What LIV Golf Can Learn From Past Sports League Disruptors

You might brush it off as fiction when I say this—but once in the late 20th century, about 50 years ago, the United States of America began a crazy love affair with soccer. (Yes, soccer.)

The North American Soccer League, known affectionately as the NASL for short, opened play in 1968, with the grand goal of taking the world’s most popular sport and making it big—finally—in the world’s biggest sports market, America.

To live up to such a lofty goal, the league quickly established clubs from coast to coast, from Atlanta to Los Angeles, and in Chicago, Boston and smaller outposts like Rochester, New York. Teams were stocked with the world’s best players, such as England captain Bobby Moore, German superstar Gerd Müller, and longtime Manchester United goal machine George Best, to name a few.

The New York Cosmos, the NASL’s crown jewel, piled on legends Franz Beckenbauer and the mighty Pelé of Brazil.

American sports fans responded. Washington, D.C., Seattle and Minnesota saw soccer crowds over 50,000, with the Cosmos hauling in over 77,000 fans during a 1977 playoff game against a team from Fort Lauderdale, no less. Soon, the NASL became the destination of the world’s most exciting players. Tickets were selling. Things were looking up.

CBS carried NASL games from the league’s inception to the end of the 1976 season. Later, the NASL secured a follow-up TV deal with ABC in 1978, after broadcasting Pelé’s final game as a special feature on ABC's Wide World of Sports, on October 1, 1977.

But one problem would surface. Live soccer did not translate as well to the television as it did to the insides of a loud stadium. By 1981, pro soccer was thwarted by network television and was fighting just for time on new cable channels ESPN and USA.

Meanwhile, the NASL shrunk from 21 teams to 14. And by 1984, league missteps and a nationwide economic recession would force the NASL’s increasingly cash-poor teams to shut down operations.

A 2006 ESPN/Miramax documentary called Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, narrated by Matt Dillon, covered the leagues highs and lows. While the film points out that no one factor killed America’s first fling with what Pelé called “the beautiful game,” it hinted strongly that a lack of television success likely did soccer in.

But soccer was not the only once-popular sport to go under after TV interest dried up. Even in football, arguably America’s true national pastime, new leagues find it difficult to last.

The XFL, founded in 1999 by World Wrestling Entertainment WWE (WWE) and NBC, opened with a bang of good ratings and critical acclaim. But after declining viewership and attendance set in, co-owner NBC decided not to broadcast a second season of its own creation. Similarly, the USFL took flight in 1983 with a $13 million backing by ABC and ESPN, but lasted only until 1986. Over its three-year tenure, the USFL’s ratings slipped and a merger deal with the NFL, the ultimate goal of many of team owners, never materialized.

It remains to be seen whether the newer versions of the USFL, which just concluded its first return season July 3, and the XFL, set to start in 2023, will take hold. Another spring football league called the Alliance of American Football (AAF), kicked off in 2019, lasting barely three months before going bankrupt, unable to pay player salaries.

Perhaps one thing that the AAF, USFL, XFL and NASL did not have were backing partners with seemingly endless amounts of cash—and ample patience. LIV Golf seems to have both, at least for now.

LIV Golf (pronounced like the first name of the actress Liv Tyler) takes its name from the Roman numeral for 54, the number of total holes played in its events. So far, LIV Golf has been bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. And just like the other aforementioned sports leagues, LIV Golf does not disappoint, fielding teams with interesting names like Fireball GC and Crusher GC.

But LIV Golf has yet establish a long-term television deal and streams its events at the moment from its website and via YouTube. Forbes staff writer Mike Ozanian argued in a recent column that it’s early and he thinks LIV is here to stay, assuming it gets its eventual TV business sorted.

Surprisingly however, LIV Golf does not yet have a mobile app available for potential viewers with smartphones. Both the PGA Tour and Golf Channel have widely used mobile apps, as do individual event organizers such as the U.S. Open, the Ryder Cup and The Masters.

On top of that, we’ve heard about the enormous salaries doled out to well-known players who have come aboard in 2022.

It’s been reported that former world No. 1 Dustin Johnson was offered somewhere between $125 million to $150 million to cut ties with the PGA Tour and the Ryder Cup and become a LIV Golf regular. Johnson said in a public statement that he had to “think long and hard” about his move.

Others signed away from the PGA Tour with eight- and nine-figure deals include majors winners Patrick Reed and Bryson DeChambeau, plus former world No. 1 Brooks Koepka, and golf legend Phil Mickelson. Adding to the overall package, LIV Golf recently signed golf broadcast legend David Feherty to commentate. And to no avail, the league has tried to gain interest from Tiger Woods.

LIV Golf, a private concern, has not made public extensive financials or specifics regarding how it plans to proceed in future years.

Greg Norman: ‘Street smarts’ at work?

Over the last two years, I’ve covered golf along with a number of other sports, and have gotten to interview LIV Golf’s CEO and commissioner Greg Norman three times, once in person, prior to LIV’s launch.

Norman, who has had great success as an entrepreneur with his own namesake apparel line and wineries, has also had global success in golf course design. It’s fair to assume his design venture, which have put golf courses on six continents, has led the Australian two-time British Open winner to establish meaningful business relationships all over the world.

When asked about business, Norman often names the late Jack Welch, his longtime friend and General Electric GE Chairman/CEO as an inspiration. Norman told me in an interview two summers ago, that Welch liked to say, “it’s really the street smarts you gain by living real life that serve you best in business.”

The last time I spoke with Norman, the morning of January 6, 2021, he reiterated his admiration for Welch in all things, from the boardroom to the green.

“Jack was so street smart, and that’s what he instilled in me all the time,” Norman said about Welch, who passed away in March 2020 at the age of 84.

“Even every time we played golf, he broke it down into playing golf street smart like business. How did a guy like Jack Welch beat Greg Norman, (when I was) number one golfer in the world? It’s because he was methodical. He just got it done.”

So, it begs the question: Is creating a controversy with the PGA Tour part of Greg Norman’s “street smart” plan as LIV Golf CEO and commissioner?

Golf podcaster and enthusiast Kris McEwen thinks that Norman is relishing his well-known role as the sport’s biggest maverick and a new one as a bit of a golf anarchist. McEwen, who co-hosts That Range Life: A Show Sometimes About Golf with golf blogger Bill Bush, hints that the normal things that come into play when starting a sports league are not as important here.

“The Saudi investors in LIV Golf are not under the same financial pressures to succeed in the short-term as other sports leagues,” McEwen said. “They don’t really need to turn a profit. And Norman is just enjoying being a disrupter and sticking it to the Tour.”

But McEwen wonders if Saudi Arabia’s new undertaking is anything more than a flirtation.

“To me, if the Saudis truly wanted a long-term golf business, they would have approached some way to align with the Tour, and more importantly, the majors,” McEwen said. “I don’t know what that would have looked like, but getting your players banned from The Masters and The Open isn’t great for your new golf business.”

McEwen also adds that the PGA Tour hasn’t exactly handled the matter as competently as they could.

Golf... by firestorm?

Since the launch of LIV Golf earlier this year, it seems that instead of street smarts that a street fighting mentality is at work. After all, LIV Golf bills itself as “Golf, but louder.”

LIV Golf has not eased any concerns about poaching PGA Tour players or that it is making tour pros take sides. And up to this point, Norman and LIV Golf have brushed off public concerns that their associations with Saudi Arabia and former president Donald Trump are problematic.

In 2018, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia caught fire after the disappearance and murder of Saudi-born American resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for Middle East Eye and The Washington Post. And shortly after the January 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump rioters, both the PGA of America and the The Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews issued a public rebuke of the then-outgoing president, essentially cutting ties with him and his clubs for the foreseeable future.

In contrast, LIV Golf has embraced Trump, booking two 2022 LIV Golf events at Trump Organization golf courses. In October, the league will hold its final 2022 competition at Trump National Doral in South Florida.

Meanwhile, Norman himself has bashed the PGA Tour, calling its organizers “hypocritical” while insinuating that Khashoggi’s murder was simply a “mistake” and one that the Saudis could “learn from.”

While it’s not exactly unusual for pro golf events to host politicians as guests, Trump remains arguably a most divisive member of America’s political class.

As a result, all of it has gotten high-level PGA Tour players like Rory McIlroy plus golf legends like Fred Couples and Davis Love III to criticize Norman and his new league for essentially politicizing golf.

Upping the ante, a handful of players and others associated with LIV Golf have filed suit against the PGA Tour. And just this week LIV Golf member Patrick Reed filed a defamation lawsuit against the Golf Channel and golf commentator Brandel Chamblee.

Taking it all in, another fair question to ask: Is LIV’s golf by firestorm sustainable?

“I’ve talked to some friends about the sustainability of the LIV Tour,” McEwen adds. “The fact of the matter is the Saudis or Norman may not really care about that.”

Even if that's not the case, how will LIV Golf survive financially long-term, with massive salaries offered to each PGA Tour defector? Another question remains as to whether LIV Golf will be able attract very necessary corporate sponsor partners, should their adversarial approach not temper down the road.

But if we take the USFL, XFL and NASL as examples—recent history shows us that sport leagues without rock solid TV network backing don’t last over time.

Read Frye’s interviews with Rory McIlroy and Derek Jeter.

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