LIV Golf shows what happens when a niche sport goes to war with itself – rugby should take note
This R360 stuff is interesting for the thunder that isn't rolling. Normally, when you come across a sport being sized up for attack by an outside disrupter, you can't move for sirens wailing and cannons firing in opposition. That doesn't quite seem to be the case with
rugby
in this instance, which raises the fascinating question of why that might be.
It feels like a little more than just the usual rugby confidence in itself, although that is certainly part of it.
World Rugby
hasn't said anything about the proposed breakaway league spearheaded by former England international Mike Tindall. There hasn't been a peep out of any of the unions. None of the players' bodies have chirped up, either in support or in high dudgeon.
Since nothing is yet official and all anybody has to go on is a strategically leaked business pitch and a year-old podcast rumination by Tindall, it's maybe no surprise that everyone is holding fire for now. But somewhere in the silence lies the uncomfortable truth that has set this thing in motion in the first place.
Rugby is in a precarious place right now. Nobody can say with any confidence what it's going to look like in, say, a decade's time, but it probably won't look like this. Particularly in England, where three Premiership clubs have gone to the wall in recent seasons and seven of those remaining are losing money.
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England
is one of the great rugby nations on the planet and it is struggling to make the sport a viable business. Same goes for
Wales
, where the WRU is reducing its funding to two of the four regions. Same
Down Under
, where Rugby Australia recently announced a loss of $36.8 million (a shade under €21 million) for 2024 – and had the chutzpah to pass it off as good news because the
Lions tour
and next year's World Cup will bring in the bucks. So much jam tomorrow.
Into this world, the arrival of an idea that is apparently attracting new sources of funding can't be dismissed out of hand. Especially when some of the people interested are reportedly established owners from the big, sexy, moneymaking leagues – the NFL, the Premier League, Formula 1. These are the lads with a proven record of turning existing sports into spun gold. If they think they have a way of making rugby viable, there's probably more rugby people than you think who are willing to give them a hearing.
Instinctively though, it feels like the whole idea has two glaring issues. One, rugby is too small for a breakaway league to work. And two, rugby players aren't famous enough to build a breakaway league around. They're both variations on the same problem, but let's take them in order and use the most recent sports league disruptor as a case study.
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Bryson DeChambeau celebrates his birdie putt on the 18th hole with a record 58 to win the LIV Golf Invitational - Greenbrier at The Old White Course in August 2023 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Photograph:The first
LIV Golf
tournament took place this week in 2022. Since then, LIV has unquestionably gone on to establish itself as a player in the golf ecosystem. Whatever future the game has, LIV and its players will have to be dealt with, one way or the other.
It's maybe no surprise that some of the people involved in R360 have worked on LIV. Plenty of commentators pooh-poohed LIV from the start and didn't envisage it lasting the course. That it's still here at all will be proof enough for some of those involved that a successful template exists and that rugby is ripe for its application.
But the reality is that LIV has been a disaster for
golf
, simply because golf is far too niche a sport to be going to war with itself. By breaking away from the
PGA Tour
, LIV is running an unprofitable sports league that is bringing in pitiful broadcasting money and is only surviving because there's a bottomless well of Saudi oil cash to feed it.
Rugby is played seriously in nine countries on the planet. In only two of those is it the number one sport – arguably only in one, given that football at least has parity in Wales these days. Rugby's problems stem from the fact that there are already not enough people who want to pay to watch it, be that in person or on the TV. Slicing the sausage even thinner makes it highly unlikely that more people will suddenly think it's worth shelling out for.
That's especially true when you take the second lesson from the LIV disaster. LIV's signature achievement has been to slough off most of the interesting players away from the PGA Tour and hide them in a league that nobody watches.
Jon Rahm
,
Bryson DeChambeau
,
Brooks Koepka
,
Phil Mickelson
,
Patrick Reed
– these are (in some cases, were) some of the best players in the world and some of the most watchable. But they may as well be bog-snorkelling for their dime now, for all that anybody tunes in to see them.
And yet, whatever LIV's problems, at least the idea of following individual sportspeople is already established in golf. People don't follow rugby players. They follow rugby teams. The international game is the financial engine of the sport not because
Antoine Dupont
plays for
France
and
Sam Prendergast
for Ireland, but because millions of people are invested in the outcome regardless of who is the blue nine and the Ireland 10.
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Let's say – and this is entirely for argument's sake before anyone's lawyers get twitchy – that Dupont and Prendergast are R360 players in a couple of years' time, taking each other on in São Paulo, LA and Barcelona. Are you watching? Maybe. Do you care who wins? Not a chance. If it means that neither of them is playing for Ireland or France, will it stop you watching the Six Nations? Even less of a chance.
Rugby will change in the coming years. It has to. But the R360 proposal seems to want to (a) chop an already small sport into even smaller pieces and (b) build a new entity around a group of players who are pretty much interchangeable to all but the sport's most engaged devotees. LIV Golf gets away with it because the Saudis seem comfortable emptying barrels of money into it indefinitely.
Hard to imagine R360's backers aspiring to their munificence.
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