LIV Golf chief plays it cool in face of heavy criticism as PGA Tour continue to win ratings war

As LIV Golf’s early-season numbers continue to underwhelm, CEO Scott O’Neil is remaining calm in the face of increasing pressure to bring eyeballs to the product.

Golf’s TV ratings war is once again under the microscope after the vast difference between the recent viewership drawn by the PGA Tour and LIV Golf showed just how far apart they are.

According to Josh Carpenter of the Sports Business Journal, the Players Championship averaged 3.6 million viewers and peaked at 6.2 million. The playoff, in which Rory McIlroy saw off JJ Spaun for a second Sawgrass title, began at 9am local time and still managed to draw 1.5 million across Golf Channel and NBC’s streaming services, which Carpenter described as a “big, big number for that time of day on cable”.

Contrast that with the average of 34,000 pulled by LIV Golf on the same day for the final round of their latest event in Singapore, which was won by Joaquin Niemann and Sergio Garcia’s Fireballs team.

That was all the evidence Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee – and one of LIV Golf’s most ardent critics – needed as he ripped into his latest tirade.  

“The PGA Tour is killing it and LIV is dying a slow costly death,” he wrote on social media.

“LIV players have seller’s remorse. They want the meritocratic cachet that competing at the highest level confers but they have shown in their choice to play for LIV that they’d rather have the money first and sue for the cachet. Trying to blur the distinction between gift and reward.

“The audience sees right through them, and chooses to watch those that prefer to play for history and legacy.”

Of course, those opposed have pointed out that the first few events of LIV Golf – which averaged just 12,000 viewers for its season opener in Saudi Arabia, per the Neilsen ratings, despite their new home on Fox Sports – are played on the opposite side of the planet to the United States.

Which is why LIV’s new CEO is taking a more relaxed approach to matters.

Scott O’Neil, who took over from Greg Norman in January, believes there is so much more to the league than TV ratings.

“The golf is who we are, but it’s really about the festival around golf that makes us different,” he said during a CNBC Converge Live chat in Singapore.

“You can bring your family, you can bring a date, you can bring friends.”

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But it’s hard to ignore TV ratings – particularly when they are as far apart as they are. O’Neil remains unperturbed.

“We are different, though. We’re a global sports league,” he explained.

“Our first 4 events we were in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, then we went over to Adelaide, Australia, then Hong Kong and now we’re in Singapore.

“For those of you who’ve spent time in New York, you might know that some of our events are played at 3 in the morning, so it might not register on traditional rating scales as you might register a US sports league.

“And we’re quite OK with that, especially now that we’re starting to get more and more distribution around the world. We’re getting quite a few viewers in the timezones we are in.

“Over time, this notion of being the F1 of golf is one I like a lot. Other than LIV, F1 is the only truly global sports league. They have teams and we have teams and it’s very different for golf to have a team sport. You’re definitely playing in a premium market like F1 has.

“Our hospitality experience is clearly like the paddock or a level better in terms of opportunity. Walking the pit row is very akin to walking our driving range before an event. It’s as close a parallel as you can find. But remember we’re three years in and I bet they’re 80.”

The next real test will come at the beginning of April, when the league heads to Trump National in Florida for LIV Golf Miami, while the PGA Tour’s stars – including Collin Morikawa, Jordan Spieth, Ludvig Aberg and Tommy Fleetwood – will be fine-tuning their games ahead of the Masters at the Valero Texas Open.

“It’s a big week as LIV is playing at a well-known course like Doral and in the same window on big Fox,” Carpenter wrote. “Ratings for both will be highly scrutinized.”