James Cooper
Hello and welcome back to a brand-new podcast that's trying to do things differently by giving you the inside track on the data and analysis that reveals how the business of elite sport really ticks. In response to the need for an independent voice in such a cluttered and noisy environment, Leonard Curtis has launched the Business of Sport series, aimed at providing validated sets of financial data plus professional commentary for major sports all in one place. It's a one-stop shop for cutting-edge sports research. As part of their multi-channel campaign, we're delighted to welcome you to the second episode of our first podcast series entitled Sport, Structured. Put quite simply, it's all the facts and figures you need to know from the people who know what they're talking about, and backed by Leonard Curtis who have more than three decades of expertise in recovery and turning things around.
We started our series by examining the state of rugby union and cricket domestically, in conjunction with market-leading financial studies led by Leonard Curtis. Now, as they say, timing is everything, and Leonard Curtis have turned their expert eyes to the world of elite golf with a groundbreaking new report that shows exactly whether the sport is positioned nicely on the green or looking up from the bottom of a bunker. I'm delighted to say I'm joined here in the wonderful new UCFB Manchester broadcast studio by three titans whose knowledge and insight is contained within the Leonard Curtis Golf Report. First up, someone who's an expert in restructuring and knows what it takes to flourish in elite sport, Alex Cadwallader. Alongside the brawn of a rugby union winger is the brains of an academic in Professor Rob Wilson. And finally, next to me, someone who knows everything there is to know about professional golf and what's going right now — Sky Sports golf analyst and coach to a host of big names, Simon Holmes. Simon's also the man who wrote the foreword to the golf report, declaring there's no version of the future for golf that looks like the past. What a place to start. Welcome — lovely to meet you, Simon.
Simon Holmes
Thank you so much.
James Cooper
Alex is very firm on being positive, and that's what we try to do here. We try to make this data-led, try to make it research-backed. We try to come up with recommendations for where sport might go. But starting like that, it sounds like golf right now doesn't know where it wants to go, or doesn't know who needs to lead it, or what the future looks like. There are so many unknowns right now and it's moving by the second, by the day, isn't it?
Simon Holmes
Yes. So many times I think we probably look back at changes ten years after they've happened and try to analyse them. Well, in this case, golf hasn't changed much up until that 2021/2022 season when LIV came in and really challenged that existing ecosystem, that model. And so this is a real-time view. Headlines are being made as we speak right now. New dynamics are coming. We don't know what will happen to LIV, the challenger. We do probably know what will happen to the PGA Tour. But if it does win, how will it behave towards the rest of the ecosystem? Those are all the things we're going to uncover.
James Cooper
In your foreword, you can almost see the passion seeping through, because this is a game that you're obviously massively in love with and enamoured with — but also worried about where it's all going, what's going to lead it, and what it's going to become. Is that fair?
Simon Holmes
I think that is fair. I think we've seen it in other sports and other commodities where that big money arrow comes slowly, but once it stops on something, it can easily destroy the place it lands. As a passionate golfer, I would like to see the best players play against each other on the best courses for something that's meaningful. I would like to see the top support the bottom in golf. The bottom of the pyramid needs to have new talent and new playing opportunities. There's a lot of quality in the game from what you can learn as a young person. I would hope that the beneficiaries at the top will really remember where they came from. The PGA Tour has always been amazing at supporting charity — $4 billion gifted in the United States to very important charities. That's a little bit of the sport's signature. For a mum and a dad to play with their kids, you don't want that to be damaged.
James Cooper
Alex, I talked about research being cutting-edge. You've got your timing absolutely right on this. How much work went into deciding golf was going to be the next place that Leonard Curtis placed its hat?
Alex Cadwallader
We'd always been focused on it with the changes Simon has mentioned. The fact that you had a disruptor coming in with some financial might and challenging the way that golf was to be run and then absorbed by the audience — it was a prime sport for us to look at. With my background, I've always asked: what is LIV's business model? What are the metrics going to show that there will be a return on this investment? Because ultimately sport has to deliver that. For the numbers being thrown around, I spoke to you previously, James — ask anyone on the street: would you prefer to buy Newcastle Football Club or hire Jon Rahm for three years? What's going to be a better return for the same amount of money? So it was a sport that was right for us to look at and understand the changes they were trying to push through. But as Simon says, what are the implications, and what are we left with when all this has played out? The other tours had to respond to LIV. And what has happened to those now that LIV is wobbling?
James Cooper
I guess it also helps when the business of business is done on the golf course, isn't it?
Alex Cadwallader
Yes, absolutely. It is a sport that's very lucky that it attracts commercial enterprises, and a lot of people enjoy playing it. It ticks boxes for lots of different people and you want that to continue. But it's not about the corporate golf world — as Simon says, it's about the children coming through. LIV was attempting to grow the game of golf, but in reality, has it really done that? And has the spending been pushed in a way that the tours can't invest historically because they've been chasing to keep players on their tours?
James Cooper
Rob, I think while those two were talking about handicaps and driving and putting, both of us were battling to caddy. I'm not sure about the organic process between you and Alex when it comes to picking a topic. But when he said golf — was it a "yippee" moment?
Rob Wilson
Interesting. I wouldn't say yippee, because I had to do a lot of work on it. I needed to read up on golf as an ecosystem. Some of the stuff Simon educated me on over lunch — the dynamics of the tours, how the players are ranked, how local golf clubs are so integral to the underpinning of the ecosystem, and then when it started getting really interesting for me, the money flows and who's taking what out of the game. The difference really comes down to golf being ostensibly an individual sport — although I've been educated about how it's also a team sport with elite formats — but how an individual sport can generate its own economic value and actually be much more sustainable as a model than we see in some professional teams. We spoke about some of them in Episode 1. We'll speak about some of them on later episodes of this podcast.
So how that individually-driven, highly commodified, commercialised product was being driven across effectively westernised territories — and then we have this disruptive force, which is great when we're talking about governance, regulation and structuring. How this disruptive force was trying to do things very differently, engaging new audiences, promoting towards families, big entertainment events — almost music festivals. We spoke about sportainment on the first episode. How they were going to do that against, of course, a backdrop of public investment from Saudi Arabia — sovereign wealth, soft power, call it whatever you want. The amount of money going into sport from that region to really validate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a place for sport. We've seen it with boxing, Formula One, and golf. Obviously they're going to start divesting now, but they've still got some big principal assets knocking around the globe, all funded in a similar way.
James Cooper
Simon, I asked the gentlemen in Episode 1 about the health of their sport on a scale of 0 to 10 — 0 being a dying man, 10 being a superhuman super being. Where would you categorise golf right now?
Simon Holmes
I think it's on the table and it's just about to get the big shot. It will be very interesting to see how all of the different players behave. For the first time ever, the PGA Tour — which has been just a governing body, a really non-profit organisation running a linear series of maybe connected or disconnected events for eleven months of the year — now has external equity coming in. That means behaviour is going to be different, the focus is going to be different. They're not just delivering this sort of linear ecosystem anymore. Now they're actually going to have people saying: where's the profit, where's my money, where's the return? Are they going to behave differently?
You've also got player equity now. So instead of just having a prize money-driven reward system, players will be a part of the group. And then you've got what looks like PGA Tour super-mighty — stable, looks as though it's solved its problems and knocked away the competitor. DP World Tour — a passion of mine — it's global, it has a media package that LIV doesn't have, it has a huge pipeline of players and a long history. It definitely leans heavily on the financial support from the PGA Tour. If the PGA Tour starts to think "Where are all my P&Ls going? Do I need that DP World Tour anymore?" — you don't want that power to disable it. If it's all America-centric, it is important to have children, for example, able to watch a meaningful competition, which DP World has always been able to offer being a much more global tour. I hope that behaviour will be factored in. Yes, make your money — 100%, totally get that — but don't, when you leave and take all your money, destroy what was there already.
Rob Wilson
I was just going to pick up on that equity stake piece. We wouldn't have expected that from a sport like golf. I think most of us as analysts would be looking at Premier League football, Major League Soccer, the NFL — where are those new ideas coming from to reward players in a slightly different way, rather than just throwing cash at player contracts? So it's fascinating that golf has gone down that route. Part of that was probably because of the push they were getting from LIV — the need to change, to modernise, to extend their brand exposure. What we also know about athletes is that they are carrying much more value to the market now, as digital platforms have appeared and new ways of promoting brands have emerged. We've started to see new fandoms — individuals like us following individual players as opposed to teams. Connecting the power of the person with the sport is a fascinating next step for any professional sport ecosystem, and I think golf will reap the rewards of that because of the superstars that are playing.
James Cooper
You have to be almost an academic to understand what's going on, bearing in mind the PGA Tour made a loss but PGA Enterprises didn't — and then we're talking about illiquid equity. That's stuff from accountancy and business, not sport.
Alex Cadwallader
Illiquid generally means you can't just go and trade it without an event happening or meeting certain parameters. And ultimately — I'd ask Simon — before LIV, was there a general feeling amongst the world's top 50 players that they were ridiculously underpaid?
Simon Holmes
No, I would say quite the reverse. If you look at the catalysts for significant changes in prize money, I would say Tiger Woods's arrival in 1997 and the enormous spotlight that followed that man, the huge increases in media coverage — that was organic growth, valued into the system properly. There were many more people watching, so it became that much more valuable. Tiger made all of his contemporaries millions and millions in prize money. Now, there must be a way of factoring a sustainable system. If you looked at perhaps the Players Championship — not a major, but probably the best of the PGA Tour events — and asked: could you have a prize money total of more than $10 million and it be sustainable? That might only be $10 million. So when the PGA Tour swept the table with eight events at $20 million, they did that as a reaction, as a defence against LIV's aggressive move. If LIV can't do that anymore, I would see that as a place where there could be a real change in terms of player compensation.
James Cooper
Rob — will the PGA Tour be looking at the illiquid equity arrangements and thinking they moved too quickly? Spent $200 million on Tiger, $200 million on Rory, when the bad man was going away anyway?
Rob Wilson
That comes down to strategy and happenstance, doesn't it? In 95/96 I was going through school. I remember Tiger breaking through. Did we really know he was going to be the superstar that he became? Did we know he was going to get that huge backing from Nike and become the face of golf? I remember growing up watching those adverts — "I'm Tiger Woods" — that was an explosion of a personal athlete connected with golf. We've seen similar with Lewis Hamilton in Formula One and David Beckham in professional football. We were talking about Maro Itoje off-pod earlier — there are always going to be iconic athletes that emerge, but it's very difficult to plan for them. I don't think any of the tours will be thinking it was a missed opportunity. It's more a case now of how do we leverage that, and how do we deal with what we're actually seeing in golf — an uptick in player performance, because no longer are we seeing single-player dominance. We're seeing it spread across a vast number of different athletes. From your time coaching Nick Faldo, it would have been the same two or three people fighting for every championship, wouldn't it?
Simon Holmes
Yeah. In the Tiger years, if you were a fan of Tiger, his competitors never really played that well — the rivalries didn't function. Duval, not amazing. Vijay, not amazing. Ernie, not amazing. He was the gladiator. Now you could say "I'm a Scottie Scheffler fan, I'm a Rory McIlroy fan, let's see what happens." Rivalries accumulate eyeballs. As long as you keep seeing these different stars rising up — which means your pipelines have to be really efficient so your talent appears — that's extremely healthy for the ecosystem.
Rob Wilson
And we see it just tiers up and tiers up and tiers up. We spoke on the first episode about the joint nature of production — you can only have a golf competition if you've got 25 top players in that final round. That's what generates the huge sponsorships, the huge broadcast deals, and therefore the huge purses players are ending up with.
James Cooper
In the research you talk about the pyramid — obviously a very wide base of club players. Is it healthy? Is it doing the things it needs to do to provide for the tip of the pyramid?
Rob Wilson
Simon's probably better placed to comment. There's certainly work to do at the grassroots. As with lots of sports, there are huge access issues. If you're not brought up having played golf, how do you access it? I was not from a golfing family, so I didn't pick up a club until my mid-20s. I think access is always going to be a challenge. But those local golf clubs are kind of sustainable businesses in their own right. They are generating decent amounts of revenue, and that's ultimately where the pathway will have to exist. You've got your golf pros in clubs and the coaching opportunities that sit around that.
James Cooper
Alex, you've always challenged yourself — what does good look like? What does good look like when it comes to golf?
Alex Cadwallader
I can imagine LIV Golf will be a case study for the next 25 years at various business schools across the globe. In the next seven months with the new restructuring and M&A investment advisors appointed to the Board of Golf, they have a very challenging task — trying to sell a product that has proven horrendously loss-making. LIV themselves have previously said "don't look at the viewing figures and those metrics, we're judging it on something else." If LIV had come across a model that worked and achieved what they publicly said they were looking to achieve, then that's great — good competition that pushes the PGA to change and the whole sport benefits. But what it appears to have done is simply pay the players a hell of a lot of money without generating anywhere near the revenue. And the impact of LIV is that the PGA Tour has had to take decisions to push their prize money up that I don't think are good for the foundations of the game. That's the real impact of it.
Full-on disruption — but what was PIF's ultimate game with that investment in LIV? They were already in sport. Middle East companies and wealth funds were already sponsoring our big events, sponsoring the European Tour and DP World Tour. The Saudi oil company sponsors parts of the women's tour. They already had major events there. So what were they really trying to achieve beyond disruption? The implications are dangerous for the game. The advantage golf has is that it is still a growing sport with fantastic viewing figures and strong investment. I would expect it to ride its way through this. I don't think the PGA Tour is suddenly going to collapse, and I'm sure the DP World Tour will come to some sort of agreement. But it does set a — hopefully — a real big warning to other sports about the implications of what can happen.
James Cooper
Isn't that the key issue? We don't even know what this is all about, do we?
Simon Holmes
When it first started, and there were little chats going on, as I understood it, what the Saudis really wanted to do was build — they were going to build a big coastline full of golf resorts on their Red Sea coast. What they wanted was for all of us to go and play golf there. So what they first wanted to do was get into the golf scene and perhaps have three big events in Saudi where all the best players would come. That was, as I understood it, the very first ambition. Then I think they met people like Greg Norman and others who suggested there was another way. I think the Saudis were rejected by the PGA Tour, and maybe that was a catalyst for them to decide to do their own tour. But they did it in such a strange way — they invested billions into securing talent, but with no media distribution. Absolutely no media distribution. So their build-out, player costs, and prize money had no type of revenue stream or distribution to match. You could watch it on YouTube. That, I think, was a real fundamental error.
If you look at F1 teams, they're maybe the only thing that could compare. Liberty Media has an enormous package of distribution — it's totally organised. The platform is safe. With no media partner, the attitude of "I'll build it and they will come" was an incredibly dangerous business decision.
Rob Wilson
And it's incongruent with a lot of the other things they've done. The F1 Grand Prix is strategically delivered. The investment in Newcastle United is tied to a big Premier League and international broadcast rights deal. Even the Riyadh Season, the boxing, the MMA stuff they're looking at delivering — they all have much more strategically driven broadcast rights. I almost think they jumped the gun with YouTube — saying their audience would be young people who don't want to watch 56 holes of golf over a weekend. They want a shorter format, something a bit glitzy and glamorous, eyeballs on the screen, revenue from YouTube clips. It just never came, because you have to enable your audience to access your product. Nobody knew about it in the mass market. The golf audience knew about it and decided either they were in or they weren't. But they never captured that additional market, and it fell apart very quickly.
Alex Cadwallader
They took an approach and, looking back, they almost wanted to do everything differently — let's only play three rounds, let's not have a cut, let's all play at the same time. I understand that when you go and watch a LIV event, the on-course experience can actually be quite good. But they would always pick a sleepy PGA Tour event between majors that not many people attend. If you look at the crown jewels — the Open or the Masters — part of golf is the tradition, and they don't make massive changes to that. LIV hasn't identified a new model or product that the PGA Tour wouldn't have found anyway. The PGA Tour would have been alive to the fact that Bryson going on Instagram trying to do a hole-in-one over his house was going to garner more eyeballs. But that's not really driven by what LIV's product was or their business plan.
James Cooper
So — a business question. If you got the call from the people trying to restructure LIV, would it be "I'm not here, thanks very much" — or is there an answer?
Alex Cadwallader
It's a challenge. You have a model that has proven horrendously loss-making. The investment has gone into talent based on contracts that will come to an end — whether you can even meet the remainder of those contracts without the funding is very uncertain. It's a challenging sell. I think most commentators don't expect LIV to get the funding they require to meet their player outgoings. So it wouldn't be a particularly easy assignment. You'd want to be paid upfront, and you wouldn't necessarily want a success fee. Yeah — it'll be a tough one.
James Cooper
Simon, you know the fabric of golf. Two-pronged question: did the people that went to LIV not surprise you, bearing in mind you know the characters? And can you believe the sums of money that some of those golfers — whose names aren't known across the planet — are being paid? You've got 70 or 90 million pound a year players who could walk down Manchester high street without being recognised.
Simon Holmes
I think if Mickelson — he was the first guy who went — if you compare Mickelson to Woods, both were offered a deal. Tiger says no, I'm going to stay with the tour, that's my legacy. Mickelson goes — yeah, slightly renegade attitude. Then Brooks Koepka, slightly renegade. Dustin Johnson, Patrick Reed. Cam Smith was a very surprising one to me. Jon Rahm was a very surprising one to me. But they're all just that little bit outside of the boys' club, and I think the boys' club kind of held the line. Tiger called Rory, Rory called the others, and they said hold the line — and they held it.
On the pricing — I'm amazed. I hear that Mickelson was $200 million. I don't know how they negotiated that, or whether you just said to Greg Norman "hey, listen, can I have $200 million?" It's quite an easy negotiation. And then those first twelve players took a critical, important part of the golf population. My problem with it is — I'm a golf fan, I watch a lot of golf, and now I don't get to see the best players play against each other. And the ones who've gone to LIV haven't improved their game. I feel like I don't care about the tours or the players, I'm the one who's wounded. I'm the worst person off from this whole set of decisions. I'm the golf fan. I'm the passionate golf fan. I'm the worst off. Who's out there trying to make me whole?
Alex Cadwallader
The only thing I'd say — devil's advocate — I sometimes think scarcity of seeing a particular player every weekend can be beneficial. When we were growing up you only got to see Maradona during the World Cup. Whereas now, we sort of get it four or five times a year with the Ryder Cup seeing these titans. But putting that to one side, I fully agree with Simon. Taking the bigger picture view — yes, we've been denied seeing those players develop. And everyone talks about whether those players are able to perform at the level they have been historically, because they're playing courses that are totally differently set up around the world. They're winning shooting 25 under par and then turning up at the US Open where you win at two over par. Simon's the technician here — he'll know that's a very different mindset. You're not battle-hardened.
Rob Wilson
Just thinking it through — were you surprised that Mickelson was the one to go rather than Tiger? And do you think if Tiger had gone, we might have been having a very different story?
Simon Holmes
Tiger was made an enormous offer and totally rejected it — because if you look at what he was chasing, he was chasing Nicklaus's record in the majors. So that's a very different pathway — embedding yourself in golf history forever. Mickelson plays golf in a very different way. Woods, like Faldo, like Nicklaus — very much a chess match. Mickelson, very much like Palmer, very much like Rory — much more of a gambler. I think there's a mentality that defines a lot of the decisions they make, because that's in their nature.
When Mickelson went, he probably took three or four of the other guys with him. And you can't blame Westwood or Poulter — because there's normally no free lunch. But that really was one of the only free lunches on the planet — end of your career, great players, amazing reputations, come and play with us. You'd go. But if you're at the peak of your career — are you going to become a global icon in a LIV environment that looked like it was promising elite golf but was actually entertainment? You couldn't buy into it as a golf fan. I think the whole thing has been an incredibly interesting exercise.
Alex Cadwallader
And it's something we'll touch on in a future series — the impact for the performers, the players. You can't criticise them entirely. And some of them are quite open. Others have unfortunately come up with phrases that get repeated back to them. But ultimately, they were able to say: what are your gripes with the PGA Tour? Come and play eight or nine events, we're going to pay you a hell of a lot more money. We all look up to these sportsmen and think they love the game. But elite sport as a performer is still a business, and it can be quite tiring and mentally tough. If someone comes along and says — I can get rid of all of this, here's a guaranteed $50 million, play whenever you want, whatever lifestyle you want, we'll fly you around on our private jet — I don't think you can begrudge many of them.
Rob Wilson
That's why I asked about Tiger not going. When you compare it to a lot of the PIF investments — look at the Saudi Pro League. Let's get Ronaldo. He's at the end of his career, but we're going to go after Ronaldo, not Messi. Messi went to MLS, and they built a structure around him. All of the other players, the less well-known ones who've also gone over, haven't got the eyeballs or the earworms. It's all been built around CR7, Cristiano Ronaldo. And the big difference there is that's generated broadcast revenue — interest from private commercial endorsements, private partners, private sponsors. So the Saudi Pro League ecosystem is now maturing because of that iconic signing that it probably wouldn't have had initially. I really wonder whether we'd have been having a very different conversation had it been Tiger at the peak of his powers.
Simon Holmes
One of their very early decisions — they hired Greg Norman. Very much a Marmite guy. Very fringey. He's got no chemistry with the Woods clan, no chemistry with the Rorys, because he fell out with Nicklaus. There's always been some tribal stuff there — he's kind of sat as a loner. He was friends with Nick Price, not anymore. He was friends with Nicklaus, not anymore. So when you've got that guy always making the friction until something breaks — if the Saudis would have gone instead to someone like Steinberg, who manages Woods and a few others, would it all have been different? If they hadn't been told by Jay Monahan "actually, golf isn't for sale" — those are some fundamental mistakes which, I think, feed themselves all the way back to where we are now, as this looks like it dismantles itself and we don't know what it's going to become.
James Cooper
What do you know about the PGA Tour — bearing in mind your golf journey started there, you know these people, you know the personalities. Does it become a monster because it's a monopoly? And does the DP World Tour become some sort of feeder championship for people who've gone away from it — a way back into the PGA Tour?
Simon Holmes
I think there was probably an option in the very beginning to help the DP World Tour. But instead of going the harmonious route — "hey, how would this work?" — it went into a battle. That for me was definitely a Greg Norman dynamic of "if I can't have this, you're not going to have it either, and I'm going to blow it up." So rational business decisions start to vanish, and you start to have irrational emotional decisions that cost a lot of money.
The professional golf tours have always had the tendency to be like a mirror smashed into every corner of the room — no cohesion. You take someone like Nick Faldo at their best: they'd be invited to play the three majors, maybe Nicklaus would invite Faldo to play in his, maybe Arnold Palmer would invite him to Bay Hill. That was it. There was always a bit of protectionism. Now you've got this alignment, this cooperation between the PGA and DP World where the ten best DP World players go to America to play. All of this is good snakes and ladders. But the whole board has to be counted — the content creators, the indoor golf, all the ways you can absorb more young people into the game must become part of the cost structure. Otherwise, the funding model isn't properly done. You're only funding the bits you want.
Alex Cadwallader
What was quite interesting was that there was a period where they were expecting the PGA Tour and LIV to do a deal — talk of a merger. And if that had been their strategy all along — knocking on the door, being told no, becoming aggressive, taking some of their top players — and then suddenly news broke that they'd signed Jon Rahm. I wonder if you could go back to them now and ask: do you think that was a wise decision? Should you have continued on what may have been the original aim — to actually have a stake in the PGA Tour and be at that table? Because as soon as they did that, I think talk of the merger just stopped.
James Cooper
Will some of those players be writing mea culpa letters to the PGA — "let me back in, please"? And how will they be met by people who have reason to bring them in, but also big reason to shut the door?
Simon Holmes
I think it will go personality by personality. I don't think that Bryson, by putting his name into the anti-competition lawsuit against the PGA Tour, will have too many PGA Tour friends. Jon Rahm is an interesting guy — he kind of does his own thing. What is interesting is that Mickelson's brother was Jon Rahm's manager, so that could have been why Jon was pulled there. What I don't know is what will happen to the DP World Tour. I think it's more fragile than we think. The PGA Tour has strengthened itself. And I don't think LIV has enough substance under any conditions to exist at its current price point. If it came down to DP World pricing, then I think it can definitely exist. But its talent is getting older and not less expensive. So they hold the cards, I think.
If the PGA Tour ends up being the supreme winner, hopefully it has the good grace to find a pathway back for the talent that wants to return. I know you can be quite annoyed with people for things they've said — but after two years, you're going to get over it. And you'll be paid to get over it. But us as golf fans — from two young kids playing in a field, all the way up through every single development tour to the PGA Tour and the four big tournaments — I hope that will all be priced into this one thing while there's this awash of money.
James Cooper
What was interesting in the report was the context you put around the earnings situation. We all think the earnings are sky high for golfers — and they are. But then you put it in the context of other world global sports: five golfers in the top 15 of the Forbes list, none in the top 20. It shows that if the PGA has the teeth and wants to do it — turn it into Netflix, get the eyes and bums on seats — there's a lot of space still there, isn't there?
Rob Wilson
Huge amount of space still in that marketplace. Just looking at the earnings — Rory could probably buy Gloucester Rugby Club ten times over and still have some change in his pocket to fund it. So that's a conversation we might have to have at some point. I do though think that what we'll see is a lot of hullabaloo now because PIF are pulling out their funding from LIV. I think there'll be a scrambling of conversations to try and keep that competition going next year, but at a vastly reduced amount. It will be interesting to see whether they can bring any commercial partners on board to try and address some of the issues Simon mentioned. But my gut feeling is there'll be a market correction. Over the next couple of years, we'll start to see a dialling back of some of those tour prize funds. The sponsors are probably sighing a big sigh of relief that they're not going to have to pay over the odds to maintain their connection. So I think correction over the next couple of years. And that's not going to plateau player earnings — they will still be paid handsomely, because it is a very lucrative sport to be involved in.
Alex Cadwallader
I don't necessarily think there's that much more growth for golfers to be paid as much as some of the Major League Baseball players or the NFL. Interesting — Formula One hasn't actually increased that much in terms of driver wages. It's almost about: is there growth for those in the top 20 to 70 in the world? That's the big question mark. Because some of those heartland sports do generate a lot more revenue than golf ever will. Where we want to get to is players being paid what the tours can pay sustainably, while also achieving their other goals — making the game as accessible as possible, growing the game globally in a structured way, ensuring the infrastructure is there. The goal isn't for the tour to try to pay Rory, Tiger, and Scottie as much as possible. And the other thing the tour needs to think about — and it's challenging — is to reward the players who didn't go and stayed. The player I'm thinking of — I think he came second in the Masters twice and then had a couple of back injuries — was offered $125 million and turned it down. And subsequently, his career hasn't gone the way he might have hoped. But that is unfortunately business. That is life. We all have opportunities to join TNT Sports or stay at Sky Sports, or go to Qatar. It is business. We often do hold our sports teams and leagues to a higher moral standard because we want them to achieve so many different things that a normal business wouldn't.
James Cooper
I started with you Simon, and I want to finish with you. Do you look at golf in the future and think — I'm excited about where this goes? Whether it's short form games, stuff being played indoors, Netflix treatments, Drive to Survive with golf — does that get you excited?
Alex Cadwallader
I assume you haven't watched Full Swing then?
James Cooper
No, no, no! Why didn't they go Drive to Survive though? It is the same format...
Alex Cadwallader
It is exactly the same production team. I would imagine Formula One might own the Drive to Survive name though.
Simon Holmes
I think if you look at the leadership — the people the PGA Tour have picked — they do definitely hold the history of the game as one of the real pillars, a foundation, a steel strand into the ground. I think that's important and heartening. If you look at the way a lot of the players have behaved and supported the tour, even though they had something lucrative over here, that shows me that the love of the game and the fact that history and behaviour still matter. Those things are very encouraging. There have been some unusual players in our normally very quiet clubhouses — they've come in with guns blazing, cowboys with money flying out. Didn't expect to see them. It looks like they're leaving. Who remains? I don't think we're going to know. But in this time period, we will be able to watch it as it unfolds.
James Cooper
But is that exciting? Or is it just a change?
Simon Holmes
No, I don't think it is just a change. I think there was a status quo — no ripples on that pond before 2020, 2021. It was this number of events, here were the pipelines, the board looked exactly the same every single year. Now, including content creators, the competition for attention has come. We are all in sport competing for people's attention, and attention is very fleeting. People say a 16-year-old won't sit and watch a four-hour programme, and I think that's probably true. But they can have all of these little other gateways to join the game. I hope that gets bonded and brought together.
James Cooper
That's the secret, isn't it Rob — finding other ways to get that interaction and the eyes on the game?
Rob Wilson
Unlocking the audience — providing products that people want to buy, in a way that they want to receive them, at the point at which they need them. That's basic business. And that's the big challenge with any shifting demographic as generations move. What we saw as golf — or professional football, rugby union, whatever you want to look at — the youth of today are looking at it through a very different lens, with a vast array of different technologies. Sport — because that's our business at the moment — has to engage with that and really capture the imaginations of those people, because that's the lifeblood of what comes next.
Alex Cadwallader
And I think the sad thing, looking back — if you went back five years and said someone was prepared to put $4 billion into golf, what could we do to have a nice sustainable product, grow the game, do all these things? I doubt they would have said "let's create a LIV tour." They'd have used it in other ways. And the player I forgot the name of was Will Zalatoris.
Simon Holmes
Yes — and here's the thing. If you came in and said, OK, here's $6 billion — is there anything that we could do to golf that would improve it in any way? We'll fund it. That would have been amazing. The Ladies' Golf is an incredible platform. The quality of the players is just driving, there are great rivalries, it's completely global, it's an incredibly organised system. The LET players — there's a place where you could have had support. But if you brought all of that together and said: not men's, not women's, but golf — from the beginning all the way around — you could have created an amazing system, and had some real change over.
James Cooper
Gentlemen, that's great. Thank you very much. What an astonishing four-ball we'd be. And that's it for another episode of Sport, Structured, with Leonard Curtis. I hope we've shown you we do things a little bit differently. Yes, there's informed conversation and debate — but it's backed up by data, research, and recommendations aimed at growing longer lasting and more sustainable sport for years to come.
Disclaimer: The content of this podcast is intended as commentary and opinion on matters of public interest in the sports industry. While we make every effort to ensure accuracy, figures, statistics and financial data referenced may be based on publicly available estimates and could be subject to error or change. Nothing in this podcast should be taken as a statement of fact. If you believe any information is inaccurate, please contact us at rob.venables@leonardcurtis.co.uk and we will endeavour to correct the record promptly.
