Jon Rahm’s victory at the LIV Individual Championship came in front of an average audience of 89,000, according to SBJ.
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Most of the time, TV ratings require nuance.
Anyone can read the numbers, but the numbers don’t always tell you everything you need to know. A favorable timeslot, pre-broadcast audience tailwinds or lack of alternative options can boost a good rating in the same way that a scheduling snafu, extra opponent or changed time zone can affect a bad one.
But the numbers from this weekend’s professional golf tournaments — the LIV Individual Championship and the PGA Tour’s ProCore Championship — need no such context. They were bad by any objective measure, raising the latest warning of an exodus of television audiences fueled by years of division and confusion in the pro game.
We’ll start with the PGA Tour, which recorded 69,000 average viewers during Sunday’s final round at the Procore Championship in Napa, less than a quarter of the audience that tuned in to Sahith Theegala’s final-round victory in the same event last fall.
The Procore Championship (formerly the Fortinet Championship, Safeway Open and Frys Open) wasn’t helped by the same Netflix winner support it received in ’23. Instead, PGA Tour champion Patton Kizzire captured a five-shot victory over an easy field. The final round aired opposite the NFL on the Golf Channel, which reaches a much smaller audience than most of the traditional PGA Tour broadcasts on NBC and CBS. However, the final number was small even by Golf Channel’s diminished viewership standards, considering it ranked below the August average for a Golf Channel telecast of any kind (76,000).
Kizzire’s win kicked off a FedEx Cup Fall season, retooled by the PGA Tour to serve as a feeder series for the major tour. The tournament moved away from its “closing schedule” to beef up its biggest events during the spring and summer months, when televised sports competition is relatively light. But the downside of this change is that it risks leaving the fall months entirely to the NFL and college football — a shift that could further hurt the rest of the Tour’s declining TV ratings.
The situation was just as dire across the street at LIV, where alone 89,000 average viewers tuned into Sunday’s final round of the league’s individual championship in Chicago, less than a third of the 286,000 viewers who tuned in to the league’s first CW event in Mexico last February.
LIV’s ratings were closer to its averages, but the league didn’t have the PGA Tour’s built-in challenges of a Masters winner, a weak point in its yearlong schedule or an event that aired exclusively on cable. Instead, LIV’s averages — which fall safely below August averages on cable channels like Great American Family, Disney Junior and Up TV — came from the latest round of what could be its biggest event of the year. , with one of the highest in the league. prized stars claiming a big-money win at the home of the league’s typical broadcast network, the CW.
We’ll note here that LIV and the PGA Tour faced plenty of competition in the sports world this weekend, including a typical blowout from the NFL’s televised giant and a pair of domestic competitors, the Irish Open and Solheim Cup. These items undoubtedly combined to steal market share from the two major pro tour broadcasts, but it’s also fair to ask whether, even given these headwinds, telecasts from the world’s two biggest pro tournaments should be able to produce viewership greater than the combined 158,000 average viewers.
As tempting as it is to focus on these questions, or more specific issues with television and the league’s competing products, another dismal set of ratings raises larger concerns about the health of the sports television product more broadly.
LIV’s meddling in the sport has made the pros extremely wealthy and brought in billions in new investment, but it has cost golf dearly in terms of public goodwill. Many casual golf fans have reported tuning out of pro golf after being angered by the sport’s partisan rancor, turned off by its lack of weekly star power, disinterested in its new competitive formats or confused by the repetition, out. -Again the state of peace talks between the two parties, which have already stretched to 15 months without any clear solution.
Over the past nine months, executives in both leagues and some networks have slowly raised concerns about the state of television audiences, but the growing number of questions about declining ratings underscored a deeper truth: the numbers were falling down
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves when it comes to valuation stuff. It’s too early to worry,” the CBS Sports boss David Person said GOLF in Maya point echoed in subsequent months by executives at NBC, LIV and, most recently, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan.
At the end of the 2024 regular season, SBJ Josh Carpenter cited a PGA Tour network partner as facing a year-over-year valuation decline of 15 to 17 percent, far outpacing the declines faced by other sports properties as cord-cutting continues to spread.
“I think when you look at 2024, it’s important to note, and I will note, that the overall consumption on our platforms in total has increased.” Monahan said at the championship tournament last month. “This bodes really well for the PGA Tour and the engagement we have with our fans.”
Consumption data is good for optics, but ratings are still where sports leagues and networks make their money. The value of a sports TV deal is fundamentally tied to the size of the audience and the volume of advertising sold – without either, a deal isn’t as valuable.
That’s why LIV has struggled to gain visible ground with advertisers and corporate partners, and why it has wanted to extend its deal with The CW, despite the same audience development struggles. It’s also why the PGA Tour is spending the fall looking for innovative solutions for its telecasts, including its curious influencer pilot program, Creator Classic.
None of this is to say that pro golf is headed in a hopeless direction, or that the losses of the past few years are irreparable against the combined financial might of pro golf’s two major tournaments. it IS to say, however, that the TV ratings problem in golf is real and that each of golf’s stakeholders bears a share of the responsibility.
After the last round of evaluations, it’s okay to be open.
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You can contact the author at james.colgan@golf.com.
