New Tour Threatens PGA, But Are The Numbers Legitimate?
The latest threat to the PGA, the new professional golf tour LIV, finally made its debut on network television. The tour debuted on YouTube in 2022, but this year they finally get to be broadcasted on real television on the CW.
Over the past weekend, the players teed it up from Mexico, and the entire world was not particularly watching.
The Viewership That Might Be Real
A report from Josh Carpenter from the Sports Business Journal showed that LIV had 286K viewers on Saturday and 291K viewers on Sunday. These are the two most important days of the tournament, and they were lacking viewership.
Estimated golf viewership from the weekend, per a source: LIV Mayakoba: Saturday 286K, Sunday 291K PGA Tour: Saturday 1.61M, Sunday 2.38M — Josh Carpenter (@JoshACarpenter) February 28, 2023
The report also showed that the PGA Tour had over a million viewers on Saturday and Sunday. The PGA and LIV have been fighting back and forth for almost a year now, but it clearly shows that people are not interested in LIV at all.
Of course, LIV was going to come out and have say in the report that they had hardly any viewers. LIV announced on Friday they averaged over 3.2 million viewers for the three days, and one day was not even televised on network television.
They also stated that the tour brought in over one million viewers on Saturday and Sunday.
Is LIV Making Up These Numbers?
There is something weird going on here. It’s kind of crazy to go from a report of having around 300,000 viewers to having a million. I bet only five percent of people in the country knew that LIV was having a tournament over the weekend.
LIV saw the horrible numbers that they brought in, and they knew something had to be done about it. The PGA Tour is still the king of golf, and getting blown out of the water in viewership by them when you want to become them is not great for the brand.
Let’s tell the truth for one quick second nobody cares about LIV, and it’s not going places that everyone who is a part of it thought it would. The guaranteed money for players is great, and the team events look pretty cool, but at the end of the day, the golf fan just has no interest in watching it.
Golf is all about the four majors and some tournaments on the PGA Tour but it’s not like football where people are dying to watch it all year. Football is always trying to make new leagues like the XFL and USFL to keep the sport going forever, but golf is not the same thing.
The PGA Tour is playing the Arnold Palmer Invitational, which is a tournament dedicated to one of the best golfers to ever step on a course. The tradition and the legacy still and will always make the PGA Tour the best golf tour in the world.
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