LIV Golf is on the ropes
The numbers are in for LIV Golf's major broadcast TV debut and they aren't good.
Sunday's final round, aired on Fox and featuring some of LIV's biggest names in the hunt — Sergio Garcia, Bryson DeChambeau and Phil Mickelson — garnered an audience of just 484,000 viewers. In comparison, the PGA Tour's Valero Open — which didn't feature any of the Tour's big names in the hunt — drew an audience of 1.746 million.
This is troubling news for the breakaway tour. To this point, LIV could blame anemic ratings (sometimes in the tens of thousands) on low visibility (airing on the CW) or inconvenient air times. Who's staying up to watch a tournament live from Singapore?
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LIV had no such excuse this weekend. The tournament was held in Miami, aired on Fox and played opposite a Tour event which most of its best players skipped in preparation for this week's Masters.
To be sure, LIV has a broader geographic focus than the PGA Tour. Eight of its 14 events are played outside the United States. So yeah, garnering a large American audience isn't the end-all-be-all that it is for the PGA Tour. But still ... 484,000 for a Sunday afternoon event hosted by the President of the United States?
If, indeed, this was a make-or-break weekend for LIV, as many billed it, then LIV busted. And it matters a lot.
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Two years ago, when LIV and the PGA Tour announced a partnership agreement, the belief was the Saudi-backed tour had the American tour on the ropes. It had deeper pockets — much deeper — and was still in the process of poaching the Tour's best players. It already had Mickelson, Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson, and would soon add Jon Rahm — the world's No. 3 player at the time — and Bryson DeChambeau — the sport's No. 1 attraction, outside Tiger Woods.
To stay afloat, the PGA Tour needed to capitulate and end the war with LIV, or so the thinking went. Week after week, month after month, and now year after year, the question came: When would the two tours reach a settlement? Week after week, month after month, and now year after year, there was no news. There were meetings, empty platitudes about progress and not much else. Still, it was always when would a settlement be reached.
Meanwhile, the Tour went out and got billions in private backing. It also sat back and waited for LIV to show signs of life.
LIV Golf is now in its fourth season. ()
Now here we are in 2025, five events into its fourth season, still waiting for LIV to show signs of life.
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Just a week ago, it was reported that the Saudi Public Investment Fund, the financial backer of LIV, approached the PGA Tour with an offer for a $1.5 billion investment in return for a guarantee that LIV would continue on and the installation of PIF overseer Yasir Al-Rumayyan on the Tour's policy board. The PGA Tour rejected the offer outright.
Now, as the best from both tours ascend on Augusta National for one of golf's unified events, talk of reunification has gone from "when" to a hardly audible "if."
"As I can tell and you guys can tell, it's not happening anytime soon," Rahm said Tuesday at Augusta National.
And with the clock ticking on those giant contracts LIV used to lure those big names, such as Rahm, why would the PGA Tour act now?
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So far, LIV's strategy to buy eyeballs hasn't panned out. Turns out it takes more than a few big names to make people care about something. If that wasn't profoundly evident before this weekend, it is now.
And now, LIV Golf is the one on the ropes.
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