LIV's Fox Sports Deal Brings Some Credibility and Many Questions
Ahead of the start of its fourth season in a few weeks, LIV Golf will arrive on mainstream US network TV for the first time, but is the Fox Sports deal all it seems?
The basic principles of economics include scarcity, supply and demand, costs, benefits and incentives.
In short:
Resources are limited.
Because they’re limited, their allocation is governed by supply and demand.
Purchasers (whether that’s you or me, a national government, or Fox Sports media rights negotiators) consider the costs and benefits in their purchasing decisions.
All purchasers’ behavior is greatly influenced by incentives, whether those incentives are hidden or in the open, conscious or not.
All sports rights deals go through all these stages.
For the biggest — the NFL, the Olympics, or the English Premier League — the commodity is in high demand and low supply, and negotiators will keep going back to the bank to make sure the rights land in their stable. On the evidence of recent years, with everyone’s attention fragmented by a thousand apps and a million choices, the biggest sports events are reliably the only occasions when you can be sure to get people together and watching; and as a result, these rights owners can name almost any price.
Mid-range sports rights, such as the foreign rights of European soccer leagues or Twenty20 cricket outside the Indian Premier League, might be lower in profile but the negotiations are likely no less complex, with a more even playing field meaning both sides, rights holders and rights bidders, have something to lose and something to gain.
And then you have the bottommost tiers, where even the term “rights-holders” might be confusing: yes, they have a legal intellectual property claim on the content their sport, league or organization produces, but the value of that content might be negligible or non-existent. This can lead, in many niche sports, to time-buy deals, where the rights-holder produces everything, usually in partnership with a contracted production company, and purchases broadcast time on the schedules. In these cases, the media company’s main obligation is just to schedule it for screening on its channels and other properties.
It might be uncharitable to suggest that LIV Golf is on this bottommost tier, but it’s certainly closer to that level than it is to the premium grade sports offerings that have media companies and their lawyers and bankers forming long and disorderly queues to do a deal.
The reality is that since the leaderboard pylon first hit YouTube in the summer of 2022, LIV’s media cut-through, especially in the most lucrative US market, has been something bordering on pitiful.
The YouTube live streams of its play were often watched by between 20,000 and 60,000 viewers, while Nielsen ratings for LIV’s individual championship finale won by Jon Rahm in September showed that fewer than 100,000 people tuned in on The CW, the channel which held the US rights for LIV last year.
Those numbers are not nothing, especially for a still novel golf concept in its third year and with no history of network coverage, but they pale in comparison even with mid-ranking live sports events on network television.
Compared to high-level golf, those numbers are positively dire. A recent article from Sports Business Journal waded into the PGA Tour’s television ratings during 2024, which showed significant fall-offs from previous years — but even those PGA Tour falling ratings would appear to put LIV in the ha’penny place.
From the SBJ piece:
Digging into the numbers, the [PGA] tour averaged 2.2 million viewers for its Sunday telecasts (no majors) in 2024, a drop of 19% from 2.7 million in 2023. With majors included, that Sunday number in 2024 jumps to 2.8 million. On Saturdays, the tour earned 1.5 million viewers, down 17% from 1.8 million last year.
On a close reading, LIV’s press announcement of its new deal with Fox Sports this week contained some important details.
For starters, LIV remains responsible for all production, including the on-mic crew. The press release adopted a gushing tone in outlining that its “acclaimed on-air talent squad” of Arlo White, David Feherty, Jerry Foltz, Dom Boulet and Su-Ann Heng would be back in front of the cameras and behind the mics starting with the season opener in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in the first week of February.
But something undeniably strange has been going on when you read between the lines, or listen between the notes, of LIV’s coverage. Many people who’ve tuned in over the past couple of years will attest that the undoubted broadcast skills of the likes of White and Foltz are diluted by the overwhelmingly positive tone they always have to strike.
Overall, the LIV commentary has always seemed to be much less about calling the play by play, and much more about marketing and messaging, which is a pity, because Foltz, especially, is an excellent broadcaster.
While the reality of the deal with Fox is likely much less golden than the LIV announcement would suggest — the whole thing hints at a decent deal for both parties rather than an extensive negotiation after competitive bidding — there are undoubtedly positive elements for both parties here.
For one thing, even if LIV and its production partners are still producing the content and the Fox role is more about distribution, the reality is that merely by being on Fox, and for more than a year, lends an undeniable credibility to the product. (A quick aside: that carefully chosen “multi-year” wording in the announcement seems to point to its being precisely a two-year term, as three or more would have led to justified trumpeting by LIV, while two years does not exactly signal a major investment, or risk, on the part of Fox. So the LIV communications team would have argued, and rightly, that “multi-year” sounds much better than just “two”.)
On top of that, there’s a strong argument that Fox, with its slightly younger demographic and contrarian, even disruptive, personality, might be an ideal partner as LIV takes on the aristocracy of the PGA Tour. As a survey conducted by Sports Business Journal and Magna Global a few years ago revealed, the PGA Tour had the oldest average age of television viewers in 2016. (Sixty-four is a positively geriatric average age, six years older than NASCAR viewers, 14 more than the NFL average age, and 22 more than viewers of the NBA.)
If there’s one thing LIV Golf wants to do, it’s appeal to a younger demographic, and its bright branding, more casual attire, embrace of social media, boyish banter and the YouTube generation, shortened play — shotgun starts and three days instead of four — loud music and on-screen colorful leaderboard pylon are all designed to do just that.
And Fox Sports could be a perfect partner to help them on that journey.
For Fox, the move marks a return to live golf for the first time since it backed out of its deal with the USGA for the US Open in 2020.
As Jon Miller, the president of programming for NBC Sports when it stepped in to take over Fox’s deal in that first pandemic summer, told Golf Digest at the time:
“The feeling was that we just didn't want to go for 2020. If we're going to do this we should see if we could get the whole thing back. Look, they [Fox] were very open about it. Golf was not the right fit for them.
None of the people who were there now at Fox [in 2020] were involved in the deal when it was done in August of 2013.”
Someone who is new to Fox, and whose quotes are prominently positioned in the news announcement, is Jordan Bazant.
Executive Vice President of Fox Sports just since 2022, Bazant is a veteran of the sports agency game — he previously co-founded and ran The Legacy Agency for 16 years before a six-year term as Head of Sports with William Morris Endeavour, the firm which bought the UFC in a $4 billion deal in 2016 and also considered a $1 billion investment in LIV, according to comments by CEO Ari Emanuel in 2023.
You don’t work for two decades at or near the top of the pro sports agency game, be part of billion-dollar investment deals and then land a big role in network television, without becoming expert in cutting a deal, and there should be no doubt that Bazant sees plenty of potential, and not much risk, in the LIV offering.
If LIV and its marketing agencies can put some of the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund cash to good use, and Fox can get that product to millions more people over the next two years, then there will surely be bigger opportunities for bigger deals further down the line.
Throw into the mix that Greg Norman — whose unique brand of narcissism, resentment and energy was vital to getting the LIV product off the ground — has stepped aside and been replaced just this week by a new CEO in Scott O’Neil, then many of the ducks are in a row for LIV to make much more of a splash in 2025.
Sports competition thrives on tradition.
As I outlined in Part 5 of my long essay series on the PGA Tour and LIV, cricket’s IPL is one of few examples of new sports institutions gaining widespread appeal in the 21st century.
LIV is trying to do something similar, and in a much more competitive market. Notwithstanding its commitment to being a global golf league bringing top-level competition to places, like Australia and Korea, desperate to experience it, LIV will sink or swim solely through US visibility and esteem.
LIV Golf is moving up a steep rock-face, and it’s still near the bottom of the climb, but this week’s news has helped it find a higher foothold.
Thanks for reading.
Till next time.
Shane