Welp…
I’ve been considering bumping for a bit now.
The question is… where do you think these guys play next year?
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DP World Tour and Asian Tour and maybe some to LIV 2.0 (if it gets a lifeline).
Only Rahm and Bryson have a shot at PGA with a Brooks style deal.
Betting AK and ‘Bjorn Hellgren’ to win the final (?) LIV event to hopefully give it the sendoff it deserves.
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It is a sad time for pro golf. The PGA won. It used all its power and bullied the competition away. Team golf was a great, no downside idea. Big winners from all this were pro golfers who made so much more money, LIV or PGA. Losers will be fans now that PGA established they are a monopoly
I’ve got a bet on Tabuena!
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The reality is that LIV was not a good product. You’ll blame the PGA Tour, but LIV had their opportunities to grow interest in what they were doing and never managed to. Nobody cared about team golf.
For most fans, if/when LIV folds, they will either a) be happy, or b) not realize it was still going.
Sports are meant to be monopolies. It’s not good to have a fractured sport. You still have to compete against other sports and everything else out there to get eyeballs on your product, so the basic competitive market forces will always be there.
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The PGA had their own issues the last few years. They couldn’t possibly stifle anybody. Heck, they just put their loudmouth President in hiding earlier this year.
The PGA Tour on the other hand… well they won.
But LIV had more than enough money to make something work. They chose to waste it rather than build a good product. They chose to lie and gaslight. They chose to pay players unsustainable amounts. They chose to alienate and make their brand toxic to so many. The last few months have been glorious for those of us who saw that debacle for what it was. The next few months will be the same way as these frauds pick up the pieces.
It still blows my mind they had all that money and programmed all these bots, but never programmed the bots to learn the difference between the PGA and PGA Tour.
Feel like LIV has been Bryson/Rahm/Niemann bets most of time then suddenly this week I was getting Surratt, Leishman, and the NPCs. Hopefully the model sensing the big guns have checked out
Sports are not monopolies. Soccer is by far most popular sport and not a monopoly at all. LIV did mess up but by far biggest blow was PGA basically using monopoly power to stop ranking points for long enough to kill it using obviously laughable reasoning
Soccer is a good counterexample, but lots of sports are monopolies. All the big North American sports have primary leagues that are just as much monopolies as the PGA Tour was or will be, and they are doing fine.
The PGA Tour still faces pressure to attract eyeballs from other sports / entertainment.
Sure but for about a year or two we got progress that took decades before. The new format? Thanks to LIV. More money to players? Obviously thanks to LIV? Pressure on broadcasts to improve? Thanks to LIV who were much superior in golf shown, graphics, stats, leaderboard, etc. PGA basically just copied LIV in so many things and they never would have if there wasn’t competition
There was no monopoly power stopping ranking points. That was 100% LIV not meeting the requirements. They still never meet the requirements, but the ranking system bent to give them some this year, and it still didn’t save the league.
What new format? Small, limited fields? Those stunk. And they are going away in two years. The “new” FedExCup? It’s basically the same as it’s always been, a bit worse if anything.
Even if I grant you these improvements (which are small, by any measure)… the cost to get them was really, really high. I guess in your view there was basically no cost, but for most dedicated golf fans the first couple years of LIV were really rough. Endless rumours about which player would sell out to the Saudis next, and a real fear that pro golf was having an existential moment. The Saudis were offering the best players in the world obscene amounts of money to go play on a tour that was making things up as it went along. It was a fascinating social experiment and it showed that, at the end of the day, a lot of pro golfers mostly care about money and don’t care all that much about winning PGA Tour events. And that makes it a lot harder as a fan to care about what they do.
The required attendance to big events to get all big golfers together is a massive change from the past 100% copied from LIV. Smaller tournaments as well
Pro golf was never in danger, it was at its best when LIV was surging. Two tournaments most weeks, more options to watch, drama over rivalries and who plays where. It was just PGA Tour, which so many writers essentially sponsored by PGA Tour constantly acted like made up all of pro golf
Again… they are moving away from this in 2028, because small, limited fields don’t work. It’s repetitive and boring. I’m still not feeling great about the two-track system they’ve proposed, but they will be full fields at least. And there will be no requirement for anyone (e.g. Rory) to play them.
Totally incorrect. That was the PGA Tour pulling all their strings to retain their monopoly and cripple their rivals using unethical tools. The propaganda through basically state controlled media was one way and the obvious power play pulled to get this nonsense was the big one. The explanations were hilarious nonsense. Datagolf had zero problem rating LIV and they didn’t either they just made up some stuff and found reasons to cripple them with the biggest blow that could stop them
No one really cares about the bottom 60 guys at all in a tournament. I am just talking about the PGA Tour copying the LIV model while they competed with them. Now that they are a monopoly again they can do whatever
It does seem to matter though. Underdog stories are a huge part of pro golf; it sets it apart from pretty much any other sport.
There isn’t much point in arguing with you about this, but it’s kind of funny how we talk about what would or would not have helped LIV “make it”. But it was pretty obvious all along that LIV was only going to survive as long as PIF continued to be content losing billions on it. Even if their events became wildly popular, there was no viable business model that involves paying Rahm and Bryson hundreds of millions of dollars. If they got OWGR points earlier, maybe this helps them a bit, and the Saudis end up funding them until 2030? But there was never a path to long-term viability. The only other possible outcome was for LIV to poach enough top players that the PGA Tour would have to give in to the Saudis… and I guess you think that would be a good outcome?
Every tour/league in the world has defined exemption criteria so players can earn their way in and off those tours in a meritorious manner. One comes along whose criteria was basically “who wants to take this wad of ethically dubious cash?” So yeah, they didn’t meet that requirement until finally having some promotion and relegation with the Asian Tour.
I mean the PGA did even without the OWGR points agree to a merger