As head of LIV Golf, it is Greg Norman’s job to understand the league’s business.
And because Greg Norman understands LIV’s business, he knows a tremendous roadblock remains in the league’s way.
Television.
The problem is not so much that LIV is uninterested in golf television. Au contraire — the league has poured millions into production resources and hired an army of technicians and producers to work on the project of delivering a consistent, high-quality product. Rather, the issue is the other way around: golf television is uninterested in LIV. And in an interview with Sports Illustrated this week assessing the nascent league’s state of affairs, Norman was unusually candid in admitting LIV’s failures to deliver a high-quality TV contract.
“Where we’re falling short is due to the headwinds in not getting a network [TV] deal,” Norman said, ominously. “That creates uncertainty in the marketplace. [A lot of companies say] let’s see what happens. That rolls into sponsorship. We have an enormous number of big corporations who are talking to us and would be very keen to come on.”
Welcome back to the Hot Mic, GOLF’s vertical covering all things golf media. Today we’re talking about the latest words from Greg Norman on LIV’s TV rights — but if you’d like to receive news like this directly to your inbox before it reaches the web, we’d love it if you subscribed to the Hot Mic Newsletter here.
First, let’s recap how we reached this point: LIV has existed for three years. In those three years, two seasons aired on television in a near-zero-revenue deal on the CW Network, while one season streamed for free in an even-lesser-revenue deal on YouTube. LIV’s deal with the CW promises a revenue share, but LIV’s broadcasts have routinely failed to reach even modest golf TV audiences, meaning the league has failed to receive even modest sums from the CW.
Broadcast TV is the lifeblood of the sports business — the fountain from which all money-making sports entities drink. If those who seek to “break into” the sports business wish to survive — be they LIV, the TGL, or even the USFL — they must find a strategy for 1. landing on TV and 2. attracting sizeable and repeatable television audiences to watch them.
The reason for this is simple: Networks pay leagues, and advertisers pay networks. Without the money earned from ads, there is no business case for a network to pay a sports league for its broadcast rights. Stated even more simply: viewer interest is the most valuable commodity in sports television, and right now, LIV has none.
In some ways, though, the problem also works in reverse: without the help of a high-profile TV network, LIV might not be able to increase viewer interest. At least that’s what Norman seems to be alluding to in his latest comments to SI. The issue isn’t that LIV has no interested sponsors, Norman appears to be saying, it’s that LIV’s interested sponsors don’t want to help bankroll a product that nobody cares to watch. But if LIV were to change viewer interest — perhaps by wrangling a new TV contract with one of the sports world’s biggest networks — that might be enough to entice a host of new business partners to spend money with LIV.
