LIV Golf answered its biggest question this week – announcing a multiyear U.S. broadcast rights deal with the CW Network after months of uncertainty about whether a deal would be secured for the 2023 season – as the start of the organization’s second season is approximately one month away.
The league’s full schedule and the final 48-player roster still have not been announced. Seven events, including the season opener Feb. 24-26 at Mayakoba in Mexico, have been announced.
The broadcast deal is crucial to LIV’s potential success, and while the group’s organizers finally can breathe a sigh of relief, finding an outlet to air the 14-event schedule proved to be a sizable challenge.
Will it siphon viewers away from PGA Tour events?
Maybe a few, but the impact is likely to be minimal.
In its initial season, LIV emerged to create a firestorm of controversy because of the players it attracted – Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Cam Smith, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau and others – as well as its Saudi backing and different format.
What it didn’t do was capture the public’s attention with its actual competition. That will be a focus in the second year with a heavy emphasis on the four-player teams and franchise model at the core of LIV’s competitive design.
It’s a large hill to climb, perhaps an insurmountable one without a broadcast deal in place.
With the major networks out due to existing agreements with the PGA Tour and several top streaming services taking a pass on aligning with the Saudi-backed golf league, LIV found a partner in a network that has targeted a young adult audience in recent years.
Starting the second year without a deal would have been a bruising setback for LIV, which has alleged via a federal antitrust lawsuit filed in August that the PGA Tour has strong-arming its sponsors to make it more difficult for LIV to succeed.
The two groups are headed for a court date Jan. 8, 2024. The two parties continue to go back and forth regarding discovery material, a squabble that’s likely to continue throughout the year.
With the major networks out due to existing agreements with the PGA Tour and several top streaming services taking a pass on aligning with the Saudi-backed golf league, LIV found a partner in a network that has targeted a young adult audience in recent years.
According to Nielsen figures, CW was the 25th-most watched network in 2022 in terms of traditional television audiences, reaching nearly 120 million homes. According to the LIV release, the free CW app has been downloaded nearly 90 million times, offering a substantial streaming opportunity.
“The CW and its majority owner, Nexstar Media Group, recognize the enormous interest in and potential of our league and with their support, more fans will experience the energy and innovative competition that LIV Golf is using to reinvigorate the sport,” LIV CEO Greg Norman said in a statement Thursday. “The CW is a world-class media partner, and we are honored to be joining forces to further bring LIV Golf to life as they stake their claim in professional sports.”
The details of the LIV-CW deal were not released, although various reports indicate a revenue-sharing agreement between the two parties rather than a traditional payment from the network to the tour for broadcast rights. After reportedly investing more than $2 billion in getting LIV Golf up and running, some broadcast revenue is critical to sustaining the tour’s development.
For the CW Network, it means not having to underwrite the production costs of LIV events, which were streaming on LIV’s platform and on YouTube last year. It is the first time in the network’s 17-year existence that it will air live sports.
Earlier reports suggested LIV Golf was willing to buy time on a network to make certain its events are exposed to a wider audience than last year. LIV found its partner in a network intent on rebranding itself in hopes of attracting a broader demographic. However, it is a transaction with several potential conflicts with the PGA Tour and its broadcast partners.
The parent company for CW Network, Nexstar, has as an investor Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns 12.5 percent of the company. Discovery Networks is a media partner to the PGA Tour. In 2018, it signed a 12-year, $20 billion deal with the PGA Tour to handle international distribution rights and to build a direct-to-consumer streaming service called GolfTV.
The deal was restructured late last year, and sources tell Global Golf Post that Discovery, now a part of a massively debt-burdened Warner Bros. Discovery company, is trying to accelerate its 2025 exit provision.
Nexstar is the largest owner of network-affiliated television stations in America. The company – which is based in Irving, Texas, and trades under the ticker symbol NXST on the Nasdaq stock exchange – owns 197 such television channels, many affiliated with CBS and NBC, the PGA Tour’s two biggest and most important broadcast partners. The CW Network will be televising LIV Golf events in the same time window on Saturdays and Sundays as the affiliates are televising PGA Tour events, thus competing for eyeballs with their sisters in the Nexstar family. This will not sit well in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, nor with CBS and NBC.