‘They’ve burned $5 billion!’ Three years in, Paul McGinley delivers scathing verdict on LIV Golf
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The Ryder Cup legend says he can ‘count on one hand’ the number of people he knows who watch LIV Golf.
Paul McGinley has dropped a brutal assessment on LIV Golf’s lack of progress since its inception back in 2022.
The breakaway tour has had billions of dollars pumped into it from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to lure some of the biggest names in the game, but it has, on the face of it, struggled to truly break through and resonate with audiences.
Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson, Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson all left the traditional circuits at various times to sign mega-money contracts and play in the 54-hole limited field events that feature a shotgun start.
Asked during an appearance on the Sliced podcast about where LIV is now versus where it might have been expected to be, McGinley told hosts Ben Coley and Sam Harrop that “it’s kind of where I thought it would be”.
The victorious Ryder Cup captain explained: “I never really thought it had legs on it to be cutting edge and new and amazing. I don’t think it’s an exciting way of playing golf. It certainly doesn’t light my fire. And to walk against the history of the tours was always going to be a very, very difficult thing to do.
“So I’m not a fan of it. I never have been. I’ve always been aligned with the traditional tours. And it’s very, very hard to show me a metric that says that it is successful, whether that be commercially, whether that be TV viewing figures, whether it be with all my friends.
“I’m always doing market research myself. ‘Do you ever watch LIV?’ I mean, honestly, I can count on one hand in the last three years that people would say, ‘Yeah, I watch it all the time.’ I wouldn’t even get to five. And that’s people in the golfing world.
“It’s very unproven for me. And I know the attack dogs on social media will tell you otherwise, and they’ll come up with all kinds of stuff – but there’s no metric out there to say that it is really successful, that it’s doing great, and it’s about to pop.
“By all accounts, they’ve burned $5 billion and that’s from a very, very strong source. Are they going to continue doing that? I keep saying, Saudi Arabia is not a charity. They are not out there to give money away. They’re out there to create businesses. I get that. But at what stage do you invest $5 billion into a sporting franchise that don’t have any metrics to say that it’s going to be successful?”
While it has its detractors, there is plenty of online support for LIV, particularly, as McGinley says, on social media. Reports from fans on the ground at LIV events are also, largely, positive.
But one thing that was always seen as an obstacle to LIV’s progress in its first three years was the fact that it was without a major TV deal.
The CW network came on board, but it was difficult to read too much into the figures. However, now that a deal with Fox has been struck for 2025, more accurate comparisons can be drawn against the PGA Tour.
But rather than being the break needed to finally hit the big time, McGinley is of the opinion that it “could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back” if viewing figures continue to underwhelm.
“Will they be able to produce television figures, on a major network, anywhere near what the PGA Tour will do?” the four-time European Tour winner added. “And if they do, well, then that would be a metric to say, well, that’s OK there.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
So far, McGinley’s assessment is proving correct. The PGA Tour drew in more than 1.7 million viewers for Brian Harman’s Valero Texas Open win back in April compared to the 484,000 people that watched Marc Leishman’s triumph in Miami at the concurrent LIV event.
With a new CEO recently appointed, there is no sign that LIV is going anywhere anytime soon, but can it really continue to survive without making a bigger dent with TV audiences, particularly in the US? Time will tell.
The Sliced podcast is available on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.
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Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson moved to LIV Golf in big-money moves.
