And then perhaps close to a hundred thousand people made the decision to power up their devices on Friday morning — when sales opened for island of Ireland residents only — and get in line with their credit card in hand.

The three main observable results from that first day of ticket sales:

• Users logged in to see tens of thousands of others in the queue ahead of them

• The Ryder Cup website crashed (though the organizers’ IT people, embracing the plausible deniability spirit of our age, later said there were “a handful of individual user issues but … no widespread technical problems”)

• All available tickets sold out in less than an hour (note: there appeared to be no official confirmation of exactly how many were actually placed on sale)

Warren Buffett famously said,

“Price is what you pay, value is what you get”.

There’s zero doubt that while there are many out there who see €499 as a crazy amount of cash for a day at the golf, there are many others who consider it great value for what could be a once-in-their-lifetime experience.

The reality is, and in keeping with the age-old principle of supple and demand, the €499 price tag won’t be nearly enough to keep the demand at bay.

That’s what happened last year at Bethpage in New York, when ticket prices dwarfed even those at Adare Manor: $750 per day and half a million applicants, meaning each of the three days could have sold out multiple times over.

Considering those tens of thousands waiting in their digital queue and one hour to sold-out status, the Ryder Cup could have asked for €999 per ticket for Adare without making one jot of a difference to ticket sales, and the decision to settle on half that amount was most likely one made out of a prudent approach to PR as much as anything else.

It might be stretching it to suggest there was a great deal of science invested in the ticket price decision, but choosing a near-median figure between the previous two editions of the competition — tickets for Marco Simone in Rome in 2023 were approximately €260 a day before the $750 in the US last time — was close to guaranteed to achieve two things:

• The wave of media (and social media) commentary and attention that is the primary objective of all marketers and PR professionals everywhere, and

• A quick sold-out announcement

But let us go beyond the headline figure and all the breathlessly emotive commentary from a media landscape that is typically leftist, anti-wealth and (this worst of all) hypocritical — as it tries always to cozy up to its core audience while steadfastly occupying the same corporate, financial and political powerbroking world it says it wants to hold to account.

Let us consider some of the other factors as they relate to Ryder Cup 2027, the first time the competition is returning to Irish shores since the hazy mirage-like memories of 2006 at The K Club before the global financial crisis and at the height of so-called Celtic Tiger.

And let’s go a little deeper on the reaction to that ticket price.

€499 Ryder Cup Tickets, and Perception in the World We Live In

To understand what €499-a-day actually means, it helps to understand two things:

• first, what the Ryder Cup has become, because rather than a cause of outrage in its own right, the price is nothing more than a reflection of the way things have been going in sports and entertainment for much of the past decade,

• second, the underlying symptoms of something that’s been happening in plain sight right across the (western) world.

Let me try to sum it up in a sentence:

I bold and italicize seem to be because more than anything, a lot of people’s reaction to the price or cost of everything seems to one of perception more than reality. (There are, of course, many philosophers who might argue about the difference between those two things.)

One dominating perception is that income and wealth inequality has grown steadily over the past two decades, and rapidly since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Surely it’s this wealth inequality, then, that sits at the core of a situation where there appears to be general outrage at the price of a Ryder Cup ticket at the same time as those tickets sell out in an hour?

But is this wealth inequality, or the story of wealth inequality, really true?

The Gini Coefficient is a standard of measuring income inequality across the world, and it suggests that while inequality has been on the rise since approximately 1980, the growth in inequality has not been as sharp or rapid as the temperature out there would have some of us believe. And that when we look at the US, UK and Ireland — which will likely make up more than 90% of attendees at Adare next year — this does not seem to have changed in a cataclysmic or even meaningful way over the past couple of decades.

For comparison, via the World Inequality Database 2026 figures published by Our World In Data, Iraq and much of South America have Gini coefficients of 0.7 or above.

The Gini is not without its critics. One of those, the Chilean development economist Jose Gabriel Palma who’s now an Emeritus senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge, observed that it obscures the middle 50% — which almost always accounts for 50% of the income — and that the real variances take place either side of that, so he developed the Palma Ratio to track before-tax income inequality between the wealthiest 10% and the poorest 40%.

So with regard to the US, UK and Ireland, what does the Palma Ratio say?

It shows a sharper rise in the US from 1980, but the level of inequality there has remained effectively flat for the past 15 years. In the UK and Ireland, the ratio shows fluctuations but no substantial change since the turn of the century, and indeed in the UK the ratio has inequality at its lowest level since approximately 1990. (Again, by the Palma measure, Iraq and South America are miles ahead of the “west” in inequality: all are above 11 on the scale, when the US is less than 6 and the UK and Ireland are below 3.)

In the spirit of Bertrand Russell’s two important questions — “what are the facts? what is the truth that the facts bear out?” — what can we say about this?

If all above are the facts, maybe there are four truths we can glean:

• that the gap between the so-called rich and the so-called poor is actually not nearly as wide as it might be,

• that a vast number of people (in the US, UK and Ireland at least) have a lot of liquid wealth at their disposal,

• that the arrival of the social media loudspeaker for all has given room to vent to more and more people with emotional and wide-of-the-mark responses,

• and that media institutions everywhere, struggling to maintain influence and viability in a rapidly fragmented digital world, will appeal to whatever will create the most noise and garner the most attention

Throw into this situation some the unique qualities of the Ryder Cup:

1. It’s the only real team competition in the global game with the wealthiest fans and participants.

2. The two teams represent approximately 800 million people (350m US, 450m EU) from two regions that might be in some form of long-term economic decline but together they still account for somewhere between 40-50% of global GDP.

3. It takes place once every two years.

4. It takes place in the same location (EU: country; US: state) approximately once a generation. The 2027 edition is only the second ever in Ireland and the first there since 2006. Bethpage in 2025 was the first in New York since 1995 at Oak Hill. (There was a time that The Belfry was the staple home venue for the Ryder Cup in Europe, but the competition has not taken place in England since 2002, and won’t return there until 2035 at the earliest.)

This makes the Ryder Cup, by some distance, the most valuable live property in professional golf.

It sells out every time, everywhere. It generates economic activity that dwarfs almost every other regular sporting event on the European calendar. It appeals to the age-old dynamic of us-against-them, and it’s watched by tens of millions of people across the world who will never come anywhere near the venue.

This combination of scarcity, prestige, demand and the realistic framing of a once-in-a-lifetime event is the commercial equivalent of manna from heaven.

When you price an event with those characteristics, you are pricing a luxury product, and the organizers know that all they have to do is PR-massage the noise that will inevitably come up around it.

One final important point about the world all of us live in now, in 2026.

Almost everything is now “on-demand”. Gone are the days of appointment television series or movie releases where everyone queued up to see the latest blockbuster in the same place at the same time.

In our time of 4K screens, superfast broadband and personally tailored content feeds for everyone — where you can dive down the rabbit hole of your new favorite show for a weekend and then tell your best friend, who has no idea what the hell you’re talking about — only three things bring people together in the same time and same place:

• Big Tragedies

• Big Politics

• Big Sports

Tragedies like September 11, Hurricane Katrina and the Thai Tsunami will still do it, guaranteed.

Without any Big Tragedies for a while, this week the mainstream media turned its spotlight on the Ryder Cup ticket prices, thinking it was an opportunity for some Big Politics attention-mining.

But the reality is that The Ryder Cup is not Big Politics. It’s Big Sports.

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I don’t have any skin in this game.

Or put another way, the skin I have is not that LIV wins, or the PGA Tour wins, or that any other entity wins. The skin I have is the flourishing of golf, and that more and more people outside the old elite few can play and enjoy this great game.

So here are 14 thoughts on the last week (and the last few years) of happenings, speculations, recriminations and accusations in and around LIV Golf.

Table of Contents:

1. News of LIV’s Possible Demise Will Be No Surprise to People Paying Attention to the Saudis’ Investment Strategy

2. The 2023 “Merger That Never Was” The First Symptom of the LIV Sickness

3. Greg Norman May Be The Greatest Salesman in Golf History, But In The End He Could Never Have Delivered On The Promise

4. Brooks Koepka Could Never Be The Star Attraction LIV Needed Him To Be

5. The Broadcast Was A Big Reason The LIV Product Never Landed

6. LIV’s Technical Coverage Innovations Still Offers A Pathway Others Might Follow

7. LIV Has Had No Hero and Too Many Villains

8. Scott O’Neil: The Right Man, The Wrong Man, Or An Impossible Job?

9. What Now Of Phil Mickelson’s Legacy?

10. Post-PIF, Who Has the Pockets, and Would They Use Them?

11. Golf’s Global Markets: Genuinely Underserved, or Just Not Worth It?

12. Golf Is Full of Big-C Conservatives. Whaddaya Know, They Behaved Conservatively

13. The Empire Strikes Back. It Usually Does

14. There Are Four Big Winners In All This

1. News of LIV’s Possible Demise Will Be No Surprise to People Paying Attention to the Saudis’ Investment Strategy

Back in early February 2026 — weeks before the USA and Israel launched its first forays into Iran — and without any fanfare, the $1.15 trillion fund that has bankrolled LIV from the ground up, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, announced a major strategic pivot.

It has been a decade since the beginning of PIF. The “Vision 2030” reform agenda was designed to transform the Saudi economy and society and reduce its reliance on the oil that made the kingdom one of the world’s wealthiest in the first place.

The final phase of the PIF plan, covering 2026-30, is turning away from some of the “megaprojects” that characterized its first ten years. Overseas investment (the parcel of the fund ringfenced for investments in Premier League club Newcastle United, LIV Golf and US stocks amongst others) would be cut from 30% to less than 20%. “The Line”, the new 170-kilometre city that was a perfect metaphor for the lavishness of Saudi ambition, appears to have been fully reconceived.

The bar has been lowered from grandiose visions to more practical considerations. As in, return on investment.

This was bad news for LIV Golf. The media circus that happened this week and took over Golf X for days had its roots back in the PIF’s investment strategy which was out there hiding in plain sight two months ago.

2. The 2023 “Merger That Never Was” The First Symptom of the LIV Sickness

In June 2023, then PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and the governor of the PIF, Yasir Al-Rumayyan appeared together on CNBC television to announce a framework agreement between the parties.

The promise was a unified future for professional golf. The bitter war that had broke out a year previously seemed to be over.

But it came without any detail, and nothing happened.

On reflection, the significance of that, and its relevance to the rumors that say LIV Golf is now on its knees and limping towards a likely shutdown at the end of the year, can’t be overstated.

It showed that the Saudis wanted out of the war. In truth, it seems clear now that they never wanted the war in the first place.

What they wanted was into global sport as part of their strategy to build the country’s brand, use its oil trillions to diversify its economy away from oil, and and project influence around the world (you can call that sports-washing if you like — I covered that in detail over here at the time).

The ludicrous thing was that instead of investing in the game, they found themselves in a bruising and obscenely expensive trench war with the most powerful incumbent — an organization they would have been much happier partnering with rather than competing against.

It seems clear now that they were either desperately badly advised, or were sold a pup, or both.

Which brings us to Point 3.

3. Greg Norman May Be The Greatest Salesman in Golf History, But In The End He Could Never Have Delivered On The Promise

To persuade a trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund to invest billions in a startup golf league built around a personal grudge nursed for a quarter of a century — that takes levels of conviction, charm and chutzpah that are off the charts.

The PIF wanted into global sport as a soft power play. Driven by its golf-crazy governor, it saw the game as one piece of a portfolio that already included football, Formula One, boxing and tennis.

What they were sold (and, to be fair to Norman, what they bought) was an existential battle fought on terms that guaranteed hostility.

An architect who was less emotionally invested in an us-against-them narrative might have been able to nail down a partnership, either with the PGA Tour, or if the lines in the sand there were impossible, then certainly with the European DP World Tour.

There is an alternative history where PIF, LIV and the DP World Tour joined forces in 2022, which could have delivered a true global alternative to the PGA Tour. Because by 2022, the PGA Tour was bloated, boring and vulnerable. There was ample possibility that a well-backed and sensibly funded alternative tour could have grown strong roots.

The Premier Golf League (PGL), a concept developed by European sports executives before LIV existed (and which court filings later allege contained much of the blueprint for what LIV’s on-course product might become) understood this and drew up plans to build a bigger global pie, not fight over the existing one.

Instead, Norman lit the touchpaper, and Phil Mickelson (about which more below) doused the fuel on the fire. Things got oppositional from Day One, driven by a sense of ego and vengeance in the minds of a tiny number of people.

Norman’s astonishing achievement was that he got this thing off the ground and secured Saudi backing to build something that never made commercial sense.

In the end, he wasn’t able to deliver. That’s probably not a failing of execution. The failing was that the vision was impossible.

It’s a tale as old as time: Norman and LIV, with feathers and some glue, flew way too close to the sun.

4. Brooks Koepka Could Never Be The Star Attraction LIV Needed Him To Be

Koepka’s star was never higher than his run of four Majors in less than two years from 2017-19, but it got close in 2023, when he won his fifth at the US PGA (a win that gave him the edge over Rory McIlroy in the “best golfer of the post-Tiger era” race) shortly after joining LIV.

The next two and a half years, though, were characterized mostly by injury and apathy. Watching the Brooks episode of the Netflix Full Swing documentary, it was hard not to be struck by the thought that here was a guy who had everything he thought he wanted and still wasn’t happy.

Outside the Majors, where he always seemed to peak, Koepka just didn’t seem to like golf that much. So it was zero surprise that he would choose to join a new tour that came with a huge signing-on fee, inflated prize money and fewer tournaments.

But the Koepka who didn’t seem to enjoy the PGA Tour became the same Koepka who didn’t seem to enjoy LIV.

LIV needed Brooks to be one of the stars of their new venture.

But Brooks doesn’t want to be the star of anyone’s venture.

He’s a bit solitary, a bit of an outsider, seemingly the strong and silent type driven by something brooding and unspoken within him.

Golf is full of guys like him.

The mistake was hoping he would become something else.

(For what it’s worth, the pattern is continuing since he rejoined the PGA Tour. He’s had just one top 10 finish on the Tour but was T12 at the Masters. Brooks cares about Majors, not Tours. Expect that to continue.)

5. The Broadcast Was A Big Reason The LIV Product Never Landed

When broadcast sports works well, there’s always a wall between the TV team and the events they cover.

Don’t get me wrong: broadcaster and organizer must work closely, and they share many of the same objectives.

But something vital gets lost when broadcaster and organizer sleep in the same tent.

The lines between media company and promoter have been blurring for decades, but at all the best events, those lines still exist.

When it gets removed, you don’t get coverage. You get PR.

That’s what so much of LIV’s broadcast output has felt like.

Arlo White, David Feherty and especially Jerry Foltz and Henni Zuël are all credible broadcasters in the right context, but when they sign up to commentate on something owned by the people who pay their wages, the whole thing crumbles.

This was never more apparent that in two segments over the past few days, both including Arlo White.

First, an interview with CEO Scott O’Neil, which looked and sounded like an in-house comms exercise because that’s what it was.

Second, his conversation with Feherty:

Feherty: There are still some writers and broadcasters that take pride in their work, but this generation has spawned a bunch of fast typists, you know, that consider themselves to be experts, and evidently, they’re not.

White: Yeah, it must be exhausting, trying to will the LIV Golf League out of existence. Take a day off, everybody.

The end result is that those listening can never fully trust what’s being said.

The overwhelmingly positive tone, and especially the careful avoidance of anything remotely critical of the product, all gave the sense that every moment was being carefully filtered. The end result was that whatever genuine broadcast talent was there was diluted and gave the whole thing an unmistakable hollowness.

I have no criticism for anyone taking a job with LIV.

Moral grandstanding is fine for some, but let he who can’t trace any of his dollars back to any organization that has done wrong cast the first stone.

The problem was failing to appreciate that editorial standards and independence is the only way to credibility.

6. But LIV’s Technical Coverage Innovations Still Offers A Pathway Others Might Follow

Something worth saying, even now as it seems like the curtain is about to come down on LIV: Outside the broadcast booth and behind the scenes of the technical coverage, LIV has still had several genuinely good new ideas.

TV-watching golf fans have become so inured to the lack of real innovation in golf coverage — how long has it been since we got Toptracer? — that expectations tend to stagnate. Most viewers expect watching golf to be the same old same old until the end of time, and most don’t even question the dissatisfying experience served up to them.

But LIV delivered several improvements in what watching golf could be.

The stacked color-coded on-screen leaderboard was just the simplest and most obvious, but even four years later, coverage of other events still lags.

The graphics that showed how the next handful of holes were playing — shades of red for holes playing hard, shades of green for those that were presenting opportunities — have been a good innovation.

The on-screen putt line, showing the extent of the break with animated arrows, is much clearer to viewers than hearing an announcer say, “Whaddaya think, six inches outside left edge?”

Watching the RBC Heritage this weekend, the opportunities to improve coverage were obvious.

I get that live TV in a game that takes place across 150 acres is probably the hardest job in sports, but a question worth asking is:

What do viewers want?

I would argue that they want two things more than anything:

1. They want to see approach shots of varying quality. They want to see a five-iron drilled to five feet, and they also want to see the tour pro with a wedge in hand who dunks it in the water. The old saying goes “drive for show, putt for dough”, but in TV coverage it’s approach shots, from the fairway, rough and around the green, that are the shots most viewers really want to see. Viewers want to see the pros do things they never could. They also want to see the pros do what they did at the local muni last week.

2. They want context. If you see someone taking an unplayable miles right of the fairway, they want to know how they got there. They want to see how someone’s building a round steadily, they want to see someone not playing well but dialed in and grinding, and they want to see someone unravel completely in the final two holes after 16 without a bogey. Most TV coverage doesn’t give them this.

LIV didn’t deliver fully on those needs, but you can hate the product and hate the announcers and still admit the viewing experience was in some ways better than its competitors.

7. LIV Has Had No Hero and Too Many Villains

LIV paid enormous money to attract a roster of players who were, for the most part, hard to like.

Koepka, Patrick Reed, Ian Poulter, Lee Westwood, Sergio Garcia and Tyrrell Hatton were all surly and easy to root against.

Henrik Stenson became Public Enemy Number One in many golf circles the moment he accepted the LIV contract and walked away from the Ryder Cup captaincy, and his demeanor on LIV thereafter — including the ridiculous boys-club lets-make-it-up-as-we-go-along three-way captaincy with Westwood and Poulter — did little to rebuild the reputation that had been mostly positive for most of his career, and got him the Ryder Cup job in the first place.

Where was the hero?

Bryson DeChambeau is closer to antihero and will never change that look. LIV needed a peak era Tiger, and the closest to that is Rory McIlroy. (Rory’s manager Sean O’Flaherty said recently that rumors that he had turned down an $850 million offer to join LIV were wide of the mark, but that doesn’t mean hundreds of millions weren’t on the table.)

Without Rory, they were staking big bets on three players, but the candidates who might have filled the hero role all failed to do so. Jon Rahm comes closest. Before he joined LIV, he looked to have everything — two Major wins, real charisma, a compelling origin story and a star on the rise — but for the past three years he has looked, on the course and off it, like a man completely pissed off at the world.

Occasional rage is a great trait in an elite sportsman, as it can drive great success and be relatable. There’s nothing much to like or admire about permanent anger.

The other hopefuls were Cam Smith and Joaquin Niemann, both of whom were on ascending trajectories when they signed. Both have stagnated. Smith badly so. He Niemann’s series of LIV victories have never looked like translating into Major competitiveness — he didn’t play at Augusta this year and missed the cut at the last two Majors of 2025. Indeed, his record in Majors (one top 10 in 26 appearances) is so far off where he should be for someone of his raw ability.

Every great sporting drama needs a Batman. LIV had only had Jokers.

8. Scott O’Neil: The Right Man, The Wrong Man, Or An Impossible Job?

When Scott O’Neil replaced Greg Norman as LIV CEO, the reaction across the industry was broadly positive. Here was a credible sports executive — a veteran of more than 25 years leading global sports and entertainment brands — taking the wheel from the man who had spent years making enemies of too many people LIV really needed as allies.

O’Neil has spoken this week of “almost half a billion dollars” in sponsorship partnerships for 2025, pointing to the support Salesforce, HSBC, Rolex and Aramco as evidence of genuine commercial traction.

Take that at face value, and it looks respectable. But the devil in the detail of those deals is hidden to everyone. Corporate sponsors are not stupid. They know when a partner needs them more than they need a partner. The balance of power in those boardrooms was never in LIV’s favor, and most of those deals will have been priced accordingly.

There’s a world of difference between a sponsorship deal struck from strength — the kind Formula One can command after several decades of iconic heritage and history and a Netflix-powered global brand renaissance — and one struck from a position of reputational deficit and existential uncertainty.

Some might say O’Neil can only work with what he has. That what he has might just not be workable. That you can only put your finger in so many holes in a dike before the flood wins.

That’s one argument.

Another is that his performance when the venture needed him most has been lacking.

Sitting down with Arlo White on the coverage you own is not a good look when most of those watching have questions that aren’t being asked.

Even worse was the charade of an interview with broadcast partner TNT Sports — which should know better than to be a PR lapdog — where he effectively admitted that LIV was funded only until the end of the season. That video was removed from the web, that offending segment edited out, and re-uploaded.

Not good for TNT Sports, and not good for Scott O’Neil.

They should know by now that the Internet knows, and spin can only spin for so long.

None of the excesses of the Norman era and the original LIV grand vision are his fault, but he’s the one who now has to try to negotiate to find new backers to keep the thing running.

With so much money needed to keep it going, so few investment candidates available, and several of those probably already either sworn enemies or close associates of sworn enemies, O’Neil looks to have an impossible task on his hands.

9. What Now Of Phil Mickelson’s Legacy?

You will find few golf people around the world who will argue that Phil Mickelson‘s reputation and legacy have not been tarnished — possibly irrevocably — by the past four years.

If Norman was the Mad Scientist inventing the virus in his lab, Mickelson was Patient Zero. He was the most famous, the most vocal and the most combustible early advocate for the whole enterprise.

His comments in early 2022 — describing the Saudis as “scary motherf***ers” while simultaneously arguing they were necessary allies in the fight against PGA Tour “greed” — were extraordinary in their candor.

The past four years have further eroded Phil’s legacy and reputation.

His supporters will argue that when you strip away the noise, Mickelson’s founding argument — that there was money on the table and that players were not being adequately rewarded for the value they created — was not without merit. His central claim was that the players filled the grandstands, sold the merchandise and made the TV deals possible, but that the economic model of the PGA Tour was structurally weighted against its most important assets.

The PGA Tour’s own response since the arrival of LIV — including dramatically inflated prize pools, no-cut limited field “signature” events and the Player Equity Program — suggests, awkwardly, that Mickelson was right. When the gun was put to their head, the Tour moved, and moved fast, in exactly the direction he had been pointing.

There’s another strong argument that neither LIV nor the PGA Tour is sustainable, as both have required the deepest of pockets to make the extra prize money happen (the PIF for LIV, and the Strategic Sports Group of sports and media moguls in the PGA Tour’s corner).

So how will history judge Phil Mickelson?

Back in the day, he was a hero. To those who see him up close on the course whenever he plays (which isn’t often these days — just once in 2026, and he announced at the start of April that he will be out for an unspecified period as his “family navigates a personal health matter) Mickelson’s charm is still as strong as ever.

But up-close charm and wider image are two different things.

His player profile page on the LIV website has the title:

“Success of LIV Golf Will Be My Legacy”

He is tethered to this thing. Will he be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat to ensure that success? Strange things can happen, but the odds are against him.

10. Post-PIF, Who Has the Pockets, and Would They Use Them?

If PIF withdraws meaningful support after 2026, who steps in?

Corporate sponsors always see through vacuous marketing slop and get quickly to brass tacks.

So with LIV, what is the return?

Who is the audience?

What will association with this brand actually do for our business?

LIV has never had convincing answers to those questions, but it needs to find them fast.

The list of institutions with pockets deep enough to sustain a global golf league at the scale LIV has attempted for five years is very short.

Of those institutions, the number willing to take on a brand carrying LIV’s reputational baggage, its unresolved structural challenges, and its current negotiating position of significant weakness is shorter still.

It could be zero.

11. Golf’s Global Markets: Genuinely Underserved, or Just Not Worth It?

One of LIV’s recurring arguments was that the world is full of markets hungry for elite golf that the PGA Tour, anchored to its American heartland, had chronically underserved.

There might be some truth in that.

The appetite for world-class golf in Australia, South Africa, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong is real. LIV’s events in those markets drew genuine crowds and generated real excitement.

But there’s a tougher truth sitting underneath.

Elite players follow money, and money follows the US market. The US is still golf’s top market, and the gap between it and everywhere else remains enormous.

I know an elite sports professional — not in golf — who took a coaching role in South Africa a couple of years ago. When we chatted, the topic of the salary, and especially the exchange rate, came up.

He said:

“It’s perfect, as long as you don’t mind living in a wheelie bin.”

The economics are rough.

A truly global golf league might be a great idea that’s just financially unworkable.

12. Golf Is Full of Big-C Conservatives. Whaddaya Know, They Behaved Conservatively

The sands of golf are shifting — they really are.

The rise of YouTube golf, the arrival of upstart new equipment brands like L.A.B. or apparel labels like Malbon, the rise of simulator culture, indoor golf and the growing diversity of the game’s participant base are all evidence of big change that’s been happening in real time.

The game is more accessible to more people than it has ever been. As a result, it’s more appealing and more interesting. There’s every chance the golf pie could grow, and grow massively, over the next few decades.

But golf is still a sport with a 500-year history, a global network of private clubs, and a culture that has always created its greatest value through tradition, heritage and conservation.

It’s full to the brim of big-C Conservatives. Should it be surprising that, when threatened, they behaved conservatively?

Change has been happening in the golf world, but LIV has not been able to catalyze that change.

If anything, it looked less like a new entrant disrupting an elite than one elite built on enmity, grievance and oil money trying to outdo another built on old corporate money and conservativism.

Young always replaces old, and the clock is always ticking. The generational shift in golf is coming, and for many in the game it’s already here. It just doesn’t include LIV Golf.

13. The Empire Strikes Back. It Usually Does.

Business history is full of stories about well-funded challengers disrupting powerful incumbents.

But equally, the other story is just as common. The one where the incumbent, stung into action by a genuine threat, undergoes a real transformation and emerges stronger than before.

The stories of the upstart coming out on top — Amazon eating the high street, Facebook killing newspaper advertising etc. — are always sexy.

But the other story, where the dominant player responds by exercising its resources and pounding the threat into submission, are probably more common, because they happen all the time — and before the rival even becomes a story!

Just a few of countless examples:

• Disney vs DreamWorks. Disney looked formulaic and bloated when Jeffrey Katzenberg left to found DreamWorks, specifically intending to disrupt the fairytale monopoly. Disney acquired Pixar, then Marvel, then Lucasfilm, and entered a second golden age. DreamWorks, the disruptor, ended up as a subsidiary of NBCUniversal.

• Microsoft vs Netscape. Microsoft looked like a stale Operating System company when Netscape, the company that built the first true web browser, owned the internet. Bill Gates issued his “Internet Tidal Wave” memo and pivoted the entire company’s resources toward the web. Netscape’s market share fell from over 90% to less than 1%.

• LVMH vs. Independent Luxury. For decades, independent houses like Bulgari, Tiffany & Co., and Christian Dior prided themselves on family ownership and exclusivity, looking down on the “conglomerate” model as soul-crushing and corporate, but LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) used its cash reserves and global real estate leverage to force a consolidation. When these independent brands hit a rough patch, LVMH was there with an acquisition offer they couldn’t refuse. Eventually, the company turned “boutique” luxury into a scale business and became the first Europe firm to hit a $500 billion valuation.

The pre-LIV PGA Tour was a member-run non-profit offering 45 weeks of largely identical golf, performance-based prize cheques, and leadership by career golf administrators.

The post-LIV PGA Tour is a venture-backed commercial enterprise with tiered Signature events, career equity programs, NFL and private equity veterans in its executive suite, and a primetime simulator league with made-up team brands.

LIV forced the incumbent to fight, and in fighting, the incumbent became something much more formidable than it had been before.

LIV created much of the change it was aiming to create. It just didn’t get to benefit from any of it.

14. There Are Four Big Winners In All This

Through all of it — billions spent, bridges burned, careers reshaped and reputations ruined — one set of institutions has emerged from the LIV era more powerful, more valuable and more unthreatened than at any point in living memory.

The four Majors.

The Masters, the Open Championship and the US Open especially.

The PGA Championship less so, but it’s still miles ahead of all other tournaments.

They were always the pinnacle. But LIV, by fracturing the professional game and forcing every player to make an explicit choice about their future, inadvertently gave a new and great clarity: the Majors are the only things in professional golf that truly transcend politics, money and broadcaster negotiations.

They were never really under threat. They couldn’t be bought, boycotted or disrupted.

They were always the only four weeks of the year where the best always showed up. That status has been inflated more than ever.

What are your thoughts? Disagree with anything here, or any others to add? Leave your take in the comments.

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For many golf fans, maybe most, it’s the greatest week of the year.

The Masters in early April announces, with divine regularity, the beginning of Major season.

More than that, it heralds the beginning of golf season, after the longer darker winter months — for most of us in the northern hemisphere, anyway, where mudballs and fairway placing are common and, quite frankly, there are often a long list of things more attractive than squelching through courses whacking away at the mulch of fallen leaves in search of a cherished Pro V1 you regretted using the instant it left the club-face.

Maybe even more than all that, the arrival of Masters week says that while the news is now just a strange taste of one version of events, and war is ever-present and suffering is general, and the world is weird and getting weirder every day, there is some certainty and continuity out there, and that continuity and certainty can be had by turning on the TV on a Thursday afternoon and seeing the unforgettable sweep of Augusta in all its goodness and all its glory.

Augusta National is both the best of the past and the best of the future, all wrapped up in one gorgeous present moment that flits away too quickly and which, in our more childish moments, we wish would last forever.

If sports tradition and history was a place, it could very well be situated at Augusta National.

The Masters mobile app sets the standard now, and has set the standard for a decade or more, for mobile apps for sporting events all over the world.

The IBM Case Study web-page points out that the Masters now has 25 separate AI agents at work powering both its digital user experiences and the productivity of its teams, and AI at Augusta is not at all new to the post-LLM age: back in 2021 — the year now otherwise known as 1 BC (Before ChatGPT) — the IBM page outlined that 16 separate Watson AI models were in use, including one that “ranked shots at the Masters based on crowd excitement”.

As we look ahead to the 2026 version, though, it was a different type of AI usage that sparked the interest of your occasional correspondent in all things business, money and magic of golf.

The kind that’s become known as “AI Slop”.

In my recent piece “AI, The World and How Everything is Changing”, I wrote:

You can read that full piece over here:

There are several signatures to “AI Slop”, but three of the most instantly recognizable are:

1. The massive overuse of “contrastive negation”, also known as “negation and reframe”. For example, “This isn’t just an idea. It’s a revolution.”

2. The massive overuse of words such as “tapestry”, “delve” or “fundamental”

3. The massive overuse of “the rule of three”, whether it’s three-item lists, or three short staccato sentences one after the other.

(I was speaking to the CEO of a fast-growing tech company active in the space of AI and data recently. He said: “LLMs are rapidly destroying our shared language.”)

Sadly, this breed of AI Slop has infected The Masters, too.

A less-than-2-minute video posted recently on The Masters YouTube channel, titled “Under the Umbrellas | Season Two Trailer”, had the following script.

Seven AI Slop tells in a 114-second video is quite an impressive accomplishment.

That CEO is right, of course. The Large Language Models are killing our language, and when language gets killed, bad things always follow.

The overwhelming feelings I have, though, are resignation and sadness.

The Masters does so many things so phenomenally well — the past, the future, and the present (yes I know that’s a three-item list, and of course LLMs are trained on human output, so all this stuff it’s learned from us) — that we might have expected it to be one of the few remaining institutions safe from the firehose of foul-smelling shit being pumped down all our throats from every angle right now.

Unfortunately not.

But hope springs eternal.

Maybe someone will see this and decide that AI Slop is all well and good elsewhere (actually: it’s not all well and good anywhere) but it will never darken the door of the Augusta National content machine ever again.

And anyway, this particular problem comes with the easiest of fixes.

Hire one good editor and let him or her or them do their work.

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I started The Wedge — which I taglined then, and still think of now, as “the business, money and magic of golf”, a resource written by an interested observer and industry outsider — way back in the summer of 2022.

That summer, if you think back, was a time of great flux and uncertainty in the golf world globally.

Two things stick out most in the memory.

One, we were, all of us, beginning to step into a post-pandemic world, and the appetite for golf, which had become one of the few approved modes of social enjoyment during all the lockdown craziness, was higher than it had ever been before, among more people than ever before.

And two, the general and pervasive global uncertainty — and alongside that uncertainty, the desire for change and the opportunity such desire always presents — was exemplified by the great schism at the top of the pro game which, four years on, now looks a little more settled but is still far from satisfactorily resolved. The PGA Tour remains the 800-pound gorilla in by far the world’s biggest golf market; LIV Golf is now an upstart gaudy nouveaux riches rival backed by almost but not absolutely bottomless budgets, and has clearly now become the world’s second-ranked tour, well ahead of the European DP World Tour which is now a pale, sad and sorry reflection of its former self and little more than an official feeder route to the PGA Tour on the one hand, and an unofficial breeding ground for LIV on the other.

These were the biggest trends of 2022 in the business of golf globally, one of them at the grassroots and participatory level, the other at the game’s very summit.

The other big deal of 2022 was one that wasn’t remotely connected to golf when it was announced, but which, approximately three-and-a-half years on, is clearly a game-changer for everyone, everywhere, in every business, in every function within every business.

AI.

What started with ChatGPT, and the early days new fun of talking to a bot that seemed to know a lot about everything, has become, in ridiculously quick time, an ecosystem that is attracting responses that fall into three very different buckets.

1. The Evangelists. They’re all over Twitter X. AI, with the right technical setup and a few ounces of lived experience, is able to do everything that can be done on a computer now, and will very soon, when mechanized, be able to do everything outside of a computer too. Basically, for the Evangelists, AI + Robotics = The Future of Everything That Needs To Get Done.

2. The Doomers. AI is, or will be, responsible for everything from water and energy shortages, to mass unemployment, to nukes raining down from everywhere on everyone, to the end of humanity itself. The Doomers are aware of AI only insofar as they know that nothing it can do will ever be good for the world.

3. The Ostriches. This is most people in most places and most businesses. It’s debatable whether the head-in-the-sand approach is ever a good idea, although there’s a persuasive argument — the Yogis and Stoics amongst you might appreciate this — that very many apparent problems, left unattended, just go away, or get replaced by more legitimate ones. However, when it comes to AI, the Ostriches are burying their heads in the sand right between the sleepers before a high-speed train. You can choose to gravitate towards evangelism or doom, and that decision is entirely yours, but nothing good will ever come from ignoring it.

So what has all this to do with golf, and this here too-haphazard publication on “the business, money and magic of golf”?

Two major observations come to mind.

1. AI Slop, the Digital Overwhelm Reckoning and the Role of Golf

The Atlantic magazine recently published an article on how “AI Slop” — one definition: “digital content made with generative artificial intelligence that is perceived as lacking in effort, quality or meaning, and produced in high volume as clickbait to gain advantage in the attention economy, or earn money”; another describes it as “low- to mid-quality content (video, images, audio, text or a mix) created with AI tools, often with little regard for accuracy” — is beginning to infect the world’s most trusted (I used the word advisedly, and I appreciate that trust is a wide spectrum) media institutions.

From the piece by writer Vauhini Vara (my emphasis):

When opinion articles or personal essays are published in major papers—sometimes with big names attached to them—they can influence societal beliefs and, in turn, the policies of governments or corporations. It has seemed fair to assume, historically, that those opinions reflect the voices and beliefs of the individuals whose names are attached to them. But AI language is something else entirely. Research has found that AI output is much more homogenous than human language. Major AI companies have also acknowledged that their models can be skewed—for example, toward certain cultural and political beliefs. Analyses of the Grok chatbot have found that its language often mimics that of the man behind its development, Elon Musk.

Multiple studies, including those from AI companies themselves, also demonstrate that AI output is unusually persuasive, to the point of getting people to change their minds about political issues or candidates. A world where some self-published romance novels include synthetic turns of phrases and plot points is upsetting. One where AI models’ language and perspectives creep, undisclosed, into the pages of major newspapers—and therefore into public life—is terrifying.

In my own day-to-day work ghostwriting for CEOs and senior executives of companies across multiple industries (data privacy, security, outsourcing and crypto), I have observed a definite trend over the past 12 months: the platforms are being besieged by an avalanche of content, in multiple formats, the obvious conclusion being that generative AI (the various text-based outputs of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and other tools for visual formats, including MidJourney and Nano Banana) is largely responsible for so much of what now passes for online discourse and commentary now.

We can accept this and still completely ignore the “Dead Internet Theory”, which posits that an increasing proportion of the Internet in general, and social media platforms in particular, now consists of automated activity and bots, and the deepfake wave, in which bad actors, using AI tools or with old-school production, deliver content, messages and ads designed to separate the too dopey, the too trusting and the too greedy from their money.

What lies downstream of this?

The possibilities include general and absolute breakdown in trust in everything we see through the medium of a screen, followed by — as this is the way culture tends to work — distrust becoming ingrained and habitual for a wider cross-section of everyone you know. This might mean that many, or most, people will soon come to distrust an awful lot that they see away from screens too.

This sort of perpetual distrust is toxic for society at the local level, and potentially catastrophic for civilization more broadly.

It might be stretching it to suggest golf can be an antidote, but let me do just that.

Golf — and tennis, and soccer, and swimming, and tag rugby in a park on Sunday morning, and any of a hundred other active pursuits — is a finger in the dike of this flood of dissatisfaction and rage.

Getting up, getting out the door and getting to the course (or, as is now often the case, getting to the range, golf entertainment venue, or simulator place) and most importantly doing it alongside other people, sharing time and space and oxygen with them, this is an antidote to the madness that can come to us through the screens we pick up a hundred times a day.

Of course, I know I’m reaching you now through that same screen.

It’s the way it ever was. All the greatest technologies have always been used for great good and great harm and everything in between.

Intent and outcome are all that matter.

2. The Business of Golf Will Be Torn Up and Reassembled By AI Tech, Just Like Every Other

How the influence of AI technology on golf pans out in the end, your guess is as good as mine.

One thing I’m seeing, though, that will be relevant to every golf business in the world, whether you’re a senior executive at Callaway, you’re building a disruptive golf tech startup from scratch, or you run small tours a few days a week, is this:

So many of the barriers to getting something good done are coming down fast.

In the very recent past — and I’m talking just 12 months ago — if you wanted to buy bespoke software to run your business operations, or build a complex application that could create utility and value for your carefully identified target subset among the broader golf market, chances are you’d have needed several thousand dollars/pounds/euros in your wallet just to start a conversation.

No more.

This woman on X could be a recent inductee to The Evangelists club, but the stuff she’s talking about here is not overblown. Stuff like this is happening on ordinary laptops all over the world right now.

As these barriers come down, the limits are becoming limits of imagination, not practicality.

A quick search for “AI Golf” and the top three results are about AI motion analysis, an AI-powered golf caddies and an AI swing instruction discussion on Reddit.

This wave is coming, and coming fast.

It will wash ashore a certain amount of shit and debris, no doubt, but it will also bring countless successful businesses, including some run by one guy or girl with a laptop that generate millions in revenue.

So some important questions for you, irrespective of your role or the part of the golf industry you’re in right now, are:

• Is your organization using AI technology to create utility and add value?

  • If not, do you have firm plans to do so in the near future?

• Are you personally actively experimenting with the functionality of these tools?

  • If not, do you have someone, or a team of someones, actively experimenting with them on your behalf?

If the answer is “No” to all these questions, there’s a very real danger you’re becoming one of The Ostriches.

And I promise you, even if The Evangelists are wrong on many things and The Doomers are right on some, the one thing you don’t want to be here is an ostrich.

Especially with your head buried between the train tracks.

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1. Golf is the world’s greatest game

It’s easy for a lot of people to piss on golf.

Some might point to the fact the game needs the dedicated, even solitary, use of a wide expanse of land at a time when homelessness is rampant, infrastructure is creaking and food production systems are threatened.

Some might suggest the game needs money to get started, and that therefore it is by definition inaccessible and unavailable to a wide cross-section of the population.

Some might say it’s nothing more than a minority sport played by elitists.

I’m biased, of course, but I believe golf is the world’s greatest game.

I believe that because of the way it combines the very best of human vision, ingenuity and engineering and with the very best of God-given nature, environment and time.

2. In this great game, an Irishman has just become an icon

Eleven years in the making, with heartache and heartbreak and psychological torture and several seemingly complete mental meltdowns, McIlroy is now the sixth member of the Career Grand Slam club.

With Tiger Woods, he is the only one to have done it in the past 60 years.

Just think of the greats of those 60 years who haven’t got there.

Nick Faldo. Phil Mickelson. Ernie Els. Lee Trevino.

Tom Watson. Seve Ballesteros. Greg Norman. Bernhard Langer.

It could be a while before anyone becomes the seventh.

Jordan Spieth is just a US PGA away, but how long has it been since he’s been a legitimate contender?

Jon Rahm is halfway there but his form in Majors has tailed off since his move to LIV.

Collin Morikawa and Brooks Koepka likewise have two of the four. Scottie Scheffler, for all his dominance in recent years, has just one of the four Majors.

And while Ireland has long prided itself on its ability to punch above its weight — in business, in music and in sport, we like to measure ourselves against the best anywhere on the planet — the fact is that before Padraig Harrington’s first Open Championship in 2007, the only Irish golfer to win a Major was Fred Daly in 1947.

The past two decades have been a golden era for Irish golf: Graeme McDowell, Darren Clarke, Shane Lowry, Harrington and McIlroy have all won Majors in that time.

For an Irish golfer to win a Major, any Major, is still a massive deal. It could be a long time before Irish people fully digest the fact that one of their own has done what so few have dreamed of, never mind accomplished.

3. Emotional exhaustion

When Rory closed in on his Grand Slam on Sunday, hundreds of thousands of Irish men, women and children stayed up late in the night to see him try.

Those hundreds of thousands of Irish men, women and children weren’t just supporting one of their own.

It’s much more complicated than that.

As a lover of golf, and as an Irishman, this week has been an emotional rollercoaster like no other.

Apart from the emotions of watching someone so clearly emotional try to hold it together in front of a global audience, live and in real time, I’m also exhausted by the magnitude of what all this means.

For me, writing about golf, and the business and money and magic around it.

For Rory McIlroy and his family.

For the game itself.

But maybe most of all, for Ireland.

4. “But is he actually Irish?”

Ireland is an island of around seven million people.

Those seven million are split across two countries, one — the Republic of Ireland — ruled from Dublin, the other, Northern Ireland, with a devolved parliament that sits two hours away in Belfast (I use the word “sits” advisedly; in the first 25 years of this century, the Northern Ireland parliament has been suspended on several occasions for years at a time).

If you’re at one end of Ireland and you leave at first light, you can be at the other end of Ireland in time for an early lunch. (A few years ago there was a story about a university professor who lived in Cork, Ireland’s southernmost county, and worked at Queen’s University Belfast in the north, and how he could drive from his home to the college without meeting a traffic light.)

We are a modern, globalized, cosmopolitan nation now, with vibrant economic success — south of the border, at least — and all the housing and immigration problems that come as a natural offshoot to such success.

The border is invisible now, has been since the Good Friday Agreement of the late 1990s, but despite its invisibility, and despite that invisibility coming under threat by Britain’s Brexit vote in 2016 (which effectively took Northern Ireland out of the European Union while the Republic of Ireland remains one of the EU’s poster-children), the border is still the most significant thing, by far, on our small island.

It was put in place more than a hundred years ago following treaty negotiations in London after the War of Independence. Ever since, this one small island split by a political boundary has been characterized as much as anything else by that fact.

Moments after McIlroy finally sealed the deal on Augusta’s 18th green with the sunlight beginning to fade on Sunday evening, he was gripped in a bear hug by Shane Lowry, his fellow Irishman.

Lowry is from Offaly, in the Republic. McIlroy is from Holywood, in the North.

The two have been Ireland teammates since their amateur days, and while pro golf remains, for the most part, the ultimate individual sport, they are teammates and colleagues still, and the camaraderie, even love, was self-evident in the way McIlroy and Lowry gripped one another beside the Butler Cabin.

But there’s no doubt that when it comes to identity, Lowry’s formative years were simpler than McIlroy’s.

The North-South divide is complicated and difficult.

There are still many people north of the border who see themselves as British first and foremost — a legacy that goes back five centuries to the Ulster plantation and beyond.

In the 2021 Northern Ireland census:

• 42.8% identified as British, alone or with other national identities.

• 33.3% identified as Irish, alone or with other national identities.

• 31.5% identified as Northern Irish, alone or with other national identities.

And yet many of those who see themselves as Irish feel let down by the South.

They see themselves as Irish. They want a 32-county unified country — the kind of ideal that was normal and natural for the freedom fighters of 1916-21, but which, after the border came, brought the decades of war and strife that became somewhat euphemistically known as “The Troubles”.

But they also see that the political leaders in the Republic to the south have chummed it up in Brussels and Berlin and Boston, and left Belfast to fend for itself.

Amongst this, there is hurt, great hurt, and there is fragile identity.

The Monday morning after McIlroy’s win, I met someone and their first question was:

“But is he actually Irish?”

Others, the type of keyboard warriors that ruin online discourse for all of us, accused Rory of “feeling more British than Irish”, or recalled how he didn’t want to take part in the Olympics when golf was brought into the fold in 2016 because of the difficult conversation of which flag he would play for.

You cannot understand Rory McIlroy without understanding this fact.

He is the greatest pro golfer of his generation, probably the greatest sportsperson the island of Ireland has ever produced, but still his identity — how others see him, and perhaps also how he sees himself — is wrapped up in something much more than just golf.

5. Geniuses and madnesses and gods and demons

John Moriarty was a great writer and poet and mystic and philosopher who died in 2007.

Moriarty once said that the great tragedy of Ireland came when independence from Britain was achieved and our leaders pursued a standard national entity, that of political nation state.

Moriarty felt that Ireland was different, that Ireland had always been different, going back through tens of thousands of years, of Celtic spirituality and far beyond, to druids and gods and fairy-folk and magic.

Moriarty believed that Ireland’s natural state of being is that of shamanism, an ancient path of wisdom, deep and manifold layers of consciousness and mystical connection to the earth that might date back fifty thousand years or more, and that fully embracing that by declaring Ireland a shamanic state was an opportunity missed by the revolutionaries, rebels and politicians of the 1910s and ‘20s.

This is an indelible part of the magic and mania and madness that courses through Irish people’s veins.

It is, perhaps, the source code for why the greatest of Irish exports include alcoholic drinks and the pubs we drink them in.

Our potential is forever bound up in potions.

Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus were great, no doubt, but in a way they just had to be great at what they were great at.

Rory McIlroy is great, while carrying genes and strands of DNA that sees countless conflicting feelings and identities, geniuses and madnesses, gods and demons rise up in him, like they rise up in Irish people everywhere.

6. Greatness is much more than just achievement

Like nothing else, sport gives the calendar year its milestones and rhythms.

It also gives us a window into the human psyche like no other medium. This is especially so in televised elite sport, where everything is on the line and everyone is watching in real time.

Teddy Roosevelt delivered a great speech in Paris in 1910 that became known as “The Man in the Arena”.

There, he said:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

This is what televised elite sport does. It shows us the man in the arena, live and up close, at the greatest and hardest moments of their existence.

A few years ago, I wrote a short book detailing what I learned about how to be a man from watching the tennis player Rafa Nadal at work.

Nadal, much more than his great contemporaries Djokovic and Federer, is amongst the most interesting sportsmen of all time.

I would count the soccer player Diego Maradona, the boxer Muhammad Ali and the race-driver Ayrton Senna alongside him. All brought an astonishing psychological complexity to their various arenas, and it was this psychological complexity, just as much as what they actually achieved, that made them so compelling.

They were all compelling because of what went on inside their minds, and how that both helped and hindered them in their aim of getting the most out of their bodies.

For years now, McIlroy has been a member of this club.

When he stood over tiny putts at Pinehurst’s 16th and 18th greens in the final round of the US Open last June, trying to end a 10-year wait for a Major championship, the psychological torment he was going through was both completely invisible and wholly palpable.

If that was torture, for him and for all of us who love watching him, it paled in comparison to the torture of his final round at the Masters on Sunday.

In the space of a few minutes, he dunked the ball into the drink from 80 yards at the 13th and then hit one of the greatest shots in the sport’s history at the 15th, all while missing makeable putts at almost every hole on the back nine.

This is, I think, why human beings love watching Rory McIlroy.

We love seeing the heights and depths of what another human is capable of.

We can admire the Tiger Woods of 2000, machine-like and God-like.

But we can love the Tiger Woods of 2019, all aspiration, toil and frailty.

We admired Rory McIlroy when he was streaking to victory in 2012 and 2014.

But the McIlroy that wears all his endless struggles on his sleeve, the McIlroy who’s never comfortable and never lets you get comfortable while you watch, the McIlroy who goes for it even when going for it seems to raise the risk ratio to unacceptable levels, the McIlroy who fought relentless demons inside his own mind and broke down in tears at Augusta when they were finally beaten off…

… that’s a Rory McIlroy we can love.

And no matter what anyone says, love goes a long, long way.

Thanks for reading.

Shane

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When I was a young ‘un, our home lay one farmer’s field, one small river, half a dozen stepping stones and a low wire fence away from a golf course.

Something about the place drew me in, but we weren’t members, so I had to find another way.

At 7am on summer mornings I grabbed a wedge and a putter and crept across the river and under the fence and onto the 12th fairway and played a hole.

Those mornings brought the buzz of being alive and outdoors, with the sun above and the grass below, and they brought a separate buzz too: the trepidation of trespass, the feeling of what’s forbidden.

Over time, the realization dawned on me that the golf course is the very best of two worlds: on the one hand the best of human vision, ambition, ingenuity and design; on the other the best of nature, because none of it would be possible without the unseen hand of some creator or the billion-year-old unexplainable.

As I played a bit more, and became a member for a while, I was swept away in the puzzle of trying to find a hole hundreds of yards away in as few shots as possible.

Much later, I learned too how this game manages so perfectly to bring the universal dance between order and chaos to the forefront.

Chaos is your attempt to hit that ball to a tiny spot away in the distance.

Chaos is the unpredictability of anything-can-happen-and-often-does.

Order is getting it to the hole, reducing the limitless array of possibilities to just one.

Order is hearing that so satisfying sound as it hits the bottom of the cup.

Chaos is the madness of stooping to pick it out and walking to the next tee to try all over again.

The Masters in Augusta is one of those great occasions that helps to give a year its rhythms.

Tens of millions of people will tune in and see what drama lies in store, because golf, this ancient dance between the orderly and the chaotic, always has drama in store.

Thirty years and more after I tiptoed over stepping stones and crept under a wire fence, now I get to write here about golf – about the business of golf, about the magic of golf – every week.

And I get to meet and speak with people who also love this game in their own way, who feel their own bizarre buzz when they amble onto a manicured field made out of God’s greatest gift.

And every now and then, at 7am, when I see lawnmower tracks in the grass and the sun is shining, I’m reminded again of everything that lies at the heart of this great game: beauty, soul and the eternal, impossible human quest for perfection.

And when I do, everything in the world seems right, even if it’s just for a while.

Thanks for reading.

Shane

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Let’s start by addressing the “generation” mentioned above.

The Tiger generation ended in the winter of 2009. Yes, he came back for a late career encore that brought that glorious denouement at Augusta ten years later, but his generation was the generation of the 1990s and 2000s, when he strode around the world like Atlas standing atop the world and everyone else wilted in his presence.

All they had to see was that red shirt on Sunday and they’d be reaching for the smelling salts.

Golf: The Next Generation started in 2010, just a few weeks after Tiger drove into the fire hydrant, and it was McIlroy who emerged, so clearly and so convincingly, as its star.

Four Majors followed in the next four years, the first two of them by eight-stroke victories, and everyone was enraptured at just what this young Northern Irishman was capable of. They were poles apart in terms of temperament, but the pupil wasn’t far off track in the master’s legacy: Tiger won five Majors before he was 25. McIlroy was 25 when he won his fourth.

And then … a decade goes by.

A decade of heartache and heartbreak.

A decade of too many complete flame-outs and countless near misses.

There was no bigger near miss than the US Open last summer, when he missed tiddlers at the 16th and 18th greens and watched Bryson DeChambeau lift the trophy by one shot.

As the Sky Sports commentator Laura Davies said then, “He won’t be able to resist trying to knock this one close.”

A few minutes later, in the same broadcast, Sir Nick Faldo said, “A lot of Majors are won by one great shot.”

And that’s the thing about McIlroy: he knows he can hit that one great shot, and he can’t resist trying to hit it.

Even when logic dictates that he should play the numbers game, should hedge his bets, should lay up safe instead of going for it from two-eighty over the water, he almost never does.

If the tournament is on the line and one great shot might win it, Rory takes aim.

This may be a big part of the reason he hasn’t added to his four Majors, but it’s also a big part of the reason so many tune in whenever he’s in contention — no matter how impressive Scottie Scheffler is, no matter how many tournaments he wins and no matter how at ease he looks while he’s doing it, he’s not now and never will be in the same league as McIlroy when it comes to box office appeal.

No player today is.

Tiger was the greatest star attraction of them all and will never be matched.

But in his generation, Rory is out on his own.

By the time he was 35 — and there were many reasons why, including frailties of body and mind — Tiger’s career had already peaked. McIlroy at 35 still looks, on his day, like the best player in the world, and since he turned 30 the big days have seen many more on-days than off-days.

And still, so many of us watch him between our fingers.

His game, so extravagant in its brilliance, almost always puts him in position.

And then his mind, so certain of its own fragility, almost always lets him down.

In 2017, the same year they parted company acrimoniously, McIlroy’s former caddie JP Fitzgerald confronted him during the opening round of the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale when — in one of the regular mid-career flame-outs that have been so much rarer over the past five years — he had slipped to five-over-par after just six holes.

Fitzgerald said to him,

“You’re Rory McIlroy, what the fuck are you doing?”

The caddie’s job didn’t last long after that, but you get the feeling his words did.

Rory McIlroy is Rory McIlroy, and the sad thing is he needs to be regularly reminded of that fact.

Lavish in his physical talents, unmatched in his work ethic, yet so often exposed by the fatal flaws that exist inside his own mind, McIlroy is the human embodiment of an old Irish refrain that says the Lord gives us everything we have, but always keeps a bit back for himself.

One thing is for sure. When Rory McIlroy is on the premises on Sundays — or Mondays, as today at the Players Championship, where he defeated JJ Spaun in a three-hole play-off — most of us will be watching to see both the genius and his flaws.

Thanks for reading.

Shane

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• IPL franchise brand valuations

• What that might mean in context of LIV Golf team franchises

• How LIV’s 13 team brands are currently doing across digital platforms

Last summer, a new report from the investment bank Houlikan Lokey (HL) softly landed on the desks and in the inboxes of the vanishingly small percentage of people who give a damn.

That tiny percentage of people are also, I tentatively suggest, among the highest paid and highest net-worth individuals in all of sports.

Because when high-level investment banking and sports franchises mix, the content of the conversation is about a lot more than just food and beverages and ticket prices and revenue per head.

It does cover those things, of course, because all value flows upwards from the masses, but what really floats the boat of the investment banking brigade is value.

Value in its two most important monetary forms: realized, and expected.

Firstly, while the name might not be well-known to everyone, Houlihan Lokey is a big deal in the world of mergers & acquisitions and private equity advisory.

Their report, an attractively designed 29-page PDF, was titled: “IPL Valuation Study 2024 — Brand Valuation of IPL and Franchisees”.

This is a newsletter about golf, not cricket, and certainly not the Indian Premier League version of cricket.

That being said, you can be certain that there were many people within the game of golf — and more precisely, within the new ecosystem of LIV Golf which has grown from an idea to a plan to a global reality in four short years — who were paying extra close attention to the HL study.

Because, as I wrote here in my long essay series during the initial LIV Golf-PGA Tour war of 2022, the Indian Premier League (IPL) is, without a shadow of a doubt, a massive inspiration for all involved in making LIV a global success.

In part 5 of that series, I wrote:

The first Twenty20 [cricket] international was played in 2005, and the Indian Premier League started three years later.

There are parallels and contrasts here with LIV.

The parallel is that the Indian Premier League is a new league in a shorter format, big on razzmatazz and noise. (One of the LIV slogans is “Golf But Louder”; for anyone who has witnessed an IPL match, its emblem might easily have been “Cricket But Louder”.)

The IPL is now just 17 years old, but spurred by a combination of factors — India’s booming economy, its young and increasingly wealthy demographics, and the phenomenal appeal of cricket to a large percentage of the country’s 1.4 billion population — it has already grown to become, by some informed estimates, the second most valuable sports league in the world, in terms of per-game TV rights value, behind only the NFL.

Among the headline figures in the Houlihan Lokey report was that the average brand value of the IPL’s 10 franchise teams is now USD $159 million, taking team franchise valuations alone past the $1.5 billion mark for the first time.

So what might this mean in the context of LIV Golf?

How are LIV’s fledgling teams, with their occasionally weird structure — nobody can satisfactorily explain why three of the four members of Majesticks are captains — doing in the early stages of their brand development?

And, finally, what do we know about who actually owns the IP of these new brands, which in some cases are growing rapidly in terms of brand recognition in the digital world?

Let me go through these questions in turn.

What might IPL valuations mean in the context of LIV Golf?

There are undoubtedly some overlaps between IPL and LIV, and the money-men behind LIV will surely be watching developments there closely.

1. Closed League (No Relegation)

Just like the IPL, LIV operates as a closed league, thereby ensuring teams have the type of long-term stability that can attract investors seeking a predictable business model.

All 13 teams in the LIV roster are assured of participation in future seasons, allowing for better long-term planning, including sponsorship deals and merchandising contracts.

The upshot of this is that without the annual pressure of relegation so common in many other leagues, the teams which can achieve the greatest brand-building can potentially increase their franchise value significantly through fostering community and fan engagement over time.

2. The Possibility of an Equitable Commercial Model

While we don’t know much about the commercial model, it’s very likely that an equitable revenue distribution model has been adopted, or at least is being considered.

In this way, central income, from media rights and sponsorships, say, would be shared equally among teams, ensuring all teams, regardless of market size or performance, have a baseline revenue, reducing financial disparity.

If LIV is implementing this model, it would mean the franchises with the smallest footprint — both in brand recognition, commercial performance and on-course results — could still stay on a growth trajectory, collectively stabilizing the league as a whole. This would in turn make LIV itself, and its individual teams specifically, more appealing to investors.

That being said, there is a strong argument that financial stability is not actually a consideration, and that LIV as a whole is just a capital expenditure by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), with greater influence and presence for Saudi Arabia on the world stage one of the target outcomes.

3. Global Branding vs. Local Identity

Unlike the IPL, which has a strong local identity due to each team’s connection with Indian cities, LIV teams face a global opportunity that might actually be less of an opportunity, in the short-term at least, and rather the biggest challenge it has to overcome. The world is a big place.

Against that challenge, LIV’s model of visiting and returning to locations with both a vibrant economy and a definite local golf fanbase is crucial. Adelaide, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City are all on the LIV calendar again this year, and 2025 will see the league visit Korea for the first time.

The United States is still the core market and six tournaments will take place there, but the global footprint of LIV is growing every year. Perhaps South Africa, which is already represented through the all-SA Stinger team, South America and India are candidates for tournaments in future years — indeed, many of LIV’s biggest stars played in India in January in the International Series India, heralded as the strongest field ever to participate on the Indian subcontinent.

4. Salary caps don’t apply

The IPL, like the NFL, has a hard salary cap, which prevents richer teams from outspending others on talent and is, arguably, the most important factor in maintaining competitiveness each year.

Golf, of course, has always been a sport founded on individual performance and individual reward. Players earn their own tournament earnings and off-course endorsement and sponsorship deals.

Despite the team structure, this individual ethos has been carried through to LIV, where players compete for massive prize purses — each tournament has $4 million to the winning player out of an individual purse of $20 million — and smaller purses split between the winning team, who share $3 million out of a total team purse of $4.5m.

Therefore, salary caps don’t apply, but it will be interesting to note whether future high-profile additions to the roster will still be governed by LIV’s founding ethos, where individual players were lured by the carrot of tens of millions of dollars, and sometimes hundreds of millions, in signing-on fees.

5. Media Rights and Viewership

The IPL benefits from a vast, cricket-loving domestic audience. LIV faces a much bigger fight for those eyeballs and their loyalty. Indeed, one of the big criticisms of LIV in its first three years has been its inability to make any notable breakthroughs in the television rights landscape.

That is showing signs of changing, with the first deal with a major US network, Fox Sports, confirmed last month.

6. Sponsorship, Merchandising and Investor Backing

The IPL model shows how sports can be a platform for brands and investors alike.

US-based capital firms such as Redbird and CVC have invested in the IPL in recent years.

Speaking on Pitchbook’s In Visible Capital podcast in 2021, RedBird Capital managing partner Rob Klein underlined the benefits of its investment in Rajasthan Royals:

“We invested in the Royals media rights and the IPL have grown 5X since the last renewal in 2017. The media rights are currently owned by Disney through their Hotstar platform. That accounts for 30% of all paid Disney+ subscribers globally.”

LIV could explore similar avenues, although investor interest at this point appears to be sparse. After joining LIV in 2023, Bubba Watson said that “10-20 people” were interested in buying a stake in his RangeGoats GC team, but a year and a half later there have been no announcements of any major ownership stakes being purchased out of the existing PIF-dominated ownership structure.

There have, however, been some developments in merchandising. Just this week, the Cleeks GC team — the team with one of the lowest brand profiles among LIV’s 13 teams based on social media engagement (more on that below) — announced a partnership with luxury leather designer Martin Key.

From the press release:

“Retailing at $4,800 USD, the limited-edition Martin Key for Cleeks weekend bag, produced in 11 copies, is more than just an accessory — it is a statement piece that reflects the shared values of legacy, craftsmanship, and innovation.”

(I guess it’s a case of pick a number. A look at the Martin Key ecommerce store shows the bag on sale for €5,800, or more than $6,000 USD at the time of writing.)

How are LIV’s fledgling teams doing in the early stages of their brand development?

Perhaps the best way to judge the individual cut-through of each of the LIV teams is to take a closer look at their performance across the digital channels.

All 13 teams have all of the following:

• YouTube channel

• TikTok page

• Instagram page

• X profile

But how are they doing there? Let’s drop some charts.

LIV Golf Teams on YouTube

The discrepancies here are, no pun intended, off the charts.

The RangeGoats team uploaded 357 videos to YouTube — and when you bear in mind that RangeGoats are one of the newer teams, joining ahead of the 2023 season, that number is quite staggering. In contrast, Phil Mickelson’s HyFlyers team has uploaded just nine videos to its YouTube channel.

When you glance at subscribers, a startingly divergence emerges. HyFlyers have more than 241,000 subscribers, almost five times more than their nearest competitor. (That volatility probably owes something to the HyFlyers’ collaboration with YouTube golf influencer Grant Horvat, who has starred in two Hyflyers videos which between them have attracted approximately 2 million views.)

But leaving subscribers and video count to one side, how are each of the teams doing in terms of actual YouTube viewership?

There, there is a clear winner.

You might simply call this “The Bryson Effect”.

Bryson DeChambeau, the Crushers captain, now has more than 1.7 million viewers on his own YouTube channel, giving him the unique place of being both an elite player and a golf influencer.

DeChambeau has emerged over the past five years as golf’s biggest personality, from his Covid-era body-building, through the unsettling intensity that led to a much-publicized row with Ryder Cup teammate Brooks Koepka and a number of caddie changes in that time, to his wholesale embrace of digital platforms to make a direct connection with his fanbase.

Indeed, digital platforms seemed to play a key role in his decision to sign on with LIV — that and tens of millions of dollars, of course — as DeChambeau pointed to the PGA Tour’s policy of preventing players from capturing their own footage and producing content during tournament week.

Crushers are a beneficiary of Bryson’s halo effect, with the team channel getting more than 53 million views on its YouTube content to date. In contrast, Jon Rahm’s Legion XIII posted 35 videos and had, at the time of research before the first LIV event of the year, gained a miserable 1,200 total views.

LIV Golf Teams on TikTok

YouTube is still the big daddy of golf’s digital influence, but there’s no doubt that TikTok is catching up fast.

Different platform, much the same result, with the Crushers, er, crushing it here too, where they have more than 50% of the total likes of all LIV teams on TikTok.

One of the striking things on TikTok is that the Crushers channel are outdoing their rivals on all metrics — but on one metric, number of videos uploaded, they are at the back of the field.

If anything, that proves one of two things, or both: the quality of the creative matters, and the size of the personality matters.

In other words, more is not better. Bigger is better and better is better.

LIV Golf and other social channels

All 13 teams also have X and Instagram accounts, but I won’t spend too much time on the data there.

The team with the most followers on X is, again, Crushers, but with a measly 11,000 followers. The other 12 teams come in between 3,000 and 9,000 followers.

It’s a generally pitiful performance that probably says more about X than it does about the LIV teams. Whether it’s the Elon Musk factor, or just a decade-long dip in old Twitter’s profile and influence, X is by far the lowest performing platform for all the teams.

On Instagram, Crushers again lead the way with 207,000 followers, more than twice their nearest rivals (4Aces, with 95,000).

All teams are almost equally active there, hovering around the 1000-post mark. The outliers are all-Aussie team Ripper, which has posted more than 2000 times to Instagram, and Rahm’s Legion XIII, which has 650 posts but has more than a year of catch-up on most its rivals having been the most recent addition to the LIV roster at the end of 2023.

Who actually owns the LIV teams?

This is, perhaps, the murkiest factor of all, owing to the closed-doors nature of the way the PIF conducts most of its business.

In sports business media reports in 2022, it was stated that the team ownership structure during the launch phase was a straightforward split: 75% owned by the PIF, and 25% by the team captains.

There has been no real developments in this in the three years since then, in public at least.

That may not be all that surprising, given that we’re still in the initial phase of brand-building, with all the awareness and name and logo recognition that entails.

Speaking to Joe Pompliano recently, Phil Mickelson revealed that this initial phase is approximately a 10-year project, and that less than three years in, LIV is probably further along than it thought it would be.

With key new faces in the LIV senior executive team recently — Scott O’Neil, a veteran of more than 25 years of leading global sports and entertainment brands, having been CEO of both Merlin Entertainments and Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, took over from Greg Norman as LIV CEO last month — the stage looks to be set for another big push forward.

And building the brands of LIV’s teams appears to be a critical factor in the league further establishing itself on the global sports business landscape.

Thanks for reading.

Till next time.

Shane

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Neat closure is always impossible.

Keith Pelley, who recently announced that he will be leaving his position at the head of the European Tour, admitted as much. 

“The timing is never right with these sorts of things,” he said.

And yet.

Take Pelley at his word, and you run the risk of becoming just the latest unwitting victim in the career political brilliance of one of the world’s greatest sports administrators and commercial dealmakers.

When Pelley speaks publicly, it’s wise to ask a question.

What’s at stake here?

Because with Keith Pelley, something is always at stake.

That’s not to suggest that Pelley is dishonest. 

Not at all. 

On the contrary, Pelley is a man who adeptly fills the two roles that only the great sports executives can fill.

Sports executives typically come in two forms: politician and businessman. 

The politician can press flesh with hoi-polloi and riff-raff alike, always on the lookout for the photo op. A political-minded business leader I worked for once told me, “If there’s no photo, it didn’t happen.” With the politician, image is everything.

The businessman, on the other hand, can structure deals and get things done where other, lesser, men (and it is, of course, mostly men) never even saw an opportunity. 

In Pelley, you witness the best of both, politician and businessman rolled powerfully into one incredibly capable, necessarily ruthless, and endlessly accomplished performer at the highest level of sport’s corridors of power. 

You get the sense with Pelley that he could have been world golf’s mover and shaker, if he so wished. 

But no: he leaves in a couple of months after almost nine years at the helm of a European / DP World Tour which is, in the eyes of LIV Golf defector Sergio Garcia at least, on the way to becoming “fifth best” in the global golf tour rankings.

Perhaps there’s a different story.

Perhaps golf is too small for Pelley, and his time at the European Tour headquarters in Wentworth Golf Club, England might in time be viewed instead as a stepping stone to something bigger and better on his way to the biggest and the best.

So let us return to “timing”, the one word that was on the lips and keyboards of everyone who thought, talked and typed about the news of Pelley’s departure since it was announced earlier in January. 

He will leave the European Tour — now called the DP World Tour, by dint of one of Pelley’s trademark commercial deals — in April. 

Pelley is right that neat closure and perfect timing are never truly possible, but notwithstanding that, his departure prompted many to ask a pertinent question.

Not why. But why now?

Senior executive job-hopping occurs in sports less frequently than in other sectors — Pelley is, after all, just the fourth Chief Executive in the half-century of the European/DP World Tour — but executives eventually come and go, so Pelley’s decision to move on could never be called a shock.

The shock is that it’s happening now.

Why, when the European/DP World Tour is locked in months-long negotiations that could have far-reaching implications for the future prosperity of the Tour — perhaps even, say the doomsters, its very survival — would Pelley leave now?

Could leaving now be construed as evidence that the European/DP World Tour ship has taken on a gash to the hull that makes keeping it afloat impossible, and Pelley is escaping before the vessel sinks?

That narrative is a compelling one. In terms of public awareness and cachet, the European Tour has probably never been at a lower ebb. Consider a few bald facts:

• All the best European players now play on either the PGA Tour or LIV Golf

• The last world-class European golfer to graduate from the European Tour was Rory McIlroy, who last played 20 European Tour events in 2009

• The next generation of European stars — Jon Rahm, Viktor Hovland and Ludvig Aberg — all graduated from the US collegiate system straight to the PGA Tour

• In Pelley’s time, the minimum number of events a European Tour member must play per year to retain his membership has dropped from 13 to just four

This paints a sorry enough picture for the Tour. If you’re observing casually, you might think that what we’ve witnessed over the past decade or so, neatly aligning with Keith Pelley’s time in charge, is the crumbling of a once-great institution.

But the truth is always more complex and, as always, it lies just beyond the surface.

Let’s dive deeper.

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Why Keith Pelley Says He’s Going Now

First of all, let’s make sure we don’t do the man a disservice. We should, of course, pay close attention to his words — even if it’s to hold them up to closer scrutiny.

In all the reams of press releases and sound bites that accompanied the news of Pelley’s departure, for a new job back in his native Canada, there were two notable themes to his pronouncements.

1. The job he’s leaving is not yet complete, but will be completed by April. His focus for the next couple of months will be on seeing through on the one outstanding task: that of successfully concluding negotiations with the PGA Tour, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (the bankrollers of LIV) and private equity firm Strategic Sports Group (SSG) to finalize an agreement and bring into being the new company that will exert an iron grip on global golf for the foreseeable future.

2. The job he’s going to is his dream job. Pelley will take up the role of President and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd (MLSE), controlling owners of four Toronto sports franchises, ice hockey’s Maple Leafs, basketball’s Raptors, football’s Argonauts and soccer’s Toronto FC. He is — and whatever about his departure from his current job, there is absolutely no disputing this — a proud Torontonian and proud Canadian. Pelley’s former roles include: CEO of Toronto Argonauts in the Canadian Football League for three years until 2007; President of Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Canada; and, immediately before joining the European Tour in 2015, President of the Toronto-based multi-billion-dollar media company Rogers Communications, where in 2013 he negotiated what was then the biggest media rights deal in National Hockey League (NHL) history. In announcing his departure from the European/DP World Tour this month, he said, “This was the only job I'd ever leave the DP World Tour for, unless there was an NFL team in Toronto, which there isn’t.”

Both of those themes encourage us to take something vital on faith.

Let’s take each one in turn.

The first item of faith: The job still to be done

It’s not stretching it one inch to suggest that the future of top-tier pro golf in Europe hangs on the outcome of negotiations over the next couple of months.

This is a big deal.

The European Tour has traditionally been a key player in world golf, the breeding ground of legends such as Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle, Bernhard Langer, Ian Woosnam, Jose Maria Olazabal, Padraig Harrington and Rory McIlroy.

On top of that, the European Tour is the administrator of the Europe Ryder Cup team, and despite — or perhaps, at least in part, because of — the absence of prize-money, the Ryder Cup has, over the past 40 years, become one of the most important dates in golf’s global calendar. (Even though, whisper it, it omits all of Asia and Oceania and Africa and South America from its orbit; golf has always had a healthy skepticism of DEI.)

So if it’s true that Europe’s place is under grave threat, then the next two months are seen to be critical.

Except for one thing. It’s not true.

The European Tour has changed irrevocably, but Europe’s place is not under threat. 

Indeed, the current negotiations, which have been ongoing since before last June’s announcement of an agreement in principle between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, are likely to underscore Europe’s place at the heart of golf’s new global cartel.

Which brings us back to that first item of faith:

That the deal gets done, and gets done before Pelley finishes up on Easter Weekend.

Will that happen?

There are too many reputations, and too much money, at stake, so you can expect that it will. And of all the players in this great game of charades, the only one who has consistently — in the words of Pelley’s fellow Torontonian Wayne Gretzky — seen “where the puck is going” has been Keith Pelley.

Speaking after the announcement of his departure earlier in January, he said: 

“The growth of the game is global. I think that’s where the focus needs to be. I think with the emergence of FSG, which owns Liverpool [FC], they understand the importance of global. PIF certainly understands the importance of being global. This is a global game. Every business now that is growing wants to be global. What I would like to see is the game becoming unified with a global strategy. I think the PGA Tour is coming to the realisation is global is the key for the growth. They have heard me say it once or twice.”

By virtue of his imminent departure, Pelley might actually have increased the chips at his disposal. 

In this global high-stakes poker game, we have:

• the PGA Tour delegation, which is desperate to do a deal but equally desperate not to lose face or status while they do it

• the Saudi Public Investment Fund, with hundreds of billions of dollars to play with and now pot-committed to golf as a mechanism for nailing down a place in global corridors of power

• the Strategic Sports Group (SSG), a billionaire class of high-powered private equity funds and sports owners, including Fenway Sports Group (led by John Henry of Boston Red Sox and Liverpool FC), Cohen Private Ventures (Steve Cohen, New York Mets), RedBird Capital Partners (led by Gerry Cardinale and the new owners of AC Milan) and Crescent Capital (led by Mark Attanasio, owner of the Milwaukee Brewers)

• the European delegation, led by Pelley and his already appointed successor, Guy Kinnings

What is the role of Europe in all of this?

In terms of financial clout and power, it’s obvious that it’s playing a bit part.

In terms of political clout and power, though, its role might be much bigger.

There are a lot of big egos and deep pockets in the room. 

Golf is coming off two years of war. It needs a Treaty of Versailles moment, and politically, Europe is in the best place to bring all sides together. 

On the one hand, it is a signed and sealed Strategic Partner of the PGA Tour, an alliance that has been strengthened at every turn over the past five years.

On the other hand, it is now firmly ensconced in the Middle East: the Saudi International first took place as a European Tour event in 2019, and the United Arab Emirates has become such a core part of the Tour now that the whole thing is called the DP World Tour (DP World being a Dubai-based conglomerate) and the annual championship, which used to be quaintly known as the Order of Merit, is now branded as the Race to Dubai.

A global business requires a global business entity, and after the politicking and brinkmanship of the past two years, the business of global golf will get its global business unit. 

Negotiations are always a strange beast. Even when all sides stand to make massive gains, there’s always a danger that somebody could lose the one thing nobody wants to lose: status.

There is so much money and power at stake here — for everyone involved — that a deal will happen. 

It just needs a dealmaker. And in Keith Pelley, they have one of the world’s best at their service.

It’s quite likely, as I write this in the last days of January 2024, that a deal has already happened, and that the establishment of a global cartel that will be designed to maximize global revenues and influence over the next three decades, everybody involved — the PGA Tour, the Saudis, the Pelley-led European delegation and the private equity partners in the Strategic Sports Group (SSG) — wins handsomely.

It’s quite likely that the only thing remaining to be ironed out is all the dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s and, most importantly, the PR plan.

The opportunity to make the most global PR capital suggests that we can expect an announcement shortly after the arrival of spring, as the golf-watching world looks ahead to the start of a new season of Major tournaments. Perhaps the week before the Players Championship, which starts on March 14th, is when that agreement, and golf’s new global firm, will be made real.

Perhaps on March 6th or 7th, golfers and golf fans all over the world will awake from their winter hibernation to the news that the world commercial and professional golf has been united as never before.

Golf, for the past two years, has been a bit like New York’s “Five Families”, but any public or private feuding is about to give way for a joyous quarter-century of maximal gain for all involved.

By 2050, Europe’s place at the center of a global body will be assured by the events of 2020-24, and concepts such as a location-specific “European Tour” will seem outdated, parochial and small-minded.

Pelley knew where the puck was headed.

He knew that the European Tour, as it had been, was impossible to save.

But he saw something much more valuable and powerful emerging in the distance, and he might well have played a masterstroke to secure European golf administrators their place in the sport’s global power game.

The second item of faith: Keith Pelley’s dream job

If the first item above reckoned with the entire golf world and a global game of diplomacy and dealmaking, this second one is much more introspective, focusing as it does squarely on Keith Pelley’s individual and private ambitions.

Reports surrounding the announcement implied that Pelley was leaving the European Tour to take up his dream job with MLSE.

But let’s consider the direct quote: 

“This was the only job I'd ever leave the DP World Tour for, unless there was an NFL team in Toronto, which there isn’t.”

And let’s also resurface a separate quote from Pelley, one that he gave way back in 2011.

Back then, Pelley was inducted into the Sports Hall of Hame of Etobicoke, the locality in Toronto where he had been a football running back in his youth.

This was in the early days of his role with Rogers Communications, long before golf in Europe was even on his horizon, before even the landmark multi-billion-dollar NHL deal that marked him out as one of the leading movers and shakers in sports business.

In an interview to mark the Hall of Fame honor, Pelley reflected on his time with the Toronto Argonauts, where under his watch game attendance had tripled and the team returned to Championship success in the Canadian Football League for the first time in seven years.

Pelley said:

“I thought, wow, this is the dream job. I’ll never leave this one … But then the opportunity to run all facets of the Olympics for your own country (came up), and I said, how do I turn that down?”

You see, Keith Pelley does not have one dream job.

Or put another way, he has not yet arrived at his dream job.

And like the greatest chess grandmasters, he’s always thinking ten moves ahead.

His career has, in a way, come full circle, taking him from Toronto to Vancouver to Europe and back to Toronto.

But “full circle” implies that we are approaching the end of a sort of hero’s journey.

Pelley left his homeland, experienced all the challenges high-level sports business could throw at him, and then made it back home, changed and improved.

But Keith Pelley is nothing if not a mould-breaker, and there’s every chance he has at least one more big target ahead. 

He won’t ever say it, of course, but there’s little doubt he’s thinking it, and plotting out his moves carefully, and his return to North America, in the biggests job in Canadian sport, takes him much closer to what might be on his ultimate radar.

The NFL.

Roger Goodell, the NFL’s current Commissioner and the highest-paid executive in sport, is contracted until 2027 and — 67 by that point — will likely push for another few years beyond that.

For the sake of speculation, let’s disregard everything above about neat closures and say Goodell does a victory lap in 2031 after 25 astonishingly successful years in charge.

Not only has it solidified its position as the top sports product at home (the Super Bowl is watched by approximately 100 million people in America; even the Draft was watched by 54 million people in 2023), the NFL, and American football generally, has been making massive strides in exploring commercial opportunities away from American shores.

While Pelley has criticized the PGA Tour for its America-centric view, he could never accuse the NFL of something similar.

There was a time when it would have seemed ludicrous to hold regular season NFL games outside the US, but sellout season games have now been held in London since 2007, and it’s increasingly likely that a franchise will be based there within the next decade. Brazil, Mexico and Germany are other markets ravenous for the NFL product.

By 2031, the NFL might just need a sports executive with a background of mapping out and achieving a way to world domination.

Enter Keith Pelley.

Everywhere he has gone, he has delivered.

At the Argonauts he delivered three-fold increase in fan attendance and a Championship.

At the Vancouver Olympic Games he delivered widely-praised exceptional television coverage for hundreds of millions of consumers.

At Rogers Communications he delivered the biggest TV rights deal in the history of ice-hockey.

At the European Tour he delivered powerful strategic and commercial relationships with both sides of golf’s civil war (the United States and the Middle East) on the way to securing a place for Europe at the top table of the most powerful commercial entity in the history of pro golf.

In business, finance and technology, Europe has lost ground to the rest of the world over the past 20 years. The geopolitical and global commerce reality is that Europe has either fallen forever from glory or never (in the case of tech) held much glory in the first place.

Successful Europeans — see colonialism — have always looked overseas for glory, and only the most short-sighted bureaucrats refuse to look outwards now. 

Keith Pelley knows all that, and it is that knowledge, coupled with his extraordinary powers of dealmaking, that has helped him succeed in every stage of his career.

So when the NFL wants to make world domination its golf in the 2030s, is there anyone in the world better placed to do it than the former running back with a track record for playing the global game and winning?

Thanks for reading. The Wedge is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy these articles and would like to support independent media focused on the business, money and mystique of the world’s greatest game, please consider a monthly or annual subscription or gift a subscription to someone who might value this content.

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Rory McIlroy hasn’t changed his mind on LIV. He has changed his mind on the PGA Tour

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“I've passed the point of no return. Do you know when that is, Beth? That's the point in a journey where it's longer to go back to the beginning than continue to the end. It's like when those astronauts got in trouble. I don't know, somebody screwed up, and they had to get them back to Earth. But they had passed the point of no return. They were on the other side of the moon and were out of contact for like hours. Everybody waited to see if a bunch of dead guys in a can would pop out the other side. Well, that's me. I'm on the other side of the moon now and everybody is going to have to wait until I pop out. Did you know, Beth, that in certain South American countries it's still legal to kill your wife if she insults you?”

— Bill Foster, Falling Down (1993)

This article is 2554 words. Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Mark Twain is supposed to have said a lot of things he never actually said, and one of those is:

“A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”

This quote seems to be a descendent of another similar line from Jonathan Swift, the Anglo-Irish satirist of the 17th and 18th centuries:

“[I]t often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.”

There is something uniquely interesting about the way “lies fly” in our so-called information age, when news and information and headlines and out-of-context pull quotes hit us a thousand times a day, whenever we pass a TV screen or pull our phones from our pockets.

One such example surfaced on hit lots of golf media and Twitter X profiles over the New Year period: Rory McIlroy and the apparent blessing he finally gave to LIV Golf after the events of the past 18 months.

McIlroy was a guest on the Stick to Football podcast with four former UK soccer pros turned pundits and media darlings, Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, Roy Keane and Ian Wright.

The interview ran for more than an hour but the unfortunate reality now is that a tiny percentage of us have either the time or the attention span to listen to something for an hour, even if it’s something we’re interested in.

And so, a one-hour podcast becomes a series of 60-second clips, and the series of 60-second clips become a headline. 

In this case, the headlines came from Greg Norman, the always-embattled but always-spiky LIV Golf Commissioner who has been held up as both the true leader of pro golf’s journey to maturity and the villain who has broken the sport forever.

Norman, in another podcast (sidenote: as mentioned in the 2023 retrospective last time, golf media really is transforming before our eyes) LIV Golf’s Fairway to Heaven, told hosts Jerry Foltz and Su-Ann Heng [emphasis mine]: 

“I’ve got to be honest with you, I’m very appreciative of what Rory said. It’s been a painful couple of years because what we have done is be consistent. Our narrative has been consistent, our delivery mechanism has been consistent.

The reason I say I appreciate Rory to fall on his sword to some degree is the fact that he did judge us by not knowing the facts. He judged us on other people’s thoughts and opinions. We wanted to sit down from Day 1 for years and years ago, we wanted to sit down with them to completely make them understand the value of what LIV footprint, business model and impact can and has made on the game of golf.

From my perspective I say, ‘Hey, thank you Rory’. We all knew it was going to work within the golf ecosystem, we all wanted to be there, we are going to be there, he said that. And quite honestly, this is a significant turning point for everybody.”

Cue all the headlines about Norman saying McIlroy had “fallen on his sword”.

But the key questions about this are as follows:

1. What did Rory McIlroy actually say?

2. What did Rory McIlroy not say?

3. What does Rory McIlroy actually think now?

Let’s answer numbers 1 and 2 as quickly as possible.

Then I can give a best estimate for number 3.

What Rory McIlroy actually said

I’ve transcribed and annotated Rory’s full interview on the Stick to Football podcast (yes, there is some AI that could do that for me, and yes, maybe I should get out more).

What Rory actually said in the interview can be bulleted under 15 short headings.

1. Events of the past 18 months have brought an end to meritocracy in golf

“[The issue] is the guaranteed part. You come and play golf for five or six years, and you have a contract and we’ll pay you whatever it is per year, plus you’re going to compete for this prize money as well.

The one thing for me is golf has always been built on meritocracy. You shoot the scores, you rise up the ranks and you get rewarded accordingly.”

2. LIV exposed fundamental flaws in the PGA Tour’s commercial model

“We’re all supposed to be independent contractors and we can basically pick and choose what tournaments we want to play.

What LIV and the Saudis have exposed is if you have a tour and you’re going and asking sponsors for millions of dollars to sponsor these events and you’re not able to guarantee those sponsors the players that are going to show up, it’s very hard … I can’t believe they [the PGA Tour] have done so well for so long.”

3. Golf is a small sport that can’t survive division and cannibalization

“It’s created this massive upheaval in professional golf which has been sad to see.

Some people have taken one side, some people have taken another. Golf’s a small enough sport, it’s not like football where you’ve got billions of fans. So if you start dividing the eyeballs in professional golf it’s no good for anyone, it’s just going to cannibalize itself.”

4. The PGA Tour’s initial response to LIV was completely unsustainable

“Competition is good. But at the same time, the PGA Tour trying to compete with LIV and the Saudis’ money is completely unsustainable. They can’t do that. You’re never going to win a fight if it’s just money for money. And we’ve seen in all sports, there’s no-one spending like the Saudis. 

The PGA Tour [decided] to spend a lot of money [in increased prize funds] that maybe put them on a path that was unsustainable. And now you’re seeing some sponsors are pulling out because the Tour are asking for so much money, and the sponsors are like, ‘We can’t afford it. Asking us to pay 20, 25 million [dollars] an event to sponsor this thing.’ 

If they’re not seeing the value in it. ‘If you can guarantee me the top 50 players are going to come and play in my event that week then fine, but if you can’t guarantee me that then I’m not going to give you that money.’”

5. Talk of “growing the game” is not actually about growing the game

“If you’ve got people or a sovereign wealth fund wanting to spend money in your sport, ultimately that’s a good thing. But you just want to get them to spend it in the right way, and spend it on things that are important in the game.

Instead of giving someone $100 million, why don’t you put $50 million into a grassroots program for the R&A or the USGA so that you can actually help.

Whenever they say ‘growing the game’, spending that money elsewhere to actually grow the game and not just buy talent would be a way better way to spend that money.”

6. On veteran pros trying to ‘burn the place down’ on their way out

“The one thing that’s bothered me is, we’ve all grown up, played on the European Tour, PGA Tour and that’s given the platform to turn into who we have and give us the profile. When people have played that for 15-20 years and then they jump to LIV and then they just start talking crap about where they’ve come from, that’s what bothers me, because you wouldn’t be in this position if you didn’t have what you have coming up. 

At the end of the day we’re here to make a living and make money, I absolutely understand it, especially some of these guys that are at the back end of their career. I don’t begrudge anyone for taking that money and doing something different, but don’t try to burn the place down on your way out.”

7. On respecting Jon Rahm’s LIV decision

“I think at this point with this whole framework agreement and the merger news back in June, the Tour legitimized what LIV was trying to do, so it made it easier for guys to jump.

Jon, he’s smart and I think he sees things coming together at some point. So [he can go] ‘Okay, I take a lot of upfront money’ … which is his prerogative, he can absolutely do that’ … ‘And if things come together, I’ll maybe play LIV for a year, come back play on the Tour and maybe play some team golf on the fringes.’ 

So I thought it was a smart business move, it’s opportunistic, he sees that things will come back together. He’s in a lucky position, he’s exempt for all the Majors, there’s not one person who wouldn’t want him on a Ryder Cup team because of how good he is. He was in a great position where there wasn’t a ton of risk involved for him to go.”

8. On getting clear on what his job actually is

For the last two years I’ve been trying to fight the good fight. Not that I’ve wasted [that time], I’ve played well the last couple of years, I’m in a good spot, but it’s not my job at the end of the day.

My job is to go out there and shoot the lowest score possible.

9. On regrets

“I’ve went through the last two years with this altruistic approach of, I’ve sort of looked at the world in the way I’ve wanted to see it, instead of going through life… I’ve accepted reality basically. This is what’s going to happen. 

Have I lost a fight? I don’t feel like I’ve lost a fight but I’ve just accepted that this is part of our sport now.

If I have a regret, it’s being too judgmental with the decision of the players who accepted LIV offers early on. Not everyone is in my or Tiger’s position. We all turn professional to make a living playing the sports that we do. I think that’s what I realized over the last two years, I can’t judge people for making that decision.”

10. Being sick of the money talk

“Whenever I dreamed of being a professional golfer it was about winning trophies and it was about winning Major championships.

This happens in all sports but to me I’m just sick of the money talk in golf. Because the fans don’t care. They just want to watch good golf.”

11. How he set the ball rolling for the PGA Tour / PIF framework agreement

“I met Yasir [Al-Rumayyan, governor of the Saudi Public Investment Fund] at the end of 2022 in Dubai, and I just said, ‘What do you want? What is it in golf that you want to do?’ 

So we had a really good chat. We talked about, he loves the game, he wants to do certain things, he thinks the team element in golf can really take off, and try to build franchise value in some of these teams. I understood some of it.

So when I got back to America at the start of [2023] I was on the Board of the PGA Tour and I said to them, ‘Someone’s got to go talk to this guy’.

So then there was a plan put in place where one of the Board members would try to develop a relationship with him, see if we can try to figure something out, try to move forward together.”

12. On the anger of PGA Tour players after the framework agreement

“I knew there was conversations being had but I didn’t know… It went from they met in April and they got this agreement done in June. So it happened very, very quickly.

And people were like, ‘What has gone on?’

Because the PGA Tour were telling all their players, ‘These are the bad guys coming to take over our Tour’, and then two months later it’s like, ‘Oh we’re actually going to do a deal with them’.”

13. On resigning from the PGA Tour’s Policy Board

“I resigned at the end of the year because it was just taking up too much time.

I just want to get back to being a golfer, playing golf and trying to win those tournaments I dreamed about winning as a kid.”

14. On ongoing divisions, bruised egos and the prospect of being reunited

“You’ve got guys on both sides that don’t want it to happen for certain reasons. The LIV guys don’t really want to come back and play the PGA Tour because they don’t feel they’ve been treated very well, some of the PGA Tour guys don’t want things to come back together because they don’t want to see those other guys, so it’s a really weird…

People at this point need to put their egos and feelings aside and come back together and we all move forward because that would be the best thing for golf.”

15. On one possible future for LIV within the golf ecosystem

“What I would love LIV to turn into is almost like the IPL of golf. IPL in cricket, they take two months during the calendar, you’ve got four weeks in May and four weeks in November, and you go and you do this team stuff and it’s a bit different and it’s a different format.

If they were to do something like that, I’d be like ‘Yeah that sounds like fun’, because you’re at least working within the ecosystem.

What Rory McIlroy did not say

Easy.

1. Rory didn’t say, “I got it wrong about LIV.”

2. He didn’t say, “LIV is all good now.”

3. He didn’t say, “LIV is the future.”

What does Rory McIlroy actually think?

Tougher.

But let’s see this out with another short numbered list.

It seems extremely likely that Rory McIlroy now thinks the following seven things, but can’t say many of them out loud:

1. “The future of golf is here, but I don’t have to like it.”

2. “I don’t like what LIV is, but I don’t like what the PGA Tour is now, either.”

3. “I thought I was strong enough to put the genie back in the bottle. I wasn’t, so I’m no longer going to try.”

4. “I tried politics, but I’m not a great politician.”

5. “I am a great golfer, so I’m going to stick to golf.”

6. “I’ll show up for all the obligations, but the Majors and the Ryder Cup are all that really matter to me now.”

7. “I’ll never say the Majors and the Ryder Cup are all that really matter, because my sponsors pay me a lot of money and their interests are not served if I do.”

No Breaking Bad

For about a year, Rory McIlroy was golf’s romantic, fighting to preserve both the past and the future of the game that gave him everything.

Now, Rory’s romantic days are over. 

He’ll never be golf’s equivalent of Walter White or Falling Down’s Bill Foster, so violently losing faith with their current reality they become the drug lord Heisenberg or the vigilante D-Fens.

Because Rory McIlroy still loves golf.

He still loves what the game has given him.

He still loves its history.

He just doesn’t love what pro golf has become.

He’ll never be one to burn the place down.

But he doesn’t like the look of the place all the same.

Thank you for being here. The Wedge is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy these articles and would like to support independent media focused on the business, money and mystique of the world’s greatest game, please consider a monthly or annual subscription or gift a subscription to someone who might value this content.

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Want more?

For a deep dive into about golf’s mystical past, read this essay from the “Golf’s New World Order” series, titled “Why we watch, why we go, why we play”

"Why we watch, why we go, why we play"

Welcome to Part 2 of this retrospective at the world of golf, business and money in 2023 (trying, of course, not to forget some of the mystique of the world’s greatest game too.)

Part 1 was all about events at the top of the pro game and L__ G___ and the P__ T___.

It drew attention not to the detail of what happened with the so-called merger or what we’re supposed to think of Jon Rahm now, but instead trying to look at the bigger picture of America’s place in the world, the possibilities presented by golf’s growing pie and what the past 18 months might have done to Rory McIlroy.

Part 2 tries to mostly avoid all of that, looking instead at some of the other interesting stories to break, develop or be ignored over the past 12 months.

Onwards.

Thank you for being here. The Wedge is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy these articles and would like to support independent media focused on the business, money and mystique of the world’s greatest game, please consider a monthly or annual subscription or gift a subscription to someone who might value this content.

Subscribe now

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1. Golf’s new media explosion

Golf’s media landscape has been going through a fundamental transition over the past decade, and if everyone is being truly honest with themselves, this transition is probably a big reason for so much of the anti-LIV sentiment over the past 18 months.

Why?

Because one of the most striking things about the LIV project is how it doesn’t seem to have placed any importance on traditional media attention. 

After streaming free on YouTube for its first season in 2022, LIV secured a US TV rights deal with The CW network in January, but data on viewership figures was increasingly hard to come by as the year went on.

The CW is still in the early stages of its transition into ownership by Nexstar Media Group, a transition that started — unpromisingly if growth is to be considered a primary target — with declarations that the network was paying far too much on programming, cancellations of a host of shows and pledges to acquire less resource-intensive content.

As 2024 is the final year of that two-year deal with LIV, the coming year has been described as a make-or-break one for both the channel and LIV’s American media aspirations.

But this is also looking at media through a well-established lens that is, everywhere you look, being destroyed by newcomers and upstarts.

Media has changed fundamentally for every sport over the past decade, and because golf globally is about participation, personal improvement and networking more than partisanship and supporting favorite teams and players, the game seems to be leading the way in that sports media transition.

YouTube is at the forefront of this change, and one truly spectacular symptom of the transformation that has taken place is that in an analysis of golf-focused YouTube channels, the top three categories do not contain traditional media.

Instead, the three categories are:

• Influencer media

• New media

• Official organization channels

A fuller analysis might follow here in the coming weeks, but preliminary findings are that EIGHT(!) of the top 10 spots (in terms of YouTube subscriber numbers) are filled by golf influencers.

The top spot is held by Rick Shiels Golf, who has amassed 2.72 million subscribers and a staggering 753 million video views. 

By comparison, the PGA Tour has almost twice as many total video views on YouTube (almost 1.5 billion) but has less than half the number of subs (1.3 million). On top of that, the PGA Tour has had to work much harder — it has published approximately 19,000 videos while Shiels has posted 2,200.

Other “influencers” to appear in the top ten include online golf coaches Danny Maude (1.2m subscribers) and Peter Finch (600,000) and content creator Garrett Clark (GM Golf), who recently passed the 1 million mark.

Intriguingly, one of the fastest growing “influencers” is Major winner and LIV Golf star Bryson DeChambeau.

Bryson’s decision to move to LIV in 2022 was itself influenced by the freedom he would be allowed to create, run and presumably monetize his own golf content over time. 

At the time of writing this (on December 29th, 2023), DeChambeau had 447,000 subscribers, and 2023 was a year of major growth for him. 

The total video view count on his YouTube channel almost doubled in 2023 to more than 33 million video views.

Most strikingly is his view per video rate. DeChambeau has posted just 64 videos on YouTube but has an average view per video rate of more than 525,000 views.

Every major golf YouTuber in this preliminary analysis had posted significantly more content — most in the hundreds and several in the thousands of videos published — but only new media sensation Good Good has a higher view-per-video rate than DeChambeau.

Bryson DeChambeau hits it big on and off the golf course.

Speaking of Good Good, that channel is the top golf media business on YouTube with more than 1.4 million subscribers and over 350 million video views. Their growth in ‘23 was also staggering: their total video view count was up 63% year on year. 

By comparison, Golf Digest is the highest performing traditional media company on this new media format. It has 271,000 subscribers and 122 million video views, leaving it marginally ahead of The Golf Channel (234,000 subs and 101 million video views).

Elsewhere in golf media in 2023, perhaps the biggest story of the year was Netflix’s Full Swing show, which debuted in February and featured behind the scenes access to a host of pros, including Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy and Collin Morikawa. 

Perhaps fittingly for the direction of travel when it comes to golf media — which seems to value truth, authenticity and genuine fun more than the boring staged reality of superstardom — the most interesting episodes featured the agonizing soul-searching of Brooks Koepka as he tried to get back to Major contender (which he soon did, contending in the Masters before winning the US PGA for his first Major win in five years and fifth in total), the ups and downs of journeyman pro Joel Dahmen and the family first orientation of Tony Finau.

After the toe-in-the-water reality of Season 1, the second season of Full Swing in 2024 should be even better and offer more nuggets from the true reality of life on tour.

And all of this — the rapid rise of do-it-yourself new golf media, paired with the widening reach of Netflix — hammers further nails in the coffins of traditional media establishments which seem to be scrambling to save their print and broadcast businesses even as everyone everywhere turns to streaming and on-demand.

Those who in the past controlled mass broadcast radio and television and the newsstand on the corner are unlikely to control the new formats and mediums that cater for a million niche interests. 

Established media outlets are cornered dogs now, and they will bite — as we’ve seen through its trenchant opposition to LIV Golf — but the writing is on the wall for all of them.

2. Golf as entertainment, both out and about and at-home

One of the features of the Covid-19 pandemic was the way other entertainment and leisure businesses started to look enviably in the direction of golf.

Yes, golf travel went off a cliff for a year or more, but that rebounded quickly as airports opened up to pent-up demand for the world’s great golf experiences, and elsewhere, golf has benefited in countless ways.

For starters, golf was an outdoor and naturally socially-distanced exercise option for people of all ages at a time when indoor gatherings were outlawed almost everywhere. (Whatever about clubhouses, it is an enduring mystery that golf courses were closed in many countries and states during the lockdown chapter of our recent shared history.)

During Covid-19, millions of people all over the world, short of other things to do for the first time in their life, picked up a club for the first time, and very many of them seem to have enjoyed that experience.

And perhaps the most notable outcome of all that is not reflected in club membership numbers — because let’s face it, club membership is often as much about exclusivity as it is about including new people.

No, perhaps the most notable outcome of the past three years has been the growth of golf as entertainment, both at home and out of doors.

Topgolf, which joined forces with Callaway Golf in an acquisition worth approximately $2 billion in 2021, has quickly become one of the most sought-after entertainment pursuits in the US.

Figures for 2022, the first full year following the acquisition, showed that Topgolf was the largest segment of Callaway’s overall revenue for the year (39% for Topgolf, against 35% for “golf equipment”, including clubs, balls and the market-leading Odyssey putter range, and 26% for “active lifestyle”, or clothing). 

Topgolf added 11 new venues in 2022 to a total of more than 80, and more are being added all the time. (The official website shows “Coming Soon” badges for new venues in Los Angeles and Raleigh-Durham.)

Results during 2023 showed that growth is continuing at a serious clip. After that 2022 result ($1.5 billion in Topgolf revenue), Topgolf took in $471 million in Q2 alone. By Q3 results, it was accounting for more than 43% of Callaway’s earnings.

Interestingly, this performance might have cast a negative shade on the rest of the Callaway company: at one point in November, its stock was down 49% for the 2023 calendar year. At the time of writing it has recovered somewhat but is still down 27% year to date.

The broader Callaway share price should not deflect from the outrageous success of Topgolf, however. After that $1.5 billion revenue figure in ‘22, it looks well on course for a significant jump in ‘23 after three straight quarters in excess of $400 million earnings.

The rest of the world seems to be way behind the golf-as-entertainment trend, but it will catch up, and Topgolf (and Callaway) seem to have stolen a march on all other players.

Meanwhile, at home golf is also growing rapidly as technology continues to advance the way technology typically does — a better experience at a lower price.

Many golf simulators and radar launch monitors are now available for less than $10,000, with some of the market leading options available for less than $30,000 (see this excellent breakdown by Jared Doerfler over on Perfect Putt).

All of this makes simulators an attractive new option for golf addicts who might like an alternative to driving to the course and having to deal with everything from slow play to inclement weather.

3. Is golf a factor in gender discrimination at major companies?

That’s what researchers from Miami University and the University of Cincinnati assert following a major study conducted over 12 years.

In a paper titled “Hitting the grass ceiling”, and published this year in the Southern Management Association’s Journal of Management, the researchers — Lee Biggerstaff and Bradley Goldie of Miami and Joanna T. Campbell of Cincinnati — analyzed executive teams of more than 4000 CEOS, and found that the leadership candidates hired by CEOs who played golf (numbering 760 in the study) were much more likely to be male, and the female executives they hired were much more likely to be underpaid compared with their male counterparts.

There’s no doubt that some time and effort went into the research: those 4000+ CEOs were tallied against data in the USGA’s handicap system and a Golf Digest list of golfing CEOs.

Ms Campbell, one of the authors of the study, told Forbes: 

“Golfing CEOs spend a lot of time in environments that normalize exclusion, and especially gender-based exclusion. As you spend time on the golf course and in the country club, you start to internalize the idea that women are different… it’s OK for them to be treated differently and left out of ‘men’s spaces’ – that’s where the male-only grills and bars (known as the 19th hole) come from.”

Now call me a chauvinist (I am a white man, after all; please ignore that I’m from a country that has never colonized anyone and been colonized by the British for 800 years) but the main thing I took out of this quote was that it included several layers of speculation that didn’t exactly make me have a whole lot of trust in the underlying research findings.

She speculates:

• That golfing CEOs “spend a lot of time” in golf environments

• That these environments “normalize exclusion, and especially gender-based exclusion”

• That this makes one “internalize the idea that women are different”

• And that this is where “male-only grills and bars” come from (and presumably all the other “male-only” stuff that can only ever be a Very Bad Thing)

Now, as anyone who has spent time in clubhouses will know, there’s no doubt that some people who play golf can be elitist and exclusionary.

But this is to ignore that giant strides have been made in women’s golf at all levels, from grassroots participation to record-breaking Major prize money.

To blame the game of golf for gender disparities in corporations strikes me as trying to find a result to fit a chosen hypothesis rather than do the harder work of conducting real and useful science.

Gender researchers seeking things to blame for disparities and inequalities always have a hammer, and everywhere they look they find a nail.

Perhaps most interestingly, the same researcher in that same Forbes article pointed to a study from Singapore published in 2016.

Far from backing up the research, this study suggested that a good way for girls and women to benefit in the workplace is … drum-roll … to take up golf!

But but but?

If taking up golf is open to girls and women, and the social upside of golf can include building the relationship capital that might bring far-reaching benefits in work, business and life, what, exactly, is wrong with that?

Let’s allow a last word of rebuttal from an article written by Tom Budsman and published in Fore magazine in July:

“One could reasonably deduce that there are those that feel like if golf didn’t exist, many of these problems [i.e. gender pay disparity] might not, either. 

Take a CEO and his buddies off a golf course, and—presto!—gender inequality at the workplace disappears, too. Afterall, what’s a bad actor without his stage to play on? 

This is the guilty-by-association reputation that golf has been saddled with by its non-players and detractors forever. Never mind that it’s criminally untrue. Golf courses have myriad tangible benefits that stretch far and wide. And the great majority of the upside is enjoyed by the 99 percent of us who aren’t in the corner office of a high-rise.”

Bravo, Tom!

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Happy New Year et cetera et cetera. Before 2024 rolls around, I thought it would be fun to reflect on some of the most interesting stories in the intersecting worlds of golf and business and money over the past 12 months.

And the only way that made sense to do this was to do it in two parts. 

Any retrospective of 2023 that omitted developments in the ongoing LIV-PGA-PIF saga, just what they might mean for the future of golf, and by extension, the future of the business of golf, would be a poor retrospective indeed.

And yet there were so many other interesting stories to chew on from the world of golf and business and money in 2023.

So the first article here will reflect on developments at the top of the pro game this year. 

The second one — which will follow, all going well, on New Year’s Eve — will steadfastly avoid LIV entirely and take a scan through several other fascinating stories that broke over the past 12 months (and which were probably overshadowed by all the LIV/PGA Tour furore).

Thank you for being here. The Wedge is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy these articles and would like to support independent media focused on the business, money and mystique of the world’s greatest game, please consider a monthly or annual subscription or gift a subscription to someone who might value this content.

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LIV Golf vs PGA Tour: Towards the endgame or still just the beginning?

After the mass disruption of 2022, the past 12 months have only copper-fastened the position of the upstart new arrival to the top tier of golf’s ecosystem.

Since LIV Golf’s arrival last year there have been many predictions — or wishes — that it would be nothing more than a weird but short-lived detour in the history of the golf pro game, but by the end of 2023 it looks as if it’s here and here to stay.

Even Wyndham Clark and Brian Harmon would agree that the two biggest moments in golf in 2024 did not happen on the course. The two biggest moments happened on otherwise nondescript days of the calendar: Tuesday, June 6th and Thursday, December 7th. 

In June came the shock announcement of a so-called “merger” between LIV (or more accurately its Saudi Public Investment Fund paymasters) and the PGA Tour, and then in December, the most talked about secret in sports was outed when Jon Rahm completed his move to the new tour.

(Some even drew attention to the historical significance of these dates — anniversaries of WWII’s D-Day landings in 1944 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in ‘42 — as evidence that LIV was a new war on America.)

Millions of newspaper column inches and terabyte upon terabyte of data have been used up dissecting developments in the ongoing LIV Golf-PGA Tour saga this year.

The book-length seven-part series on the saga published here in 2022 is definitely overdue an appendix or two to chart all the decisions and all the detours of the past 12 months.

There’s a good chance you’re fed up with it all, so let me try not to add to those terabytes here without adding something of value or interest.

Let’s skim over the details which have been reported a million times elsewhere, and consider what the upshot of this year’s events might be for the pro game.

There are three intriguing things about all this.

First, the undeniable swing of power and influence from the USA towards Asia.

Second, the absolute certainty that the US remains in the position of power and can be expected to fight back convincingly in 2024 and beyond.

And third: the changing place and changing face of Rory McIlroy.

Sport’s swinging pendulum of power

That swing of power has been going on for a while, especially in sports. 

Allow me a Christmas-themed aside here. This week I visited the home of my niece, an eight-year-old football fanatic. She was dressed head to toe in a blue and yellow football kit I had never seen before.

I zoomed in on the crest.

Al-Nassr.

This, with Ronaldo and 7 emblazoned on the back, was one of her prize gifts from Santa Claus.

A few hours later, I opened up the Flashscore app on my phone to check for some latest scores. I hit the search button, and a list of “Most Popular Searches” appeared.

At the top?

You guessed it.

Al-Nassr. 

And this is not all about Cristiano Ronaldo taking the end-of-career big bucks in the desert kingdom. 

In the summer of 2023, the one undeniable trend in pro football was so many of football’s established superstars — many of them still a few years away from the retirement home — accepting obscene riches to go to Saudi Arabia.

Sadio Mané, Roberto Firmino and Jordan Henderson (aged just 31, 32 and 33 respectively) all arrived there from Liverpool. Neymar, once a rival to Ronaldo and Leo Messi as world’s top player, joined Al-Hilal. World Cup winner Karim Benzema and five-time Premier League champion Aymeric Laporte also made the Saudi move. Completing Saudi’s great year in football, in December the FIFA Club World Cup final took place there for the first time, Manchester City defeating Fluminense of Brazil.

Elsewhere in sport, Formula 1 and boxing have been lapping up the petrodollars for many years, and both arrived in Saudi Arabia to much fanfare in 2023.

Sergio Perez took a rare race victory away from teammate Max Verstappen in March, while three of the year’s highest-profile boxing cards took place there: Tyson Fury and Francis Ngannou in a boxing-UFC crossover bout, the double-header featuring former heavyweight champs Anthony Joshua and Deontay Wilder and the YouTuber Jake Paul against Tommy Fury. 

The F1 might be a meaningful event but the boxing bouts were as high on attention as they were low on actual significance: a bit like LIV Golf, the year’s Saudi paid-for boxing matches held a sort of grotesque appeal. 

It’s sport, but not as you know it.

A bit like a car-crash on the motorway that makes you complain about the traffic build-up, even as you slow down and rubberneck with all the rest.

America’s position at the center of it all

Despite all this upheaval in the world, the US position at the center of things will be assured for a long time to come yet.

Why?

Let’s take our minds off the specifics of sport and hover for a moment at 50,000 feet.

• America as de facto world leader: America has effectively run the world since 1945. And, to be quite frank, America has run the world quite effectively since 1945. Compared with the events of the first half of the 20th century, the past 75 years or so have been more peaceful and more prosperous for more people than any comparable timeframe in history. 

• The double-edged swords of war and finance, America’s two enriching but destabilizing forces: First, Dwight D. Eisenhower identified the military-industrial complex in his famous speech towards the end of his presidency in 1960. That phenomenon has gone from strength to strength ever since, through multiple wars that have been as profitable for big industry and its beneficiaries as they have been devastating to small communities and many cities far away from American soil. As rubble continues to pile up in Ukraine and Gaza, military-industrial interests look to have plenty of miles in the tank yet. And second, the financialization of almost everything over the past 50 years (since the decision of Richard Nixon to take America off the Gold Standard in 1971) has created a money industry that has powered great growth at the same time as it has increased underlying instability. Those who complain about the avalanche of debt miss the mountains those debts have built. No debt, no avalanche, but no mountain. (To switch metaphors, the explosion in the finance industry has been like a rapidly built gleaming skyscraper that could have done with some more attention to the dirty, unglamorous work of securing its foundations. But without finance and debt, there would be no gleaming skyscraper and no glory.) War and finance are two double-edged swords, and America has been swinging them gleefully for more than 50 years. 

• Boom-bust cycles and the 2020s: The events of 1987’s Black Monday, 2001’s Dot-com Crash and 2008’s Great Financial Crisis are still fresh in the memory for many who went through the busts, recessions and depressions that resulted, and those who did will always and forever be on the lookout for the next cataclysm. So there’s no shortage of observers around the world who have looked at the events of 2020-23 — Covid-19, the global response of mass money-printing and increased state surveillance, double-digit inflation and rapidly rising interest rates, new wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, supply chain fragility, the spectacular rise of artificial intelligence (at least in writing blog posts and workable code) and the climate Doomsday clock — and decided they possess all the ingredients for a spectacular collapse. Some (among them billionaire libertarians, gold hoarders, end-of-the-world preppers and Bitcoin maximalists) believe that the powder-keg for a full system reset is ready and just needs a final spark. But there’s another view that says something different. It says that even if we are entering another bust, the surest bet is that the cycle of decay, regeneration and growth, powered by technology advancements that show no signs of slowing down, will only continue. The Techno-Optimists might be many things, but they’re not naive.

The one thing any of us can say with any certainty about all this is:

No matter where in the world you are and no matter what you think about America, the US has been the driving force in all the upheaval and all the progress, playing a central role in all of the above and almost everything else of note that has happened in all of our lifetimes.

Yes, non-western influences have been rising — China and Saudi Arabia in business, but also Russia in energy, Iran as an increasingly powerful main player in the Middle East and Brazil as South America’s globally-focused behemoth.

But is there anyone who truly believes that America will finally be squeezed out? 

Maybe, but such empire shifts take decades or centuries to play out. 

Back to the matter at hand, and what this means for golf in general, and the big business of pro golf in particular.

Even though it sent shockwaves through the media (about which lots more to come in Part 2 of this 2023 retrospective), the fact that the PGA Tour leadership was willing to set aside its misguided moralizing and strike the basis of a deal with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia in June should really have been no surprise to anyone who pays close attention to the way things in the real world actually work.

In the real world, money talks and money walks.

Golf’s New World Order might be more global in reach and influence than it has ever been before, and America’s position of authority within that might have been diluted. 

But whatever about the detail of who will be signing Jon Rahm’s checks from now on, the smart money goes on expecting America to continue to be at the front and center.

Because America is the home of The Deal. 

All the MAGA noise about immigration and isolationism misses the fact that where there are deals to be struck, the USA will always be there to strike them.

There’s just too much money ready to change hands, and in a global financial system where devalued currencies are increasingly the norm, the dollar is still the one thing wanted by everyone, everywhere. 

As one Argentinian I spoke to recently said, “You come to my country with dollars, you are king!”

In the future, American business interests may control a smaller slice of golf’s pie, but there’s every chance that when the dust settles on the upheaval and disruption of 2022-23, golf’s pie is about to get much, much bigger.

Rory McIlroy’s new reality

If you ever can feel sorry for someone with a net worth estimated at £200m (according to the Sunday Times 2023 Rich List), then Rory McIlroy might be that person.

For a whole year, McIlroy was put forward by his erstwhile mates in the PGA Tour’s corridors of power as the Appointed Spokesman for All That is Good and Fair.

He criticized fellow pros who signed on with LIV for their greed, said it was “hard to stomach” playing in the same field as LIV pros, drew attention to the questionable morality of the Saudis, and admitted that his own place at the center of the whole affair “took time away from the two things that are most important to me which are family and golf”.

And then came that June 6th announcement that the PGA Tour — whose chief executive Jay Monahan had, lest anyone ever forget, played the 9/11 card in opposing Saudi influence in 2022 — was now getting into bed with the same Saudis.

McIlroy was a one-man finger in the dike for the PGA Tour against LIV, so one might have expected him to be involved in such consequential discussions?

No.

Rory heard about the deal the night before it was announced.

Rory’s demeanor for the rest of 2023 was striking.

No more was he a spokesperson for anyone except Rory McIlroy.

In November, he stepped down from the PGA Tour’s policy board more than a year before his term was due to end, in effect removing himself from all such influence. A year previously, that decision would have been unthinkable. 

And then in December, after Rahm’s move to LIV had been finalized, McIlroy’s stance on Ryder Cup eligibility had completed a 180-degree turn.

A couple of months previously, referencing the absence of Ryder Cup stalwarts such as Sergio Garcia, Paul Casey and Ian Poulter from the Europe team in Rome, McIlroy said, “They’re going to miss being here more than we’re missing them.”

But after Rahm’s move it was all changed:

“Jon is going to be in Bethpage [for the Ryder Cup] in 2025 so. Because of this decision, the European Tour are going to have to rewrite the rules for the Ryder Cup eligibility. There’s absolutely no question about that … I certainly want Jon Rahm on the next Ryder Cup team.”

This change in McIlroy’s position — from primary spokesperson in defense of the PGA Tour to unattached outsider, maybe in time even lone wolf — was one of the biggest surprises of 2023.

Rory McIlroy was burned and spurned by the PGA Tour’s leadership. That will hurt his ego grievously, but it may also spur him to greater focus on the things that made him great in the first place. 

Rory is a complex individual, his complexity running deep in the history of his homeland where he has at different times been both a symbol of Ireland’s punchy global ambition and its 500-year-old history of religious schisms. 

In the run-up to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio De Janeiro, where golf made its return after more than a century in the wilderness, McIlroy was repeatedly questioned about which country he was going to represent: as a Northern Irishman, he could have chosen Ireland or Great Britain, and either decision was dripping in political meaning.

After much soul-searching, and even questioning whether golf deserved to be in the Games, he opted for Ireland, but there was a palpable sense of relief from his camp when he later withdrew, blaming the spread of the Zika virus in Brazil.

All this is to say that Rory McIlroy has long made a habit of placing the weight of the world on his shoulders.

In 2024, maybe for the first time in more than a decade, he will have nothing or nobody to care about but himself.

It will be interesting to see how that affects his game.

If there’s a positive uplift in performance, we could yet see the second peak of a career that has, paradoxically, made him a global superstar while still feeling like one giant underachievement.

Thank you for being here. The Wedge is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy these articles and would like to support independent media focused on the business, money and mystique of the world’s greatest game, please consider a monthly or annual subscription or gift a subscription to someone who might value this content.

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Share The Wedge | The Money and Mystique of Golf

There’s an old quip attributed to Groucho Marx that goes something like:

“I never want to be a member of any club that would have someone like me as a member.”

Membership of elite clubs (and golf is just one version) have a weird sort of counter-intuitive interpretation of the concept of “club”.

Often, the “club” is sort of collegiate, a tribal badge, an emblem of us-against-the-rest togetherness.

At elite level, though, there’s something else going on.

It’s much less us-against-the-rest togetherness.

Much more me-with-the-elite individualness.

It’s ego stacked on ego, added to superiority and multiplied by pride, and every corridor and every carpet has to smell like money.

Now, let’s point out, right from the start, that when it comes to talking specifics about elite golf course and country club memberships, reliably exact amounts are hard to come by.

And that’s 100% by design.

Before we get to talk about something as sordid as price, we have to make sure that you’re the right type, approved and seconded by someone already inside the club. (Which is, of course, shorthand for: We have to make sure you have wheelbarrows of cash and are willing to spend it here.)

One of the ways exclusive golf clubs make themselves exclusive is by closely guarding the level of investment their members make.

As one country club member told Boston magazine in 2018:

“Have you ever seen a country club with an ad in the newspaper? They don’t do it. They want to be exclusive and hidden and not publicized.”

So elite golf and country club membership around the world becomes a sort of mirror image of that old Groucho Marx line.

Instead, it becomes something like:

“I only want to be part of a club that would have someone like that guy I envy for a member.”

So let’s caveat all of this by saying two things with some certainty:

1. Only those inside the clubs know the facts

2. Two people inside the clubs may not share the same facts

Nevertheless, the Internet is nothing if not a haven for gossip, so information does emerge, and as you sift through the reams of search results for a Google search like “world’s most expensive golf memberships”, you’ll soon notice a few things.

The first thing you’ll notice is the volume of results.

A lot of people around the world are searching for things like this, and as sure as night follows day, when a lot of people are searching it means a lot of content websites and digital media companies are publishing things to satisfy those searches.

The second thing you’ll notice as you click through the results is that a couple of patterns emerge.

Pattern 1: Same places

Many golf courses and country clubs are present in many of the articles.

• Liberty National in New Jersey, where initiation fees were reportedly USD$450,000 in the past.

• Trump National in Los Angeles (reputed $350,000 initiation fee).

• Brookline Country Club The Country Club at Brookline in Massachusetts, where initiation fees are estimated to be somewhere in the region of $250,000.

• Congressional in Maryland ($120,000 initiation, with a decade-long wait-list)

• Augusta, the home of the Masters, in the state of Georgia, where membership (by invitation only, of course) has been slated at anywhere between $50,000 and $500,000.

• Wentworth in the UK, which was reported to have been charging GBP£125,000 to new members as long ago as 2015.

Pattern 2: Same people

The courses (and lots more like them) are distinctly American in flavor.

This should not really be a surprise.

These are search results powered by an American tech company, catering for a mostly American readership.

And golf is big business in America.

The market size of golf courses and clubs in the USA is estimated at somewhere over $27 billion (Statista Research, March 2023).

But this US focus overlooks the fact that many of the most expensive golf memberships in the world are now in Asia.

Shanqin Bay in China has been labeled the world’s most expensive golf club with an initiation fee of more than USD$1 million.

There are some suggestions that the ultra-elite Hong Kong Golf Club may challenge that status. It has been mooted to cost an initiation fee of HKD$15.5 million, which converts to more than USD$2 million — if you could get in; it’s currently closed to new members.

Nambu Country Club in Korea had membership fees in the past well in excess of USD$1 million, converted from the local won, and it’s likely that Singapore Golf Club’s initiation fee is well in excess of USD$600,000.

But that dominance by Asia, even if it’s not reflected in Google search results, may be challenged by a new upstart club in Florida, which is mooted to become American’s first ever million-dollar membership.

America’s New Challenger and a Promise That All Billionaires Want to Hear

Let’s be truthful: we’re living in Monopoly money times.

Price inflation and interest rates remain stubbornly high.

Companies listed on the stock exchange have sailed past the trillion-dollar valuation mark — Apple became the first company to that figure in 2018; as of this writing six companies have market caps in excess of $1 trillion and Apple is on the way to $3 trillion.

Sergio Garcia enjoyed by far the most profitable year of his career, despite falling off the edge of the publicity cliff.

In these times, when “add a zero” is a favourite strategy no matter what your line of work, it has never been more clear that value’s relationship to price is changing, maybe forever.

And so it was always going to be only a matter of months or years before some country club in the US took its joining fees past the seven-figure barrier.

New is easier than old

Local boardroom and locker-room politics being what it is, it’s always easier to get new people to agree to something than get old people to change something.

So while the likes of Brookline, say, or Liberty National might be able to make a genuine argument to up its rates to $1 million for new joiners, it should be no surprise that it would take a brand new country club to be the first one to push through the seven-figure mark.

And that’s exactly what Shell Bay Club in Hallandale Beach has done, launching into the market with that nice round number as an initiation fee.

Per its own website, Shell Bay is “South Florida's most exclusive enclave”, a “world-class oasis of leisure and luxury … curated for those seeking [wanky copywriting alert] the pursuit of excellence and the excellence of pursuits.”

Its private membership…

“attracts an alchemy of individuals who share a singular passion for the exceptional in every way”.

Watering at the mouth yet?

No?

Maybe this’ll do it:

“Above all, Shell Bay is here to inspire unforgettable moments and nurture a life well lived.”

The last time I heard that phrase — “a life well lived” — was in Series 3 of the HBO show Billions, when Mike “Wags” Wagner and Bobby “Axe” Axelrod were checking out Wags’ future burial spot and riffing on the dissipation of sympathy depending on one’s decade of death.

—Dying in your thirties is “tragic.” As is forties. Sympathy dissipates from there.

—Fifties is “such a shame.”

—Sixties is “too soon.”

—Seventies…?

—”A good run.”

—And eighties is “a life well lived.”

—Nineties?

—“That’s a fuckin’ hell of a ride.”

And maybe that choice of words by Shell Bay, where membership helps you “nurture a life well lived”, is no coincidence at all.

Because chance plays such a part in life’s successes and failures, and because the judgment of others is seemingly vital too to all our various ups and downs, maybe that descriptor — “a life well lived” — is the one outcome that falls outside the billionaire’s orbit of control.

And maybe anything that increases the likelihood of getting that descriptor bestowed upon you is worth every cent.

Because what’s seven figures to a man who has everything else but the certainty that he’s lived life well?

What A Million Dollars in a Small Town in Florida Will Get You

All images via shellbayclub.com.

As the Irish Open, sponsored for the first time by the biotechnology company Horizon Therapeutics, was taking place a few hours’ drive east at the parkland course of Mount Juliet, some of the world’s top golfers were in Ireland—just not for the pro tour event.

Three-time Major winner Jordan Spieth, recently-crowned US PGA champion Justin Thomas, Masters champ and new world number one Scottie Scheffler and Rickie Fowler, without a Major but still one of the most colourful and biggest draws on tour, were in Lahinch for some fun times as the grinders and grafters of the DP World Tour were trying to earn their daily bread the other side of the country.

They were playing Lahinch in advance of the JP McManus Pro-Am at Adare Manor and, maybe partly, as prep for The Open Championship at St Andrews a couple of weeks later.

The photos and media attention that followed them will surely have set pulses racing among the Lahinch treasury committee.

The upside of such exposure—truly a multiple spasm wet dream for golf marketers—is unlikely to be felt until at least the 2023 figures and perhaps even 2024, given the expected timelag for golf holiday planning for US visitors.

But if there is to be another big bump for Lahinch, it will have to go a way to surpass the 2022 numbers.

In the recent Annual General Meeting of the club, a massive 300% lift in green fee revenue was reported, from a figure of approximately €1 million in 2021 to a shade over €3 million in 2022.

More than anything, that is likely down to massive pent-up demand for golf tourists who were forced to shelter in place through much of the Covid-affected 2020 and 2021.

The 2022 bump is likely also to have owed something to Lahinch’s most recent Irish Open hosting, when Jon Rahm won the tournament in the summer of 2019.

The broadcast of that event—containing gorgeous panning drone shots of the course hugging the Atlantic coast as well as those unique old Lahinch stone walls and the distinctive “in-the-middle-of-the-town” feel to the club (which in many ways echoes the experience of the Old Course at St Andrews)—will surely have moved many a distant viewer to travel agents and booking sites.

Overall revenues at the club in 2022 grew 93% to €4.94 million, with green fees making up a shade over three-quarters of the income.

A round of golf for non-members at Lahinch during high season 2023 will cost visitors €275.

That figure still might look like decent value compared to some other famous Irish courses: Royal County Down in summer 2023 is £325 in UK money, equating to approximately €375, while the Old Head at Kinsale comes with a high-season rate of €395 in 2023, rising to €425 next year.

Golf’s two-tier effect

Over time, it may well become apparent that the two tiers of golf playing finance will draw further and further apart.

On the one hand, you have wealthier travellers who are happy to pay higher prices to access the most esteemed courses.

On the other there are the local members who may be disproportionately affected by economic headwinds such as inflation and the cost-of-living hikes that come with it.

That effect can be estimated from recent figures published by BRS Golf, a company that provides tee-time management technology to thousands of golf courses worldwide.

BRS recently published data for the UK and Ireland for Q1 2023, showing a not insignificant year-on-year jump in member rounds played.

Overall, according to their Quarterly Participation Report, BRS Golf processed 5.6 million member rounds in the first three months of the year, with the largest spike coming via a February that was much drier than average across the UK and Ireland, when 500,000 more rounds were played.

March, conversely, started with subzero temperatures and widespread snow and rain and ended, in the Irish weather authority’s clinical assessment, as “unusually wet and dull”—and that’s saying something, given that “wet” and “dull” might be the two words you would use to describe March in Ireland—but despite that, member rounds for the month were flat year-on-year.

The final figures were a 9% jump in member rounds played in the first quarter of 2023 against the same timeframe in 2022.

(The company reported that the figures are even more impressive compared to the last pre-Covid year of 2019, when 2.8 million rounds were processed, although it’s not clear whether that says more about the golf playing ecosystem or the growth of BRS Golf as a technology provider during that time.)

All that looks promising.

Darker clouds might be on the horizon, though.

Starkly, the number of active memberships reported by BRS dropped by 6,000 in the first months of the year, and more than 50% of those lost members were on the island of Ireland, where 18 separate Irish clubs monitored in the data lost more than 100 members each.

Given that true membership data is likely to need some time to filter through, BRS acknowledges that the real state of affairs for 2023 active member numbers may not be fully known until at least July 2023.

Wrap

Only by later in 2023 will we have a better idea whether golf membership, which benefited from the Covid bump in 2020 and 2021, is on the path to a significant decline that may takes some years and plenty of imagination to reverse.

By the second half of 2023 we may also be armed with better information about the willingness of cash-rich US golfers to continue making the trip across the Atlantic in the same numbers.

One of the biggest non-golf stories of the year so far has been the problems within the US banking system, where just in the last few days First Republic became the biggest US bank to fail since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

First Republic followed hot on the heels of the failure (or, as some might say, forced takeovers) of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in March and—more broadly—Credit Suisse in April.

It’s hard to imagine that such upheaval in the financial system will not have knock-on effects for many, including those with the most dollars in those banks, but whether golf clubs, their playing members and wealthier visitors will be among the downstream victims, only time will really tell.

Thanks for reading.

Starting summer 2023, there will be a two-pronged approach to this Substack. I will aim to post regular newsletter-style updates (like this one on Lahinch, green fees and membership) as well as occasional deeper dive longform essays and research pieces (like last year’s 7-parter on the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, which eventually ran to approximately 25,000 words).

The Wedge aims to cover the business, money and mystique of golf. If you have any ideas for stories you think might fit here, please get in touch by emailing thewedgegolf@substack.com.

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