"It's Team Callaway": Jon Rahm Reveals Extent of Sponsor Involvement in LIV's Legion XIII
The team financials dynamic in LIV Golf was always going to be an area of unchartered territory for the brand. Callaway's backing is a big step towards legitimizing the breakaway league's team model.
In the summer of 2022, one word that never seemed to be too far away from online discussions about the 12 brand new brand names in the LIV Golf line-up.
Cringe.
If 4Aces seemed to have some sort of cool — maybe in large part a halo effect from the cool of team captain Dustin Johnson, even if his cool was mostly the cool distance of a don’t-give-a-f*** attitude — other team names and logo just seemed … cringe.
Cleeks. Fireballs. Even Phil Mickelson’s own cool couldn’t make Hy-Flyers attractive (and three years later, not many would say that has changed).
Perhaps the worst of the lot was Majesticks.
Ian Poulter and Lee Westwood might have been a lot of things in the heyday of their career, including bona fide Ryder Cup legends, but nobody would ever describe them as cool. (That seems to be true, for whatever reason, of English golfers since forever. Justin Rose, Paul Casey, Richard Bland, Nick Faldo, Howard Clark, Mark James … I could go on. Fine golfers all, and some of them truly great, but all on the ground floor of the cool factor skyscraper.)
Take the Poulter-Westwood uncool factor, add in the naffest of naff team names and combine it with — maybe most uncool of all — the fact that they soon added old buddy old chum Henrik Stensson to make it a three-way shared captaincy, and Majesticks stands alone as the cringiest of all LIV Golf team cringe.
Taking one brand name from scratch and making it something is hard.
Taking a dozen and building them together is almost impossible, unless you have bottomless pockets, exceptional creatives to spend that money, and time on your side.
Luckily, LIV Golf probably has all three.
As everyone knows by now, the Saudi Public Investment Fund is putting up the cash, and they don’t seem to be governed by normal western corporate return on investment KPIs or time horizons either.
As for the creative, as I wrote here recently, the London-based 54 agency is rapidly becoming a key part of the entire LIV brand-building efforts.
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But despite all that, despite the time horizon and the Saudi cash and the creative marketing chops, the true barometer for success in the team stakes was always going to be fairly straightforward.
Would big companies put money on the table to be a part of it?
It was recently announced that Callaway was doing just that, building on its ongoing sponsor relationship with Jon Rahm, captain of Legion XIII — so named because they were the 13th and final addition to the LIV team roster — to be a major sponsor of not just of the Spaniard but of his team.
And if that appeared at first glance to be just an extension of that pre-existing arrangement, Rahm revealed this week that it goes much, much further.
Speaking to sports business content creator Joe Pompliano on The Joe Pomp Show, Rahm said,
“For the most part, when a sponsor joins a team, they sponsor everyone on the team.
Callaway’s coming in, and it’s essentially Team Callaway. So there’s a minimum requirement for them for us to have, we do have two of that are basically full staff Callaway, have been full staff Callaway, maybe more coming in the future.
And then in our case we have one player who hasn’t played Callaway in the past, but there’s ways around it because it’s such a big company that there’s other brands they can promote. They could use Tyrrell [Hatton, who has a prior arrangement with Callaways’s rival Titleist] to promote, for example, Topgolf. So we’re still within the family.
So there’s many ways Callaway can get creative. It will be as close as possible as you would think of a normal sponsorship as I was with Callaway before, but with the whole team.
You have Callaway bags, possibly Callaway head-covers and hats, with some Legion XIII logo and maybe the color palette as well. It will be a little bit custom towards us, it won’t be the things you would see on other tours.”
It’s a bold and interesting move by Callaway, given that the company has not exactly been paragons of corporate excellence over the past few years.
As I wrote recently, the company has gone through a number of quarters of disappointing results, and will spend tens of millions of dollars to decouple the Topgolf company from the main corporate entity, less than four years after that $2 billion acquisition.
Whether the Legion XIII move, and more broadly its faith in a disruptive breakaway league that has struggled to gain any respect, never mind material cut-through, in the key US market especially, will be a good move by Callaway, only time will truly tell.
What do you think? Does the Callaway-Legion XIII arrangement go some way towards making LIV Golf’s teams legit? Or do you think it will be another error in a bad few years for one of golf’s biggest global companies?