While LIV Golf shook up the professional golfing world by pulling top PGA Tour players like Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka to its new league, the league itself hasn’t come close to engaging bettors to the same extent.
In fact, mobile sportsbook operator offered LIV Golf team championship markets in seven states, but just one ticket — a wager on Torque to win — came in on the event.
“That’s the lowest I’ve ever seen,” said Jeff Sherman, SuperBook Sports’ vice president of risk and a golf oddsmaker. “We haven’t ever put anything up that’s had zero tickets.”
Bryson DeChambeau and the Crushers ultimately won the team event, making the one ticket at SuperBook Sports a losing bet.
That winning feeling @Crushers_GC 🏆#LIVGolf pic.twitter.com/mTfq417cQh
— LIV Golf (@livgolf_league) October 23, 2023
In comparison, the PGA’s Tour Championship event, which acts as the conclusion to the FedEx Cup playoffs, is one of the most popular non-major events for bettors all golf season. Sherman suggested the altered team format for LIV’s championship event could have diminished interest, as bettors didn’t want to take the time to understand the adjusted format.
“Week in and week out doing LIV, we get maybe 20 percent of what we write on the PGA Tour on a weekly LIV event,” Sherman said. “Weekly, when it’s a standard stroke play event, people are used to that. I think it’s more of an indictment on the team format.”
LIV fighting for interest 3r5u3d
While LIV’s typical betting interest exceeds what it did for its championship event in Miami, the league has struggled to capture substantial fan and betting interest through two seasons. It’s proving difficult to shift fans from watching the PGA Tour, especially with stars like Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm, and Scottie Scheffler still excelling. Some fans are turned off by LIV given the tour’s financial connection to Saudi Arabia, while others just don’t care about the product.
“Steadfast PGA Tour fans are likely to stay interested in the PGA Tour as a creature of habit,” Ryan Ballengee, the owner of Golf News Net, told Sports Handle via email. “There’s a sizable portion of the audience that will never embrace LIV Golf because of either the funding source, the perceived correlated politics, the format, or what are perceived to be excesses in pro golf. All of those factors dramatically reduce LIV Golf’s potential US audience.”
Ballengee also says it’s not easy as a new sports league to thrive in the U.S. It takes time to build history, tradition, and rivalries that capture fans.
“LIV Golf’s biggest challenge is the same for practically any challenger sports league,” Ballengee said. “Upstart leagues, even incredibly well-capitalized ones, struggle to match, much less sur, the incumbent in their respective sports. After an initial wave of curiosity, upstart leagues tend to shed viewers pretty dramatically. Convincing viewers to embrace a new product and change habits is extremely difficult.”
Some women’s professional leagues have finally seen significant viewership increases in recent years as fanbases grow and word spreads about the quality of the product.
“The WNBA and NWSL are enjoying tremendous audience growth, and it took practically a generation for that to happen,” Ballengee said.
The WNBA notable increase in handle on WNBA games in 2023, perhaps due in part to interest in the New York Liberty and eventual 2023 champion Las Vegas Aces.
That growth wasn’t seen for LIV Golf, at least not at SuperBook Sports.
“It fell a little bit short of what we were hoping for this year,” Sherman said.
The PGA Tour also dominated golf betting at BetMGM. Major championships typically generate the most interest from fans and bettors, and they’re even more intriguing now as one of the few times Koepka and other LIV standouts face off against PGA Tour stars.
“Bettors showed more interest in wagering on PGA events, and majors received the most action as usual,” a BetMGM spokesperson told Sports Handle.
PGA Tour merger uncertain 2j2m27
In June, it was announced that the PGA Tour and LIV planned to forces in some capacity, reconnecting some of the game’s biggest stars in the same tournaments. The return of LIV players to the PGA Tour could add intrigue to future tournaments, perhaps also moving the needle for increased betting.
Front Office Sports is reporting, though, that the proposed agreement is in significant doubt.
If the competing tours don’t forces, LIV Golf might be in need of a few other PGA Tour defections to gain interest among fans and bettors. Could a top-10 player in the world switch their allegiance from the PGA Tour to LIV Golf in the coming months? It might be a bigger challenge to convince players to leave the PGA Tour with the Official World Golf Ranking board refusing to recognize LIV tournaments.
