BONUS EPISODE | The Collapse of LIV Golf: From Golf’s Great Disruptor to Sport’s Biggest Failure

pet topic, pet topic time, live golf, live golf, as we've just mentioned on the main show, it's in its death throws, certainly in its current state. I think we're calling that it's probably in its death throws first stop, but for a while, and it has been for a while, but we're seeing the final thrashings of the corpse on the road at the moment. But I think it might be useful, Charlie, before we go into the current implications and Brawler sort of conclusions drawn about the live golf fiasco. It might be useful just to sort of frame it with a quick recap of the history of this. Yeah, 2021, when the concept was first announced, it was really the first major challenge to the PGA Tours dominance of golf, the monopoly that the PGA Tours really had in golf. Yes, you had the European Tour, DP World Tour, you had the Asia Tour, but the PGA had got to a stage where really it could do pretty much whatever it wanted. We've just talked on the main show about the power of tennis and prize money, etc. The PGA acting centrally rather than having individual governing bodies, let's say around it to influence, had too much control in the eyes of many. And live golf, when it came about, was a challenge to that. It was basically saying, look, we're going to give more power to the players, we're going to give them ownership opportunities in the franchises that they participate in. We're going to pay the money, not just to come and play here, we're going to pay the money just for turning up. And as Dustin Johnson, I always come back to this point and I've talked about it so many times on the show, but it just sticks in my head from the Netflix full swing documentary when he was explaining the reasons for going. He said, look, if you offer me more money to play less golf, spend it with my family, do the other things that I want to do, I'm going to take it. I'm going to take it. And that was at a time where Dustin Johnson was right at the top of the game. Absolutely. You had Brooks Kepp who were right at the top of the game. Yeah, Bryson De Shombo, right at the top of the game. You had Cam Smith right at the top of the game. And so, you know, when you had a lot of these players moving in and leaving the PGA tour for live, let's be honest, like the bells were ringing for the PGA tour. Oh, big style. You know, everyone was like, oh my god, this is this is the end for them. They could be in major trouble. And if they get Rory and Tiger, which reportedly were major offers put on the table, not about seven hundred to a billion. Yeah, right. Not that that as we know would mean much now. But if they got those players to move over, then the widespread belief was that the PGA tour would crumble is probably a bit extreme. But, you know, really, really struggle. It was an existential threat to the US PGA tour. And it's quite interesting. Just sort of tracing back where this all comes from, right? So this is born out of the back end of the pandemic era. And it was a time when the Saudis, the Saudi government in general had determined on something called Vision 2030, which was an attempt to transform both the perception of Saudis a country, but also actually the underlying financial economic structures of their society, which have been basically a petrol state. You know, we sell our oil, we take that money in, we push it around our population. And it was a sort of an understanding headed by the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, that who's a young man was then still is now a young man saying, well, if I'm going to be running this country for the next 50 years, I want to make sure I've got a wealthy country to run. And at some point, the oil will run out. Or at least maybe even the bulb be various parts, well, they use less oil and therefore perhaps our bargaining power in terms of pricing or go down, et cetera. So we need to do something to fundamentally rebalance Saudi society. At the same time, he was coming out the back end of a PR disaster over the assassination of a journalist, Newark Oshoggi, at the Saudi Embassy in Turkey. And he had been personally blamed for that by world diplomatic society and was suffering a lot of blowback from that. There were countries looking at placing sanctions on Saudi Arabia and all this stuff. So it was a real moment in time. And I remember, fun enough, I remember one of their advisors, one of the Saudi government's advisors, I remember speaking to him pretty much like the week or two before the pandemic hit. So this is early 2020. And him saying, "Have you got any big ideas at the moment?" Because I'm telling you, there's about to be a lot of money spent. And he didn't mean on golf specifically, he meant the Saudi state is about to start spending a lot of money and anyone who has a big idea which could fit into Vision 2030 and could change perception and change reality has got a good chance of it happening. Enter stage left Greg Norman. And I think his role in this is gradually being forgotten over time because effectively he was booted out of it about a year ago. But he was the founding CEO of Liv Golf. And Greg Norman had had a long standing and antagonistic relationship with the golf authorities and with the USPGA tour in particular, dating back to the time when he was the number one golfer in the world and did not feel back in those days that he was listening to enough or that players were listening to enough, did not feel that prize money was high enough, felt there are a lot of people living off the fat of the land, which is being created by golfers like him. And you know, for those of your generation, it'd be hard to understand how big a star Greg Norman was in the 80s and 90s. He was an absolutely massive star. But didn't he try and do a break away in the 90s? Well, golf tour. Yeah, it was sort of, did it actually end up happening? Way pretty partnered with Fox Sports. Yeah. And it was blocked by the establishment. I think it was exactly. So this bit is in the concept of being. So the concept of I don't like being hemmed in by the USPGA tour. I want to do something big. And Greg Norman is, you know, he's never been just a sportsman, right? He's always been somebody who's been a bit bigger than that. Massive golf architecture business has always been involved on troponurally and other things. And has always been very outspoken. I mean, he was just a big star. And that was an era when golf had quite a number of big stars. This was sort of the Sevy Ballesteros Nick Faldo era. That was his that was his time. Sort of second half of the 1980s, first half the 1990s. That sort of decade in golf was very big in those days as it is now, but it was very, very big then. And Norman was always the sort of sites of the outsider. You know, the Aussie who came, the great white shark as his name, as his nickname was. And he never won as many majors as his talent, sort of, so she, you know, he blew up in a few days. He blew a few when he, when he should have won. What was his personality like? I mean, his personality, I mean, I've, you know, come across him a couple of times when I was a journalist is he's immensely charismatic. He's one of these guys who, he's quite a big guy with a big handshake and a piercing eyes and this type of stuff. And you know, and very much a, an alpha male, a, a real alpha male. And I think that, you know, the authorities on the US PGA tour back in those days, you know, he, he brushed up against that, you know, his, his whole style, you know, his golf head covers used to be, you know, great white sharks and all this type of stuff. He used occasionally wear one of those Aussie hats, you know, like in Crocodile Dundee. Yeah, that type of stuff. You know, he, he, he really lived that big life. And fun enough, I saw him literally a couple of years ago, I was having dinner at a restaurant in London, and he was on a table too over and when he walked in, he's one of these guys when he walks into a room, you know, he's walked into a room. It's quite a busy restaurant. You know, he's, yeah, he's got big broad shoulders, even now in his, he must be in his mid 60s, but he carries himself like he's, like he is still the star man. So really live is the coming together of an aspiration by the Saudi government to do something massive, matching up with the long standing ambition of Greg Norman to poke the USPGA tour in the eye, right? So those two things came together into this massive concept, which is actually the USPGA tour is just the golfers. If we get a whole bunch of the very biggest golfers to join something which is not the USPGA tour, the USPGA tour will be screwed, right? And effectively when it was all came out that this was going to happen in 2021, and then when the big moves started to be made in 2022, there were rumors in 2021 that some of these big discussions were happening that some of the big golfers were talking to them and all this type of stuff. And then it became clear in 2022 that some of the very biggest golfers had signed and that other big golfers were, you know, looking at potentially signing, and then the questions were being asked, well, what would the USPGA tour look like if their 20 biggest stars started not playing on the USPGA tour? You know, in terms of sponsorship, in terms of TV revenues, what would that look like? And you're absolutely right and saying what effectively ended up boiling down to really was Tiger Woods and Rory McElroy. Now it's funny to think now that five years ago, Tiger was still albeit injury wise was starting to come towards the end, but he'd been such a dominant presence in professional golf for 20 years. It's the messier, Faber. We talked about when he turned up to events. Yeah, events sold. And then you've got McElroy who's obviously at this point in his early 30s, right? Going back five or six years, but very much sort of the younger charismatic, major winning, big character, type of person who people pay to watch, right? Tiger and McElroy being those, probably Bryson who just been coming through at that point was probably the third leg of that. Well, if they got Tiger, McElroy and Bryson, what's the USPGA got to go to war with when it comes to its TV deals, when it comes to its sponsorship deals? And yet the USPGA tour has got its enormous overhead going on. They've got a huge cost, got a massive circuit to fund, etc, etc. So the threat back in 2021 going into 2022, which is when the first tournament happened, which actually was here in the UK at Centurion Club. Now at this point, not all of the big players who would end up playing on lib had yet signed to lib. But it was a stake in the ground saying, "This is happening, it is real. This is not just a theory, it's not a concept. We are holding a tournament and this is real." And at that time it was announced that the first season for the full tour would be 2023. And there was then a mad rush on during 2022 to get as many of the top players signed up as possible to make the tour as attractive as possible and obviously, particularly to try and get Tiger and Rory on board. And as you say, Varsam is offered to them because it was one of those situations, one of those beautiful situations to be in, if that never happened to me, but I have observed it in other business situations where, effectively, you are the entity that holds the key to the golden vault, right? Which is if Tiger and Rory go, then the whole thing gets blown open. And that's where the equity piece became powerful because we had a situation where players were being offered the opportunity to own a percentage of franchises of the teams they played for. So it was made up of 13 teams. That's simply the franchises. And the captains would take 25%. So there's the captains that had the big equity plays, I'm not actually sure what other players on the team. I'm not sure if there was anything kind of collectively in their broader incentivization. But the captains, the Shambos, eventually John Rams, those guys were very much incentivized by your franchising, however many years time, is going to be worth 1 billion plus. Guys, look at what franchises are setting for another sports, right? It's 1 billion, it's 2 billion, it's 3 billion, it's 4 billion, it's 10 billion, right? This is golf is the true global sport, right? Totally global sport. Obviously football is, but you can't have franchises that doesn't really work in football. So engulfed in sporting terms, you are going to end up owning 25% of something that could end up being worth billions, right? So from a financial perspective, Charlie, if you stack it up, the offer was extraordinary, right? We're going to pay you a massive signing on fee, just for like a life generational family changing signing on fee. I mean, absolutely. Open family office, you know, have loads of people running around investing your money for you, 100 million, 150 million, 200 million, 250 million, 300 million, signing on the fee. Number one, number two, when you turn up to our events, you are guaranteed. To be paid for appearing at those events, right? So the whole appearance, the thing that you mentioned on, number four, these events are going to have massive prize money on top of that, 30 million bucks, right? So the actual prize money is going to be bigger as well. Number five, we know cut. So everyone's going to be earning. Even if you have a bad week, even if things don't quite go your way, you're still earning, you're not going to have one of those nasty weeks, even the very top players do it at sometimes time, where you pay to go to a tournament, you pay to be there and all this, your psychologist and your coach and your physiotherapist, et cetera. And you miss the cut, you make, you make no money, you're down on the week. Which is fixing a topic of contention that has existed around golf and the PGA tour for a very long time. The players have not been satisfied with the fact that they do not get compensated if they don't make that cut. Right. So again, right, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge. And then on top of that, then, on top of that, also, as you say, the, the, the, the equity piece and all this sort of stuff. So you can say, okay, I'm sat here and I'm Dustin Johnson. I'm like, okay, I'm getting paid $150 million just to sign on. Yeah. Right. I'm then going to get, I'm going to become a team captain and let's just say my franchise becomes worth a billion. I'm then another $250 million in. I then play on this tour for 10 years and the prize money is so massive that pretty much I can't avoid making $20 to $30 million a year just because I'm turning up to events, I'm being guaranteed money, the prize money is massive and I'm good, and I'm good at the game, et cetera. I'm going to make another 200 million in prize money. So if I stick with this over five to 10 years, I'm going to make something like $600 million U.S. Minimum. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Now, for any professional sportsman to be able to look forward and say over the next five to 10 years, I'm going to make $600 million. That is, I mean, you know, off the scale. Yes. But let's say the top tennis player or the top goal from the world normally might expect to make $20 million a year, right? So over a 10-year period, assuming that they finish top every single year for 10 years on the U.S. PGA tour, they end up with $200 million. And here they're being told to a much higher level of certainty. No, no, it's not to be 200. It's going to be 600. So that's a 400 million difference that was being dangled in front of their face. Much of it guaranteed. Much of it, not especially tied to having to win majors and all this stuff. So I've, of course, got endorsements on top of that, right? So that 600 million probably ends up being a billion. So you are talking about joining the plutocracy. You're talking about joining the oligarchy. You're talking about earning the kind of money that somebody who starts their own tech business and floats it. You know, it's these types of sort of these fly around who don't share a private jet between three or four. You've got your own private jet that flies you around the world. You know, it's a totally mean. But it's not hard to understand why there is these guys took up Greg Norman's offer. I guess is what I'm saying. Yes. It's not to say that I think that what they did was a good thing or a great thing, Tiger Woods when he was turning it down and he turned down a number that was much bigger than these guys, right? He said, I think these guys are forgetting where they come from, where they came from and what's made them by which he meant the USPGA tour, right, which is their only in a position to be like this because of the USPGA tour. And there's a history element to that, right, which is the USPGA tour has been built up over a hundred years. And it's the stars of the past. It's the Arnold Palmer's, the Jack Nicklaus's who created this, you know, huge thing, which is the USPGA tour. So effectively what it boiled down to was, are you the type of person who respects tradition or are you the type of person who thinks bugger that it's all about, it's all about dollars on my bottom line? Anythings can be true at the same time, Charlie. Look, I mean, I would come on, let's be honest, right? Let's be honest. I respect tradition massively. I would want to go and emulate my heroes, of course. But if that money is being put down to you, it is, it is so difficult to turn that down. And yes, the credit to McRoy and Tiger Woods is extraordinary for a 700 to a 1 billion. Let's just say signing on the offer. The flip side of it you can say is that those are the two that could afford to turn it down. And I know, if they had a doubt about the longevity of this, it Rory has been playing the card of, I saw this coming, right? Yeah. I, you guys are being owed money. Shock horror. Yeah. Tiger Woods was, you know, he's a billionaire. Yeah. Rory is not far off. I don't think for his total value. So, you know, those guys had a very strong, very strong position to stand from. And they knew very smartly, they knew the loyalty that they would have from the PGA tour and doing so would give them far greater opportunity to earn. Because what, what I think they realized, and I would love to have known what the conversations would have been like between Jay Mono and the previous commission of the PGA tour. And let's say Tiger and Rory at this time would be how quickly the PGA came to decisions around player equity schemes that they have now put in place to raising prize money that is now what, two, three hundred million, two hundred or so million more. If that was quick enough when these guys were getting the money, then them sitting there and turning it down and there's still extraordinary. You pulled me up when I, the other day, was saying, "Oh, Bryson, you know, wouldn't be that bother because he'll be thinking about, you know, how other ways he can make money." Five hundred million is a huge amount of money. Seven hundred million is a huge amount of money, whether you've got billions, it's a huge amount of money. But I just wonder how much of this stuff all around it going and made that decision for those two. And the opportunity for them to really sit on the right side of this, as you've said, on the right side of it, but with a level of security behind them already, a little bit easier. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's very fair. I mean, it's very hard to get inside people's head and sort of judge, you know, what would Tiger have done 20 years previously before he became a billionaire. But I still want to go back in the history of it. Would you have said the characters that went that they would be the characters you would have expected to have been? Yes. Yeah. And that's my point, I think. I think that is my point. My point is that when you look at the John Rams this world, perpetually a bit grumpy, perpetually looking like the world owes him a favor, never looking that happy to be a professional golfer. You know what Dustin Johnson said? He said, you know, if someone offers me the opportunity to play less golf for more money, that presupposes the idea that he doesn't really like playing golf. Yeah. Yeah. Really? Same for Brooks. Same for Brooks. Same for Patrick Reed. Right. Everyone's against me. Right. It's a lot of people, it's a lot of people with chairs on their shoulder, okay? Who would play into the Greg Norman narrative of the USPGA tour screwing you. They used to screw me as well. They're screwing you. Yeah. They up to right Greg. Yeah. They are fuckers, aren't they? Et cetera, et cetera. No. I want to go back to you. You mentioned Jay Monahan. It's a central figure in this. And I think it's like the unsung hero of how this all got sorted out because he had to take a lot of shit. Right. I mean, he, you know, oh yeah, he copped it. He really copped it. Right. You should have seen it happening blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. As if you could. I just, you know, in retrospect, as has been proven by the fact that it's turned out to be a terrible idea, who an Earth could have predicted that any entity in the world would stump up six billion to try to take on the USPGA tour. No one could have foreseen that. There probably is only one entity in the world that could do it. And that's the Saudi state, right? Maybe the Qataris, right? Other than that, no one could do it. It would have to be a sovereign for sure. And it would have to be a sovereign who cared more about certain other things other than just making money because making money out of a six billion investment was never going to be a straightforward perception. Yeah. It was a reputational thing. So effectively, what happened was going back is that between 2022 and 23. there was vast pressure on the US PGA tour to come to terms with Liv. Do you remember that period, right? And there were various meetings that were broken, and even including up to, you know, very senior politicians getting involved, Trump and all this type of stuff, where it's basically, come on guys, look, there's room for you, you can all get together. And perhaps Liv should take over a chunk of the US PGA tour and, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be. That, and there were meet, Jay Monahan was pressured into having these meetings to show that he wasn't being stubborn, right? Which is, you could be the commissioner who sees the entire US PGA tour go down on your watch. Now, in retrospect, what the US PGA tour did was strategically brilliant, which is they effectively played for time. They strung out these conversations into a sort of framework where it was like, well, we'll have one meeting then, we'll have one meeting now, we'll have one meeting there. Let's see how long these guys can keep going without coming to terms with us and without Tigram Rory being on site. Let's see how long that takes. And that really only, I would say the first time when it became clear that the US PGA was not going to pursue those conversations, those negotiations and didn't need to was probably only a couple of years ago, 18 months. It wasn't that long ago that people were still saying, when's the next meeting between Liv and US PGA? Well, sorry. So that was what I was trying to get the data on here, because remember when that, there was the merger, the shock merger, there's an ounce in 2023, which then led to the whole Rory being betrayed by the PGA and all of this. And you're right, you know, really, it was always the commercial entity as well, which was interesting, because there was a huge part of Liv from just a money-making standpoint. There had a huge question mark over it. It was a commercial set of partnerships and it was a broad cost. I don't, I always had one problem. Where the hell do you watch it? Are you, I mean, Liv tore itself. So it's, yeah, you had tours now with two set pretty issues, you know, for you have one with the required great players and had a lot of money, you had a PGA, which had great commercials, great distribution. Distribution. Yeah. Bringing something together, which was an ounce in 2023, which Monohana had been talking about here, it says it's a historic day for the game. He said, was intelligent, because I don't actually ever know what came of this agreement. It was all playing as in retrospect, it was all playing for time. But the communication clearly was lacking between some of the top players like the Rory, because he came out, didn't he, and was publicly very upset by this, because he had turned down 700 million. And then these guys could just reintegrate back into a system, having taken a huge fee. So while he was smart and intelligent about how to buy for time, there was clearly still a gap in the communication that needed to happen between the top stars on the PGA tour, yeah, to try and build a better publicity around because the PGA suffered for this, they suffered for this for a, for a little while. Two years. I mean, okay, let's just play the other way around and let's just imagine that Jay Monohana and the US PGA tour hierarchy started to actually discuss openly what their strategy was with Rory. Yeah. Rory then speaks was agent, his agent and speaks to somebody else, the whole thing just becomes public. Right. So I think what they had to do was to say, right, we're going to carry on and we are the US PGA tour. We are in discussions with Liv because for the good of golf, blah, blah, blah, blah, we don't think there should be a split blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we'll be in discussions with them and we can come to some sort of framework, deal, potentially, whatever it might be. Now whether they were deliberately playing for time, I think they were or whether actually it was just a happy coincidence. It gradually became clear that more big players were not going to join and it also gradually became clear to your point that no one was watching. And anyone who runs sports organizations knows professional sports organizations that fundamentally you either need people paying to sell up and watch your events or and and you need people paying to watch on watching on TV and preferably paying to watch on TV or at least knowing where to go to watch it on TV in the first place. So the lack of a mate, the lack of distribution as you put it, the lack of having networks who actually wanted to televised these events turned out to be the key Achilles heel for the entire thing. So when you think about financial viability, what do the sponsors want? The sponsors want to make sure that they do sponsor it, their brand is visible. So if you can't tell them that they are going to be on major channels, watch by millions of people, then effectively your sponsorship deals are going to be way down here, not to mention of course your broadcast deals because by definition you get paid by the channels for that. So in retrospect, what they actually had to do really was tie up major TV deals kind of first to give them the distribution to make sense out of the entire thing because without the distribution, it's just never made sense. So you've got these massively well-paid players playing in a very expensive tournament, very expensively staged, which 5,000 people turn up to watch. I drop in the ocean in the big scene, things 5,000 people, 10,000 people on a golf course seems like quite a lot by the way, just to be quite clear. But in terms of ticketing revenue, it's not very good, especially when you've got the overheads that they have huge overheads. So effectively, the lack of TV deals, the lack of distribution, the lack of visibility is a thing ultimately that enabled the US PGA to let it just die quietly because that gap in the lack of the TV deal, that lack in the lack of commercial revenues is what meant the Saudis had to keep on putting money in. If there's one thing that I've learned, and you mentioned earlier on reference to Price and his potential loss of the 500 million he might have been banking, is the more time I spend working for or alongside very rich people or entities and I advise the Cateri government for quite a long time. So not rough experience. No one actually really likes losing shit, those are money. In the end, you know, I've worked for billionaires who cry like babies over having to write a 2 million pound check. You know, it's still 2 million pounds. The bottom line is they might now have a billion of assets all over the place, but 2 million, the opportunity cost on that 2 million is very, very substantial. They could go to one of their favourite charities and transform that charities into our future by giving them 2 million. They could give it to their children who could then do something interesting with it. They could go and get themselves a bigger yacht. They could do all sorts of things. Now if you think about the Saudi state as being an equivalent to an ultra-high net worth, but on a much, much bigger scale because it's a country rather than a person, there was this underlying narrative of billion here, 2 billion here, 3 billion here, 4 billion here, who cares? Just doesn't work that way. Life doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way when you're getting nothing back for it. And so I think to your point, if you created a league which had a distribution model that got people obsessed with golf and was working, right? We're still struggling to maybe make the money, but was working from the PR perspective, from the perception perspective that played a huge part in its origination because it was doing nothing for Saudi sport internally. It was doing nothing for Saudi Arabia really internally. If that was working, then it's the kind of cost that they would have attributed to. Would you have gone to major networks around the world and said, "And this is in the framework of the sure amount and money that was being invested full-stop, right? Would you have gone to major networks and have gone? Tell you what, we'll pay you to screen this for the first two years, right? You could go to sign out the BBC, which has lost all of its golf coverage because they can't afford to pay for it fundamentally. And said, "I'll tell you what, I'm always really about how you're quite sure of money. We're going to pay you 50 million to screen our events in the UK, right? We want you to screen every week on BBC 2 and we'll give you this money for screening." And then we'll talk at the end of two or three years. And in the meantime, build the audience, build the dependence, the sport that sports lover dependence. I love watching this. This is great. I'm able to watch on the greatest golfers in the world on free-to-wear and all this type of stuff. And then once you've then built that audience, you've then got a case to go to the pay TV people and say, "This is what the audience is." What you create, hopefully, and that is a competitive tension for the rights. It would have gone to Canal Ploos in France. I've gone into Spain knowing that I had John Ramm there. We would have got, you know, I mean, my god. Can you imagine what they could have given it to Super Sport in South Africa with Dean Burmister in there? But to be fair to Dean Burmister, he's not just a big star in South Africa. He's the biggest star on the planet, right? You'll remember that. He's especially now, I mean, messing and retiring from international football. Yeah, it's Burmister all the way from here on in. No, no, no. You can see Burmister shot. But look, seriously, yes, because if what you had to do was you had to put it in front of people, fuck it. I would have put it on YouTube. What? Where's your YouTube deal, right, going? Because also, the whole point of this was also to revolutionize how people consumed golf. It was a three day, not a four. It was shotgun starts. Yeah. I, you start on different holes of the course. It was pubs and atmospheric moments around the game. It kind of, it bred to what we would class now as, I don't know, like more of a kind of entertainment creator type culture and experience that you didn't get in the traditional. We must be quiet when someone's on the putting green in golf. So if you're really going to play that and you're really going to buy into it, you could have had the deals where you'd have creators working with live golf to create live golf content on on their channels. I've done. I think there was a bit of that, Charlie. I did see some of that. And of course, the biggest creator of all in golf is Bryson, who definitely did a lot of that from the get go. No, because by then it's too late. No, it came in later, most of that came in later. And I think the other problem is, is that some of their innovations, supposed innovations basically just didn't work, right? And that's fair enough, right? Sometimes you try something and it doesn't work. The problem is, is if it's core to what you're doing, then you've got an existential problem. And the big thing that did not work was team golf, right? That was there, most of the rest of the stuff I could put under the heading of, how can we make golfers lives easier? Turn the tournament from four days into three days. Great for the golfers. Is that great for the fans? Not really, it takes away one day optionality on me going, 'cause most likely you're not gonna go to all four days the event, you're only gonna go to one day the event. And sometimes that might wanna be a Thursday, rather than a Saturday, whatever it might be. So it doesn't really help the fans. Getting rid of the cut, definitely doesn't help the fan, that helps the golfer. So there's a lot of stuff that they were doing that I thought was very led by the need to bring golfers across and make their lives easier. But the thing that they did, which was really meant to change it, and this is bound into the franchise thing that you mentioned earlier on, is team golf, right? So you build the concept of week to week team golf as opposed to having to ride a cup once every two years, and the president's cup once every two years. And you say, right, week to week, your, you, the fan are gonna get passionate about these teams is, I imagine was the underlying concept, right? And then you will become a fan of the team. And therefore, when we are valuing the franchise, we'll be valuing the fandom that's been built around that team. Now we can talk about the individual or marketing bits that they could have done. I actually think nothing they could have done would have worked. I don't think people care, right? In Europe against USA at golf, that's something which is so easy to comprehend. I'm not supporting this golf or that golf, I'm supporting my country or my continent, right? Now when you're talking about a group of four golfers who've been thrown together seemingly at random for no great obvious reason other than this, well, yeah, sort of, yeah, I'll have him on my team, that was pretty much what I'd amounted to. So what am I buying into here? Why do I care? Why do I care what those guys together do or add up to? There's, there's just nothing there which would make me care. I don't have any tribal loyalty to John Ram's team, right? - Leakin. - Yeah, you're good, you've been, you've been finding it somewhere. - Right. - So I think that that concept of team golf was a fundamental flop. The lack of original distribution on a broad way to get audiences engaged and to really get people understanding this is gonna be a big thing, it's gonna stay being a thing, et cetera, was a massive flop. The lack of Tiger and Rory was a problem for them as well as being a bonus for the USPGA tour because those were at the time, the two biggest figures in World Golf and it gave the USPGA an ongoing credibility and top line sort of thing which otherwise they might not have had. - And you absolutely know history or heritage to work with. So everything you were doing was trying to create fandom, tribalism from scratch, which live or not first and will not be the last to fail to do. How long does it take to do that kind of shit? - Yeah, decades. - Decades, right. You've gotta have a strategy that is 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 years old in advance, that kind of stuff. What they were talking about here was a quick, hard, dirty, putch, coup against the USPGA tour that would break the whole thing apart which would mean that effectively they would then have a clear run at it for a long time to come. And I think they saw the other sort of brand problem with a revolution in golf is golf and golf, golfers and golf fans. Are they naturally within their respective societies the revolutionary types? Traditionally, no, I would just say no. I would just say in general terms, if I go into a golf club, forget Britain, if I go into a golf club in Argentina, right? There are many facets of Argentine society which are quite lively. If I was to go to a student, you know, to a university, there'd be demonstrations going on. If I was to go to a football match, it would be, it would be fiery, et cetera, et cetera. If there's probably one place in Argentine society where I will find the slightly calmer, slightly more adult, slightly more sort of respect for the tradition type people. Give me the golf clubs. - But that would be assuming, right, that your target audience was purely the existing pounds of golf and you didn't think that 100 golfers, I mean, the 100 type strategy was, if people don't even play the game, and by the way, like hundreds of millions do, it's got a much broader participation base. So if someone doesn't even play the game, is golf itself a fundamentally exciting sport? - No, it's quite boring. - It's exciting for us, 'cause we go, I would find that bunker shot really difficult. - No, right. Oh, I could do that. You might think that I would say that was very, very difficult as long as I didn't discern a wasps nest along the way, it would be extremely difficult. So so much of it's bound up in the beauty of golf is that even those of us who aren't that good at it can still hit the occasional shot of which Rory would be proud, right? That's the beauty of golf. We can, in each round, we will most likely hit one, two or three shots, which even the top pros would go, I wouldn't take that back. That would be fantastic. So that interaction between the golfer and watching professional golf is absolutely core. And my observation of the golfer is that they are intensely interested in the traditions of the game, the legacy of the game. I'm not just talking about sort of you know, the stooges in the RNA clubhouse. I'm talking about Arnold Palmer. I'm talking about, you know, sort of even quite sort of out there, thick, it's Greg Norman, et cetera. I'm talking about the history. So I remember, you know, when, when Sevy Ballasteroz won that tournament. So when you create something totally new, which doesn't have any former stars who won that tournament in the past, that isn't played on a course that you remember going back 20, 30, 40, 50 years, like Wentworth and other stuff and stuff. Everything is totally new. You're actually cutting across the grain of what football is. Imagine, sorry, golf is, imagine in football if you tried to create something that basically said, don't worry about that whole geographical tribal thing, right? That's all old hat. We're going to do something totally different that does not rely at all on you getting involved and interest in this because you come from that. Well, they do exist these things, right? Like baller League and these type of things, but they're very small scale. I mean, they don't really, it's not a six billion play. And they're not saying that they're going to overflow the Premier League. Yeah. It's not, it's basically saying for all of those you, who are very interested in the Premier League, by the way, here's a bit of fun on the side. So to bring it back into maybe then the original ambitions, if heritage and tradition in a sport that you're targeting is so important, it just reemphasizes the positive effects they could have had if they'd picked something that was struggling at the time that people already care deeply about, that had history, that had some of the best players ever playing for it. And then suddenly you walk out of it as a genuine hero. You're a hero for a 5% cost of what you've had to put into this. And what we mean by this is when we said that they should have looked at putting some of the money into the DP World Tour, the European Tour. Well, that'd be honest. That'd be honest. They could have owned the DWP Tour. They could, right. But at the beginning, they didn't even need to, you know, they basically just needed to come in and try to, try to put them on the market. Well, Charlie, it's to compete with the PGA. But if you're, if your aim here is to disrupt the US PGA Tour, and if your aim is to build something which is big enough to make a difference to Saudi Vision 2030. Yeah. And if your aim is to do something which is well regarded enough to make people around the world go, do you know what? Those Saudis, they're okay, they are, right? Effectively, doing a reverse takeover of the European Tour while still calling it the DWP. Well, they give it some Saudi name. Because it's effectively by dropping its name of the European Tour in favor of the Dubai World Ports Tour, DWP Tour, they'd already sold the pass in terms of naming, right? So they could have called it the Saudi, you know, the Sella World Tour. Yeah, Sella World Tour, whatever it might be. They could have done that, right? But everyone would have thanked them, you know, there would have been lots of golfers. It's fascinating to go back and think, right? Which is, if you look at Rory being a great example. So Rory obviously comes from Europe. Whenever possible, he plays in Europe, right? Why? Because basically he likes being back. He's a lot of mates here, he's got family here and all this stuff. He is in America to play on the US PGA Tour because that is currently the world championship, right? That's where he has to be. But given half a chance, he's back over here. You know, when we were playing golf done in Cornwall the other day, what do we see when we walk into the clubhouse? It's a picture from the three weeks previously of Rory, you know, on a link's agenda. Playing recreational golf on a links course in Cornwall. That's kind of where he wants to be. So instead of saying to Rory, I'll tell you what, here's 500 million to join something which is going to be totally new and weird and list of stuff. Instead of said, how about if you partner with us on reinvigorating the European Tour back to its former glory, so it can be a genuine competitor to the US PGA Tour. We're not going to stop you pay on the US PGA. You can play on the US PGA, but our best is that you won't want to as much because we are going to have 15 tournaments a year on the European Tour, called the Golden Series or whatever it might be, like they had the Masters Series in turn. We're going to have 15 tournaments a year on the European Tour, historic tournaments. The PGA went well. The French opened, so on and so forth. The European Masters in the United States. and then in the Swiss Alps, et cetera. There are gonna be 15 talk tournaments held in iconic locations with names on the trophy, who you love to see your name alongside, et cetera. Please partner with us in this, and we will give you a share in the commercial rights for that because we think we're gonna turn this around. - And also, what do you get if you do that? You get the Ryder Cup. - And you got the Ryder Cup. 'Cause I own the Ryder Cup, half of it. - So it was the great opportunity that was missed, and it was missed because in Greg Norman's own personality, an alpha male style, Greg Norman started on the European tour. That's where he started his professional playing career before he went to the US. And the thought for him of going back to the European tour and going, can we help you out a bit here? That wouldn't have suited the alpha male. The alpha male needed to be front and center. I'm taking you on, we're gonna do something totally new. It's gonna, you know, it's gonna totally destroy everything that you built up and everyone will then turn around and go, ha, Greg Norman wasn't either guy, right? And in that sort of, it's funny, the seeds of destruction of things are so often from right at the very start, the fault lines, the fault lines and the very start. There wasn't strategic thinking going on. There wasn't a careful person who had been involved in golf administration for 30 years who knew and understood how this might go, who tried to push events before, had seen what worked, what didn't work and all this stuff going, you know what guys, there's an easy way to do this. Rather than spending six billion on creating something new which might well fail, I can get for three billion, something which will definitely succeed. How about that, with far more of a certain upside on the perception you're going to? It's definitely gonna succeed. Yeah, so look, the long the short bit is, is to bring things up to present as we said on the main show, but for those of you who, I did watch the main show, for sure you did, or who might have forgotten what we said on the main show because you went up to make a cup of tea, is that fundamentally here we are, we are at the end of live golf season, 2026, which is the fourth full season. It was 2023, 24, 25 and 26. They didn't make it to the end of the season. They had to cancel the final event of the season. They had to massively pair back the second last event of the season and all sorts of golfers and suppliers erode all sorts of money. And it looks like they're gonna go into chapter 11 or administration depending on which country you're looking at it from. And we're calling that this is the end of live. Meanwhile, the chief executive of live is saying that he is out there trying to find investment to create live 2.0 as it's being called, which would be a massively reduced thing, 10 events, much lower prize money, et cetera. And we're saying, well, if he does that, he does that, but it's not live. It's not, no longer has the original point of live. It no longer would have that. It would simply be a another group of golfing events, with a certain amount of prize money and with some professional golfers playing golf. - Yeah, that's a tool, basically. (laughing) - Well, you know, these players are now stranded pretty much. - Well, that's an interesting side of it, isn't it? Because I think we heard recently that the European Tour, the DWP Tour, is receiving applications right now from live golfers. And don't forget that not all of the golfers on the live tour did receive these big signing on bonuses, you know? Most of them are already playing on the US PGA Tour or in some cases on the European Tour. Most of the US PGA Tour and earning really good money, right? And they came across, 'cause they thought this was gonna be certain money, right? So Nov was for them getting rid of the cut is critical because they missed the cut more often. If, you know, for the Rory Macroises, Rory Macroises, well, he barely ever misses the cut. So it's not such a big deal. But for these journeyman professionals, it was a huge thing. So they've gone from being in a good position with their tour cards on the US PGA Tour to now being stranded on live with very uncertain future. So then our writing emails to the European Tour saying, please, please, please, can you have me back on and the European Tour is thinking, well, I mean, the problem we've got is we've already got 125 players. We can't start booting out some of our existing players to take back on board players who are best with journeyman anyway, right? So there's no commercial justification for it. There's no fairness justification for it. So tell you what guys, there's something called qualifying school. There's something called qualifying school and qualifying school for those of you who don't know is the most brutal event in sport, right? It's when you turn up for one week and you play about five rounds of golf and the ones who finish in the top 25 get a full card. The ones who finish in the next 25 get a half card for the less attractive events and that type of stuff and the rest of them don't get anything, right? Brutal because you can be absolutely deserving in general terms of being on the European Tour or the USPGA Tour. But if you have one bad week, which those who play golf know is an ever present possibility, as Rory knows, it's not a present, right? One bad week and you're out. Yeah. I think it was last year on the European Tour Qualifying School, Eddie Petterall had fallen out of the top 125. So I had to reapply for his card and he went to qualifying school and was out of the picture and then I think he buried five of the last nine holes to make his tour card, now that's pressure golf. Substacker, I think, Eddie Petterall. Yeah, so he is a substacker, yeah. Substacker, that's true. So I mean, that is pressure golf and that is just absolutely, I've got just, the thought of it just makes my stomach choke. Come on, David, come on, give us a good substack golf lesson. We're in great need of effort. Right, okay, John, I think there we are. There we are. It will remain there on the archive and serves an object lesson to other people who think that they can do something spectacular in sport without understanding how that sport really works. Exactly. Guys, as always, thank you. Thank you very much. Great to have you with us and we will see you next week.