Portrush Diary; UP, Xander and Niall, together at last; Nobody believes anything and everything is narrative; Human Shiels, Creator in Exile; The Pub Paradox, how women watch
Overthinking the sports business, for money
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Open season
A brilliant start to Open Championship week at Royal Portrush.
I was there Monday to Wednesday and the buzz and the size of the crowds was off the scale. AND IT HADN’T EVEN STARTED YET!!
UP has been working with Callaway Golf on some live event projects under our Wedge Issues series brand.
Monday night we took over the best pub in the world* - The Harbour Bar in Portrush - for a very exclusive live Q&A with reigning Champion Golfer and Callaway player Xander Schauffele.
Then on Wednesday morning it was a podcast recording on the business of golf.
Stellar guests Niall Horan, Inci Mehmet and Dan Rappaport enthralled a packed room at the Callaway Clubhouse.
Listen to all of it when the podcast drops tomorrow.
A big Unofficial thank you to Ben Sharpe (between Niall and Inci above), Chris Gregg and the team at Callaway and to Steve Martin and the MSQ Sport and Entertainment team.
Best-in-class.
PS: Dan Rappaport, far right, is well worth a follow if you don’t already.
LIV Golf and the politicisation of the algorithm
Keith Waters got a lovely retirement send off at the Association of Golf Writers dinner on Tuesday night.
Fully merited.
He's had a fascinating and important career as a player turned European Tour executive, working first under Ken Schofield and George O'Grady then Keith Pelley and latterly Guy Kinnings, who gave a warm, heartfelt speech in front of the AGW invitees from across the media and golfing world (that btw included a special guest appearance and Q&A with local hero Rory McIlroy, resplendent in his Masters jacket - see Dan Rappaport’s tweet above).
What you may not know is that Keith Waters is the absolute authority on player rankings.
There is nobody, literally nobody, who knows more about this topic, which remains one of THE trigger questions in the game.
Waters helped create the OGWR at the behest of Mark McCormack in the 1980s - he’ll put me right but I seem to remember him telling me the first ever world number one was Bernhard Langer in 1985 (verification required).
McCormack wanted a way of judging the top 50 players in the world, mainly as a negotiating tactic to get more money for IMG clients.
Schofield took Waters to the meetings because he was the only one who understood the numbers, having made a lot of money, and friends, from gaming the system as a player, advising his mates which events reaped the highest return in terms of ranking points.
All of this is background, and I wanted a reason to celebrate Keith Waters’ contribution to the game.
Fast forward
Since those early McCormack days, the OGWR has become the currency of the professional game worldwide, the foundations upon which everything is built, from sponsor bonuses and broadcast rights through to the betting markets, each of which are based largely on the strength of tournament fields.
As you’d expect, its inner workings have since been transplanted from Keith Waters’ brain to a complex mathematical algorithm.
Over the last four years of the LIV moment, the OGWR has become the tool by which the official game has punished the deserters.
See the screenshot here, taken from National Club Golfer’s site:
The argument is significant because it talks to quality of the LIV product, perceived or real.
The use of the OGWR puts some ‘led by the science’ type distance between the official game and the decision to exclude most of them from the Majors.
Computer says no, etc.
From there you get to the culture war positions that run through the game and was every second conversation around the Royal Portush this week.
Nobody believes anything and everything is narrative
I don’t believe your numbers and you don’t believe mine.
That vacuum is filled with stories. Some true, others less so.
I’m going to second guess how the LIV OGWR story will run:
LIV will attack the data source. This type of piece will gain ground - ‘Golf’s World Rankings have become laughable and inaccurate sham’.
The official comms will quietly brief its own client journalists, who will seek to position LIV as part of the fake news, anti-vaxxer conspiracy nut job movement.
Watching on will be the golfing public who will grow bored and irritated, and will do what they’re already doing - watch the Majors, the Ryder Cup and YouTube.
Talking of which:
Human Shiels and the 9million quid question
Rick Shiels is not at Portrush this week.
Q. Why?
A. LIV
Last year at Troon he was everywhere, from the AGW Dinner to the Sky Sports booth and their Live from the Range BTS programming (which is excellent btw).
This year he’s been banished; Creator in Exile.
The price to defect to the dark side was - according to a few good sources - about £9million for three years.
A lot of money obvs, albeit he told us when he came on UP that he has a team of 20+ and a new studio HQ to pay for.
But you sense that the broader cost to Shiels Inc is yet to be determined.
Cue pretentious use of Oscar Wilde quote on the price of everything and value of nothing.
Here’s our Wedge Issues podcast with him from his days when he basked in the glow of the official game…
PS. The other golf meets creator culture story that caught the eye this week was Grant Horvat (me neither). The YouTuber didn’t accept a sponsor’s invite in to the Barracuda Championship because the PGA Tour wouldn’t let him film rounds in competition. Classic rights can of worms snafu. And not just confined to golf.
Here’s Rappaport:
A bit of afters - YouTube Era
A build from Dan Ayers of IMG on last week’s substack on YouTube.
The initial piece is here.
Dan’s comments here:
See also:
The Twenty20-fication misread: How long form’s renaissance undermines the cliches of the consulting class
Ok, this is not about sport per se, but it is really.
Ted Gioia is a brilliant cultural analyst.
The rebirth of longform runs counter to everything media experts are peddling. They are all trying to game the algorithm. But they’re making a huge mistake.
They believe that longform is doomed. They see that digital platforms reward ultra-short videos on an endless scroll. And they understand that this works because the interface is extremely addictive.
So short must defeat long in the digital marketplace. That’s obvious to them.
But all the evidence now proves that this isn’t happening.
Many media companies went broke trusting their advice. It was dead wrong—but many still haven’t figure out why.
This is a must-read for anyone in sport.
The Pub Paradox
UP Podcast alumni and WhatsUP member Charlie Thomson wrote a really good culture piece on how women watch women’s football:
Recently, the question of ‘Do women’s football fans go to the pub to watch games?’ came up in the Unofficial Partner WhatsApp chat.
A simple question with an answer that opens up a much bigger conversation.
In 2023, Budweiser Brewing Group found that 57% of UK women were more likely to head to the pub to watch football after the Lionesses’ tournament success.
But, Greene King research stated that only 8% of pubs regularly screened women’s sport.
And there it is: The Pub Paradox.
High demand. Low supply.
Classic women’s football territory - where fans want in, but the infrastructure hasn’t caught up.
See also: Last Orders, our episode on football’s relationship with the pub.