First turn? PGA viewership is down. LIV event in Australia sold out in a day

While LIV Golf is making plans for the 2023 season, the PGA Tour has already played its new year a few weeks ago. Last week saw the traditional Houston Open, which was dominated by American Tony Finau with a total score of -16. In the background, however, the struggle to watch golf on TV is resigned, where the PGA is experiencing its first significant slump.

Back in October, the portal First Sportz published that the viewership of the traditional PGA Tour is on a downward trend. Currently, the PGA does not even feature in the top 150 shows in the US, which has not been the case in recent years.

Now, the verified Twitter account LIV Golf Insider has weighed in on the interest issue, coming up with some surprising numbers from last week’s Houston Open. According to him, the tournament’s viewership dropped by as much as 40 percent compared to last year.

The average viewership in 2021 was somewhere around 222,000, but this year it’s only 133,000. The answer to this issue is supposedly to be found in the exodus of players from the PGA circuit who have decided to move their careers to an innovative venture called LIV Golf.

Names like Scottie Scheffler, Hideki Matsuyama, Justin Rose, and Jason Day have all appeared at the Houston Open. However, there were a number of players who relocated to LIV during the year. These include four golfers (Carlos Ortiz, Dustin Johnson, Talor Gooch and Brooks Koepka) who finished in the Top 5 in Houston last year.

A PGA fan will surely lean on the bald fact that this is still many times the number that one of the LIV tournaments had in the inaugural 2022 edition. LIV fans, on the other hand, will respond that the LIV events were not officially televised by any major U.S. television station, as is the case with the PGA, which will affect viewership quite substantially. Both sides will probably be right about something.

However, the outlook for the 2023 season is already a little more favorable for the LIV. It believes that just signing with a lucrative broadcaster will have a salutary effect on its viewership.

However, before the two organisations engage in a direct battle for golf viewership in the US, the LIV refers to the interest in their product in the rest of the world, which is also important to them. This can be seen in the internationally diverse starting field.

LIV Golf also has a handful of players from Australia in its ranks, led by the biggest personality Cameron Smith, who gave the PGA the boot after the end of the last PGA season to be on the LIV side in just two weeks.

One of the LIV’s tournaments will be in Australia in April. While the battle for every spectator will be building up on the US soil, the event in Adelaide, Australia, is enjoying an extremely high level of interest. According to unofficial sources, fans were able to sell out the tournament in less than one day.

However, this may not be true as many people claim that tickets are still available and also that nowhere has the capacity of tickets available been released.

However, the official LIV account has confirmed the high demand for tickets, subsequently adding more tickets for all three days. This, too, illustrates the fact that there is a war going on between the PGA and the LIV even in the media world.

Source: PGA Tour, LIV Golf