The end of LIV Golf, or the end of the beginning; Ambassador, with your booze ban you're really not spoiling us; Wanted, a new sports league in which Alex Ohanian doesn't invest
Overthinking the sports business, for money
#Wedge Issues
What happens at the end?
LIV Golf kicked off its 4th season in Riyadh last week.
The years just fly by when nobody’s having fun.
This is a significant moment in the story, because it’s contract renewal time.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Many of the big name players signed up on three and four year deals and are pondering whether to go again.
Likewise, LIV/PIF are looking at what they bought in the white heat of the breakaway and asking whether they were had.
More broadly, it’s a way in to an under-asked question: what happens after the thrilling ‘Alex Ohanian is backing it!!!’ shitstorm phase of disruption, when the smoke clears and your left with having to deal with the same boring problems as the old guard.
Conclusion: Bryson and the rest
The last three years have been great for Bryson DeChambeau. He’s gone from a talented and annoying country club brat to the most famous golfer-creator in the world. Hear our Wedge Issues episode on the making of Bryson here:
This fame gives him massive leverage.
LIV could get rid of every one of their expensive cast of famous-within-golf competitors and their product would be pretty much unchanged.
For all intents and purposes, Bryson is LIV.
(He’s also great for the majors btw…)
Over the past few weeks there’s been some shuffling at LIV.
Notably, Pat Perez has been moved from the course to the commentary booth, a decision that came as a shock to the man himself.
"To be honest with you, it was a little more forced than I thought it was going to be. I’m going to be perfectly honest," he told LIV's 'Fairway To Heaven' podcast.
"I thought I was going to be playing this year and I’m not. ’ I've always thought about TV anyway because I did the Tiger-Phil match and YouTube stuff. I thought it would be there one day and it seemed like a couple of weeks ago was the day.
You won’t know who Pat Perez is. Very few people do.
As I wrote three years ago, Perez is the problem that LIV was supposed to solve.
No version of Best v Best sees Pat Perez with a club in his hand.
So, is this a shuffling of the LIV deck, or something more existential. We’ll see.
Jump to:
LIV was the poster child of the Sport By McKinsey movement, my shorthand term describing the vogue for disruptive sport entertainment properties.
Tribalism via teams; format innovation; global over US focus.
McKinsey is just a proxy for the coldly rational approach that’s being applied to sport by the big consultancy and p/e groups.
Basketball, rugby, athletics, tennis, cricket, triathlon…the modellers are assembling to disrupt them all.
The question comes back to specificity: Are you stealing the right bit? Or are you making an attribution error?
See previous:
The IPL is one of the great success stories of our age. But is it just about India?
The Ryder Cup is golf’s cash cow, so good the PGA Tour copied it and created The President’s Cup which has all the same moving parts. But it’s shit.
The question facing LIV/PIF is whether they’d do it all again.
If it’s all been a mahoosive test and learn exercise, what have we all learnt?
Would you pick a fight with the established rights holder as they did with the PGA Tour and DP World Tour?
PIF has certainly shown up differently in tennis than it did in golf.
Interesting little quote in the FT from Maverick Carter, Lebron James’ mate behind the basketball breakaway, who is keen to distance the project from the idea that it is ‘disrupting the NBA’.
Other than that, it’s a tick list from the Sport By McKinsey playbook:
The upstart international basketball league advised by LeBron James’s longtime business partner Maverick Carter has scored significant backing. Its investors, according to the Financial Times, include the Singapore government, SC Holdings, Riyadh’s Public Investment Fund, UBS, Skype founder Geoff Prentice, former Facebook executive Grady Burnett. VC firm Quiet Capital and tech investor Byron Deeter are reportedly raising capital. Galaxy Entertainment, which is based in Hong Kong, is also reportedly a partner.
In January, Bloomberg reported that the league was seeking $5 billion in funding to launch an international league.
Sources familiar with the new league told Front Office Sports last month that James would not be involved, and that the league has no intention of competing directly with the NBA. The league instead is aiming to be an “F1 for basketball,” making two-week stops in eight global cities. Singapore was known as a host location, and the FT report listed Macau as another host.
Local > Global
Deep in Sport by McKinsey model is the assumption that sports leagues can be made to have a global relevance.
I think this is the weakest bit of the argument.
The sports media rights market is not global, it’s a series of local markets - something referenced on The Bundle this week.
McKinsey for Sport is modelling their breakaways on luring the tech platforms in to the rights market, and they want it to be global, one ticket everywhere, because that’s how they work. But this is the world as they want it, not how it is.
Sport is annoying. It doesn’t fit.
#The Booze Bundle
What is the Saudi Bundle?
Since talking to Jack Buckner at UK Athletics, I’ve started to question why we attend sports events, and by extension where booze fits in to that equation.
Buckner talked about creating a ‘Glastonbury for Track and Field’, a placeholder for a different approach to athletics events.
Then we got to, why do people go to Glastonbury? Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. In that order.
See previous: I went for a beer and some sport broke out
This clip of the Saudi Ambassador is revealing about what he thinks sport is.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
He thinks the World Cup is about football.
What if, it’s about the beer?
What we call good atmosphere is really a socially acceptable level of drunkenness: We don’t want them fighting in the town centre, but we don’t want Emirates Library level silence either.
Some recent stories, each share a theme.
Roland Garros bans champagne (translation: there’s a class thing going on here too, the wrong type of person is drinking too much. See also Ascot)
Sir Clive Woodward brands Twickenham ‘a pub’ (translation: Woodward overstates the role of rugby in why people pay through the nose for Twickenham tickets)
Saudi fight nights lack atmosphere (translation: there’s no booze)
Darts at the Ally Pally is about booze not darts.
We can add the current WSL booze-during-the-game trial to the above list.
Take alcohol out of attending sports events and you get to that weird representation of football fans found in advertising.
It’s this version that is becoming embedded in to ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models.
This is what you get when putting ‘soccer fans’ in to Canva’s AI thing:
Happy, smiley people mixing peacefully together.
I suspect this is what the Saudi ambassador thinks football fans are like.
Comical in parts but mostly spot on.