Does The LIV Tour Have A Plan For Success?

Try as I might, I cannot wrap my brain around the LIV Tour’s long-term plan for success.

For most businesses, success would be easy to define: become profitable within an acceptable and specific period of time.

Of course, the LIV Tour isn’t strictly speaking a business. It’s underwritten by the Saudi government.

So the profit question basically goes out the window. Good thing, too, because it is also impossible to imagine the LIV Tour cooking up any meaningful revenue streams capable of creating a profit.

Whatever you think of mixing politics and sports, the reality is that given the Saudis’ reputation with respect to human rights, the prospect of landing any sort of a significant media deal in the United States approaches absolute zero. Same goes with sponsorship. Image-conscious corporations simply won’t be into the associated grief.

Tickets? For its first two events, the LIV Tour has resorted to literally giving away tickets in the hope that somebody might be willing to use them.

Most experts believe the fundamental long-term goal is what has become known as ‘sportswashing.’ That means using an affiliation with a sport such as the LIV Tour to burnish an otherwise tarnished image with a public that likes fun and games.

Is ‘sportswashing’ the primary goal of the Saudi-funded LIV Tour?

But even buying that essential premise, the question then has to be answered: Why golf? Both in the world generally and in the United States in particular, it is not an especially popular sport.

The World Atlas website identifies the most popular sports worldwide based on its estimate of the number of fans. Golf barely makes the top 10, with a relatively modest 450 million fans.

For the record, soccer is a runaway No. 1 with an estimated 4 billion fans followed by cricket (2.5 billion) and ice hockey (2 billion). Tennis also tops the 1 billion level.

Interest in golf is also well behind several sports among audiences in the United States, where in theory money committed to the purpose of ‘sportswashing’ would be most prudently spent.

The website SportsBrowser rates golf only the seventh most popular sport among Americans based on viewership, behind the NFL, MLB, the NBA, the NHL, soccer, and tennis.

In that ranking, golf stands just ahead of two activities – wrestling and auto racing – whose fan bases would likely be far more willing to overlook the kinds of social policy questions that make ‘sportswashing’ potentially productive in the first place.

In fact, the Saudis are already invested in several of those most popular sports. They sponsor soccer teams and motorsports events, and they have a long-term partnership with the WWE.

Perhaps the long-term answer to the Saudi/LIV Golf’ ‘what’s my motivation’ question only tangentially relates to ‘sportswashing’.

The one little-discussed option that might make sense is that the LIV Tour’s goal isn’t to establish itself as a long-term competitor with the PGA Tour and other affiliated world tours.

Perhaps the goal is to be enough of a nuisance for a long enough time to force some sort of merger of golfing authorities, with the Saudis winning a prominent seat at the table.

This would not be unlike what owners in the old American Football League did by forcing a merger with the National Football League in the early 1960s…except on an international basis.

Imagine in that scenario a single worldwide Tour consisting only of the game’s premier players who would have won the right to compete by advancing on lesser regional tours, of which the remnant PGA Tour might be one.

I do not know if that’s what the Saudis have in mind. But with respect to golf, I’m pretty sure that if the goal is merely ‘sportswashing,’ it is doomed to fail and in the process become a perennial drain on the Saudi sports economy.

The Saudis can afford the expense, of course. But even in Saudi Arabia, at some point, there has to be a plan to actually accomplish something.