Jon Rahm’s LIV Individual Championship win came in front of an average audience of 89,000 viewers, per SBJ.
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Most of the time, TV ratings demand a difference.
Anyone can read numbers, but numbers don’t always tell you everything you need to know. Favorable timing, tails of pre-broadcast audiences, or lack of other options can increase a positive rating in the same way that a scheduling snafu, an added enemy, or a changed time zone can have a negative effect.
But the numbers for this weekend’s golf tournaments — each of the LIV championships and the PGA Tour’s ProCore Championship — need no such context. They were bad by any objective measure, raising the latest warning of a TV audience exodus driven by years of fragmentation and confusion in the professional game.
We’ll start with the PGA Tour, which averaged 69,000 viewers during Sunday’s final round at the ProCore Championship in Napa, less than a quarter of the audience that watched Sahith Theegala’s final-round victory at the same event last fall.
The ProCore Championship (formerly the Fortinet Championship, Safeway Open and Frys Open) didn’t get the same support the Netflix winner did in ’23. Instead, PGA Tour veteran Patton Kizzire won five majors in an easy field. The final round is broadcast 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. Still, the final number was small even by Golf Channel’s reduced viewership ratings, considering it ranked below the August average for Golf Channel’s telecast of any kind (76,000).
Kizzire’s win kicked off the FedEx Cup Fall Season which has been revamped by the PGA Tour to serve as a feeder series to the major tours. The Tour has moved away from its “wrap schedule” to increase its major events during the spring and summer months when the competition for sports TV is relatively light. But the downside of that change is that it risks leaving the fall months to the NFL and college football entirely — a change that could hurt the rest of the Tour’s dwindling TV ratings.
Yet, surprisingly, the situation was just as grim on the road at the LIV, where only 89,000 spectators tuned into Sunday’s final round of each league contest in Chicago, less than a third of the 286,000 who watched the league’s first event. on the CW in Mexico last February.
LIV’s ratings were close to their (already lost) averages, but the league didn’t have the PGA Tour’s built-in excuse for a tour winner, a weak point in its year-round schedule, or a cable-only event. Instead, LIV’s averages – which fell safely below the August average of respected cable channels such as Great American Family, Disney Junior and Up TV – came in the final round of what could be its biggest event of the year, with one of the highest performances of the league. -underrated stars looking to win big on the league’s standard broadcast network, the CW.
We’ll point out here that LIV and the PGA Tour faced a lot of competition in the world of sports this weekend, including the usual blur from NFL television and their in-house rivals, the Irish Open and the Solheim Cup. These things have undoubtedly combined to steal market share from the two largest pro tour televisions, but it is also fair to ask that, even given these storms, the telecast broadcasts from the two largest pro tours in the world should be able to generate viewers greater than the combined. 158,000 average viewers.
As tempting as it is to focus on these questions, or on more specific problems with the league’s television and competing brands, another bad set of ratings raises serious concerns about the health of the sports TV brand more broadly.
LIV’s entry into the sport made the majors incredibly wealthy and brought in billions in new investments, but it cost golf decades of public goodwill. Dozens of casual golf fans have reported quitting professional golf after being offended by the sport’s racism, turned off by the week-to-week lack of star power, indifferent to its new competition format or confused to play again, turned off. -and peace talks between the two sides, which have now dragged on for 15 months without clear solutions.
In the past nine months, executives at both agencies and several networks have expressed concerns about the slowness of the TV audience, but a growing number of questions about declining ratings have underscored a deeper truth: the numbers. be to drop.
“We are not ahead of ourselves when it comes to measuring things. It’s too early to be concerned,” CBS Sports CEO David Berson said GOLF in May, a point echoed in the coming months by NBC executives, LIV, and most recently, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan.
At the end of the 2024 regular season, SBJ data Josh Carpenter cited another PGA Tour network partner as experiencing year-over-year ratings declines of 15 to 17 percent, far outpacing the dips experienced by other sports properties as cord-cutting continues to increase.
“I think when you look at 2024, it’s important to note, and I will note, that the overall usage of our platforms has been consolidated,” Monahan said at the Tour Championship last month. “That’s a good sign for the PGA Tour and the connection we have with our fans.”
Usage data is good for optics, but ratings are still where sports teams and networks make their money. The value of a sports TV deal has a lot to do with the size of the audience and the volume of ad sales – in either case, the deal isn’t that important.
That’s why LIV has struggled to gain traction with advertisers and corporate partners, and why it was happy to extend its deal with The CW despite those same struggles to grow audiences. That’s also why the PGA Tour is spending the fall looking for new solutions for its broadcast, including its influential pilot program, the “Creator Classic.”
None of this is to say that pro golf is headed for a dead end, or that the losses of the past few years can’t be remedied by the combined financial power of the two major golf tours. It is something to say, however, that the problem of golf television ratings is real, and that each of the golf participants is responsible.
After the latest batch of ratings, it’s okay to say nothing.
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You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.
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