{"id":437011,"date":"2025-12-10T04:12:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T04:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/437011\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T04:12:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T04:12:12","slug":"scrutiny-league-gets-is-well-deserved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/437011\/","title":{"rendered":"Scrutiny league gets is &#8216;well-deserved&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The great divide in men\u2019s professional golf is becoming more entrenched with each passing year.<\/p>\n<p>Despite lacking any viable commercial path forward, the Saudi-funded LIV Golf continues to throw money at a failing product. The rogue golf league keeps writing checks for hundreds of millions of dollars, yet struggles to attract hundreds of\u00a0thousands of viewers in the United States.<\/p>\n<p>In Year 1 of its brand new TV deal with Fox Sports, LIV <a href=\"https:\/\/awfulannouncing.com\/golf\/liv-viewership-disaster-pga-tour.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">continued to get trampled<\/a> by its PGA Tour competition. Of the 17 rounds to air on the Fox broadcast channel, LIV Golf averaged just 338,000 viewers per telecast last season. Broadcasts on FS1 fared far worse, averaging just 63,000 viewers through the midway point of last season. On the other hand, the PGA Tour averaged 2.66 million viewers per telecast across 26 events on NBC and CBS.<\/p>\n<p>One could\u2019ve reasonably surmised that the additional exposure from the Fox deal would\u2019ve meaningfully helped LIV Golf reach more fans. But its viewership on The CW, the league\u2019s previous broadcast partner, hovered in the 200,000-300,000 viewer range, much more than the FS1 broadcasts and not terribly far off from the Fox windows.<\/p>\n<p>At this point, it\u2019s clear that LIV has been a failure from a commercial standpoint in the United States. And surprisingly, the league\u2019s new CEO Scott O\u2019Neil is willing to admit as much.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c[The U.S. is] the dominant No. 1 TV and sponsorship market in the world, and there\u2019s not a close second,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sportsbusinessjournal.com\/Articles\/2025\/12\/08\/livs-scott-oneil-on-fox-deal-road-ahead\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">O\u2019Neil told Sports Business Journal<\/a>. \u201cAnd so, the scrutiny we get in the U.S. is well, well-deserved, and we certainly take the challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To be fair, LIV did start its Fox deal behind the eight-ball. The agreement was announced so close to the beginning of the season, that Fox didn\u2019t have the most favorable television windows to give LIV. That could potentially change as the 2026 season approaches.<\/p>\n<p>LIV is also putting most of its focus on attracting young talent, rather than poaching current PGA Tour players, in a bid to build for the long-term.<\/p>\n<p>Will that lead to more eyeballs? So far, the results aren\u2019t there. But what\u2019s becoming more apparent is that the LIV-PGA split is here to stay, regardless of the former\u2019s ability to draw a television audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The great divide in men\u2019s professional golf is becoming more entrenched with each passing year. Despite lacking any&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":437012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[1430,19413,202187,119612,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-437011","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-liv-golf","10":"tag-liv-on-fox","11":"tag-scott-oneil","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115693325062174290","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}