We always knew TGL week six would tell us a story about golf’s simulator start-up league.
The question was: which story?
Would it be the tale of a smash hit — the rare new sports league capable of finding instant commercial and popular success? Or would it be the latest in a proud lineage of pro sports failures, a league failing to catch on with the broader sports world despite its PGA Tour support?
In our world of gray, perhaps it isn’t a surprise to learn the answer falls somewhere between the two. The TGL is not a smash hit, despite a few weeks of compelling TV and strong ratings reports, but it is not an utter failure, either, its business buoyed by a surprising amount of institutional support and a steady, if not spectacular, base of support from the golf fanbase.
The ratings tell a similar story. Monday’s Presidents Day triple-header (featuring two matinee matches and an evening bout split between ESPN and ESPN2) delivered some of the league’s smallest TV ratings to date, delivering 347,000 (ESPN), 377,000 (ESPN) and 357,000 (ESPN2) average viewers, respectively. Those holiday numbers, while only a fraction of the 1.05 million who tuned in for Tiger Woods’ debut in week 2, represent modest gains over the broadcasts in the same windows last year, and fall generally in line with expectations for the holiday, time slot and home network.
Of course, it’s probably not in the TGL’s long-term best interests to have its telecasts vacillating between a quarter-million and a million average viewers on any given week (if not growth, consistency is a sought-after trait in the TV world), even if this most recent batch of TV numbers weren’t totally out of character with the schedule. One of the league’s biggest advantages is its partnership with ESPN, which has broadcast the league’s matches on Monday and Tuesdays as part of an agreement that sees the TGL cover production costs. The so-called “Worldwide Leader” provides plenty of cover (and a high floor) for a sports property emerging into the marketplace, and the Monday and Tuesday primetime slots given to the league have mostly paid viewership dividends.
ESPN likes live sports, which help to attract consistent audiences and, by extension, consistent money-making opportunities. But it is incumbent upon the TGL to show that it can continue to deliver those things. Monday’s ratings won’t dissuade ESPN brass from choosing a similar primetime slate in year two, but both network and league would surely prefer if the numbers stayed closer to those at the beginning of January.
The latest ratings batch from the TGL comes as its “official partners” with the PGA Tour have seen a boost of their own in television. CBS’ final-round coverage of the Genesis Invitational drew 3.4 million average viewers, up five percent from last year, the latest in a recent trend of ratings bumps for the Tour after a disastrous 2024 saw nearly one-fifth of its TV audience disappear. It’s hard for anyone to say definitively how TGL, whose average viewer is more than a decade younger than the PGA Tour, may be helping the bottom line, but so long as the numbers are good, it might not matter.
Comparatively, ratings have remained a struggle for LIV, which aired on the main Fox broadcast network for the first time last weekend for its final round from Adelaide, Australia. Adelaide should boost the league’s U.S. TV audiences after decidedly bleak season-opening numbers from Saudi Arabia (19k average viewers over the entire weekend), but its place in the golf TV hierarchy as of Feb. 19 remains beneath its simulator siblings.
For now, that’s the best story the TGL can tell. And considering where the floor was just seven weeks ago, that’s not half-bad.
