Approaching One Year in Business, LIV Golf Execs Vow Improvement: 'We're Not Going Anywhere'

LIV executives said the startup league has a multi-decade plan and a program for other markets to submit bids to host events.

POTOMAC FALLS, Va. — Next month LIV Golf will celebrate its one-year anniversary and a lot will have happened over those 365 days.

The organization has sued the PGA Tour on antitrust claims and conducted 15 competitions with payouts exceeding $350 million in individual and team prize money while slowly establishing a team concept for the long haul.

All that including an ongoing war of words with the PGA Tour in a battle that will likely determine the path of professional golf in the future.

A skirmish has also occurred between LIV and the Official World Golf Ranking as well, but none of this has changed LIV’s goals of expanding and benefiting from the golf ecosystem.

One significant benefit LIV has that so many other startups lack, is funding.

The Public Investment Fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has assets of $650 billion and has been the financial benefactor to LIV Golf and other golf ventures believed to be a good commercial investment.

According to two LIV executives this week at LIV Golf Washington D.C., the business plan that was presented to the PIF before LIV Golf’s launch was a multi-decade plan, so there are no surprises internally if the investment takes a while to flourish.

“This was always going to take time to mature, time to establish itself,” an executive said this week. “That happens at different stages for the league, for the teams and for the events.”

Because the process of building out the commercial viability for the league, teams and events comes at different times in the development cycle, some financial benefits may be seen quicker than another.

“We've always acknowledged and knew that it would take time for them to become fully established and fully commercially mature,” the executive said. “And in terms of what that looks like, it's almost limitless.”

LIV believes that each team will have corporate sponsors similar to major U.S. sports teams, which will generate financial benefits for the PIF as well as the individual teams and players.

LIV's leadership believes that certain venues will become "home" venues for the individual teams, much like professional soccer and the four U.S. major sports, with those venues creating a home atmosphere and interest will seep into the culture of the city.

“They're in their absolute infancy in golf,” the executive said about the team/venue concept. “But you look at other sports and how they depend on the success of the teams, now LIV has got that platform that it can do that.”

Last month's LIV Golf Adelaide event is viewed as the poster child, as it had more than 20,000 spectators on a smallish footprint at The Grange Golf Club and $100 million of economic impact.

The size of the crowd, the integration of entertainment into the event and reaching a different demographic all were huge wins for LIV.

“Sixty percent of our attendees were under 45, so it’s reaching a different crowd,” the executive said. “If you were at the Fisher concert in Adelaide, it did not feel like a golf event, it felt like a real festival atmosphere and golf was at the heart of it.”

The top-to-bottom approach of LIV is to make golf more mainstream and if it can accomplish that goal, then the belief is that more untapped markets could be unlocked, with Adelaide and Singapore being examples.

Those successes from April have led LIV to develop a "Host Venue Bid Program" with immediate interest from around the world, including major international markets and U.S. locations as well.

While limited to currently only 14 events per year, LIV is continuing to look for new and untapped venues, so the bid program opens the marketplace for its commercial goals as well as to support the financial viability of the concept.

“If we sit around the table and start discussing ... what does the future of the sport look like with historic levels of investment?" a LIV Golf executive said. “We've always said the sport can be in a better place. It requires some wise heads to sit around and start mapping this out as opposed to trying to fight against it. Work with it.”

LIV officials have only met with the DP World Tour and R&A chief executive Martin Slumbers about their vision, as other groups have not yet been willing to meet or discuss the possibilities outlined by the LIV business plan.

And while that is not unusual, since professional golf has been a very parochial institution, the time may come when the groups may have to meet—if LIV stays around that long to force the issue.

“We're not going anywhere,” the executive said. “There's an opportunity for more teams, the opportunity to cross-pollinate from an all-star PGA Tour team that might have the top four FedEx players coming to compete in every event or our top four players playing in the Players Championship, whatever it might be.”

On the eve of a one-year anniversary, LIV sees its initial launch as a success, and believes it is on the right trajectory.

What Year 2 brings is anyone guess, but LIV is focused on capitalizing on golf's worldwide fan base. 

“We're not saying we're the answer, we think we've got some good attributes,” the LIV executive said. “We're not as cutting-edge as we want to be yet. I think the opportunity is trial and error, keep trying, keep making mistakes to try and grow the pie.”