McCarley’s kingdom, the SoFi Center, is by far the largest expense. Building the arena cost a reported $50 million, nearly five times as much as the TGL’s initial estimate of $11 million back in 2023. Costs jumped in early 2024 after a catastrophic setback — a generator failure just weeks before the league’s first scheduled launch that caused organizers to pursue a more permanent structure.

With less than three weeks until launch, the arena was still many long days from being complete. On the day I visited, the area surrounding the stadium was packed to the teeth with construction vans, but notably devoid of signage or parking. Inside, some areas still needed drywalling, and the arena’s full array of seating had yet to be installed.

“I’ve been involved in 10 different Olympics, and I would tell you that in a few of them, I’d walk into the opening ceremony and they were still painting and landscaping,” McCarley said as the sounds of power tools picked up inside the arena. “Luckily we started our painting and landscaping a couple of weeks ago.”

The good news is that the questions McCarley can answer are getting smaller. Construction will be at least close to completion on opening day. The competition component is close to fully baked. The league already has done half of its scheduled 50 rehearsals before opening night, and is on track to complete all 50. The technology works, and the roof’s structural integrity is not in question.

“I think it was a blessing in disguise,” Tiger Woods, one of the league’s initial founders, said of the first arena failure — a point reiterated by several TGL players and personnel. “We were rushing to get it ready.”

The bad news is that, as opening night grows closer, the list of questions McCarley can’t answer only grows.

What if the league can’t make money? What if the public’s appetite for simulator golf isn’t there? Or, asked differently, what if the public’s aversion to simulator golf is real? What if golf’s personality problem is a bug that the TGL doesn’t or can’t fix? What if golf’s personality problem isn’t a bug, but a feature — if commercial blandness is a piece of the genetic makeup required for most pro golfers to reach their professional potential? What if some players view their involvement as evidence of their commercial success rather than incentive to build upon it? What if some players view their full-throated involvement as a distraction from their golf, rather than an investment in it?

And, of course, the doozy: What if McCarley’s wrong? What if this grand experiment falls not on him, but on a group of players over whom he has no control?

“I think it all falls on the players,” Billy Horschel said from his corner of TGL media day. “Listen, with all the companies who have signed up, with everyone who’s put in the hours to make this something special, if the players are not entertaining and not engaging — if they’re not talking and dissecting stuff — we’re not going to be successful.”

Horschel, who will play for the TGL’s Atlanta Drive and has long been generous with fans, seems like one of the players best suited for the new league. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was the only player to address his responsibility as a competitor in the new league in the weeks preceding the TGL’s launch.

For many players, the prospect of running PR for the TGL before launch is uneasy. The league needs its players to be successful, but the opposite isn’t true. Golf’s stars may be camera shy, but they are finely tuned to criticism, and they have been trained to protect themselves first. While the TGL would love a few full-throated endorsements, the players recognize the only thing worse than a boring simulator golf league is a phony one propped up by half-assed support. In other words, there’s a balance between player obligation and responsibility. Horschel seems to grasp the nuance.

“We have to be entertainers,” Horschel said. “We have to take ourselves away from what we are at PGA Tour tournaments inside the ropes and we have to be different. We have to show more of ourselves in here than we would out on the course.”

At stake is nothing more than the PGA Tour’s future. It should come as no surprise to learn that many of the same names behind the TGL’s star-studded investor class (Arthur Blank, Steven Cohen, Marc Lasry, Fenway Sports Group) are also newly minted part-owners of PGA Tour Enterprises. Their investment in the Tour will survive even if the TGL doesn’t, but the investment in golf is, like most investments, contingent upon making money. Flushing untold millions down the drain is, charitably speaking, an undesirable way to kick off the partnership.

McCarley detests this kind of stakes-setting. Before he was an executive, he spent years in NBC PR and marketing. He may be a start-up first-timer, but he’s still careful to avoid rake-stepping on the eve of launch. He dodges goal-setting for year one, sharing only his hope that golf is bigger after the league launches than before it.

“There’s gonna be people who love this, and there’s gonna be people who hate it,” he says. “It’s not going to be for everybody, and we understand that.”

He looks somewhat detached as he says this, staring out at what has become of his cocktail-napkin idea.

He’s given years of his life to the TGL, cared about it so much that it will soon stop being an idea altogether. It will be a real live thing, and neither the credit for its success nor the responsibility for its failure will belong to him alone.

“How was this different than I thought it’d be? It was harder,” McCarley says. “I mean, how do you eat an elephant?”

He pauses for a moment, letting the question hang in the air.

The answer, it seems, is just beyond our grasp.

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