LIV Golf’s best chance yet at a competitive Sunday with the PGA Tour fell flat last weekend.
The Saudi-funded golf tour, which held its first stateside event of the season at Trump Doral in Miami last weekend, drew just 484,000 viewers on Fox for its final round Sunday.
Conversely, the PGA Tour averaged 1.75 million viewers for the final round of the Valero Texas Open on NBC, more than three times greater than LIV’s audience.
Sunday marked the first time that both tours have seen their final rounds go head-to-head on major broadcast networks in the United States. Prior to this season, LIV Golf signed a multi-year media rights agreement with Fox Sports that, so far, has resulted in some embarrassingly low viewership figures.
Despite losing badly to the PGA Tour, Sunday’s round was actually the most-watched in LIV Golf history. Previously, the league’s high watermark was 432,000 viewers for the final round of its opening event in Mayakoba last season, which aired on The CW.
By that measure, Sunday’s numbers are a silver lining for LIV. But in reality, the fact that Sunday’s round was its best-ever audience, and it still lost to the PGA Tour by over one million viewers, says it all.
Not only did LIV Golf finally get its chance to show what it could do in a favorable television window on one of the largest broadcast networks in the country, but it had plenty of star power on its leaderboard compared to the PGA Tour. LIV’s biggest stars like Bryson DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson, and Jon Rahm were all in contention during parts of Sunday’s round. The PGA Tour’s leaderboard had the murderer’s row of Brian Harman, Andrew Novak, and Ryan Gerard; not exactly household names.
It should be noted, the PGA Tour did see some significant audience decay on Sunday compared to last year’s final round window. Sunday’s final round broadcast on NBC declined by nearly 20% versus last year’s playoff finish between Akshay Bhatia and Denny McCarthy. The combined audience between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf on Sunday would’ve approximately equaled last year’s PGA Tour-only viewership.
LIV will have a few other opportunities to compete with the PGA Tour head-on later in the season, but those PGA Tour fields will likely include many more stars than last week’s event in Texas. The rogue tour has scheduled three stateside events head-to-head with the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup Playoff tournaments, which feature the PGA Tour’s top players.
The breakaway tour is seeing its influence over men’s professional golf slip away, and there’s no sign it’ll bounce back.