Phil Mickelson loves LIV, even if his performances haven’t shown it.
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For the first few months of his LIV Golf career, Phil Mickelson has been excellent for starters…and not much else.
The six-time Grand Slam champion has struggled big in three starts since joining the upstart league, racking up a cumulative score of +26 in 144 holes played. In two starts in LIV’s 48-man uncut events, he finished no better than 34th. If his final holds on Sunday at this weekend’s event in Trump BedminsterMickelson will have played just one of the nine LIV rounds under par.
However, more so than his wrestling at any event, Mickelson’s game has generally looked disjointed, awkward and out of place. Lefty has had his charisma stripped away since he returned from his self-imposed hiatus from professional golf, and his golf game has looked much the same.
And yet, Phil insists, his discomfort on the pitch has nothing to do with his feelings about the new league, which are still in full bloom. In fact, you’ve already seen two ways LIV “works” for professional golf and, perhaps most surprisingly, neither of them has to do with money.
“The reason I’m so excited about LIV Golf is that it addresses the two areas that over the 30 years I’ve played the Tour, they’ve tried and struggled,” Phil told reporters earlier this week.
Those areas, according to the $200 million man, are international growth and intergenerational growth.
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On the subject of international growth, Mickelson pointed to LIV’s timeline and contract structure. Unlike the PGA Tour, where players are generally free to choose which events they are willing to play, LIV’s contracts require players to compete in every event. event, ensuring a consistent level of field strength each week. With the series planning to visit four countries in 2022 (and one more host in the next few years), Mickelson believes LIV will be more successful in attracting international audiences than previous efforts.
“LIV has the opportunity to bring professional golf to the world,” said Mickelson. “Players here, when they sign up, we get a ton of money, we give up our schedule and commit to wherever they hold events that we’re going to go to and we’re going to be there, and then they have the ability to move golf. professional all over the world. I think that’s a very important thing as we try to grow the game of golf around the world. We may not feel it here in the United States, but globally I think it will have a huge impact.”
In that sense, Mickelson is not wrong: LIV does it it has broader international goals than the PGA Tour, and it also has the wherewithal to make sure its best players travel internationally. But international growth also requires an element of international interest, of which there hasn’t been much in the early days of LIV. Tickets were available for as little as $1 for Friday’s opening round in Bedminster, and free ticket baskets are available for most LIV events. All this without mentioning the DP World Tour, which has invested heavily in finding growth in many of the same markets that LIV is now pursuing.
Still, the goal behind expanding the frontiers of golf is clear: to raise the profile of the sport with a new audience. Not coincidentally, the same can be said for Mickelson’s other LIV proof of concept, intergenerational growth.
“The other thing is that we, as a game and a sport, the viewership is up five years from the average age, I think, of 64,” Mickelson said. “We have to target the younger generation.”
(ed. note: Updated golf audience data has not been released for several years. Mickelson references a 2017 study by Sports business magazine.)
As for how LIV is going to reverse golf’s trend line toward a larger audience, Mickelson offered some arguments.
“One, it’s not a 12-hour day, having to watch golf all day. You have a four-and-a-half hour window,” he said, referring to the league’s quick-start format that condenses play into a single broadcast window.
“Second, when I think a broadcast partner comes along, I think it’s going to revolutionize the way golf is viewed, because you won’t have commercials and you’ll have shot after shot after shot,” he continued. “It will capture the attention span of the younger generation. We will open many opportunities to attract the younger generation, which again, for 30 years we have tried to do and it has gone backwards.
LIV in particular does not have a streaming partner, nor does it have prominent sponsors to date. His streams currently stream for free (and commercial-free) on YouTube and Facebook. While a partnership with a subscription-based platform like Amazon Prime could allow the league to broadcast commercial-free, even that would seem unlikely, given that commercials are a primary source of revenue for many subscription-based platforms.
But a broadcast partner of none kind could help LIV lower the overall age of the golf audience, particularly considering the league’s focus on courting younger fans over the span of the last few months. The hard part would seem to be finding a partner willing to do business at a level that would give the Saudi-backed league the legitimacy (and revenue) it seeks.
Ultimately, these are issues that LIV’s leadership, and not necessarily its players, will face on the road to long-term growth. Even if the league hasn’t convinced golf stakeholders that he’s here for the long haul, it seems to have gotten that message across to its most prominent player, or maybe it’s just the nine-figure signing bonus that still clouds his judgment.
