Crushers Crushing It and Other Notes on the LIV Golf Teams' Brand-Building Performance
A deep dive on the brands of the 13 LIV Golf teams, and why billion-dollar valuations for Indian Premier League cricket franchises is relevant for the upstart golf league.
In this essay:
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