One of the big questions moving forward with the LIV/PGA merger is what will happen with the media coverage and distribution of tournaments. SportsCenter anchor Scott Van Pelt told Dan Patrick that he’s not sure.
SVP was a guest on The Dan Patrick Show on Wednesday, and he told Dan that he thought the announcement of the merger was fake initially. But now that it’s real, and details on the TV rights side are scarce, it’s hard for Van Pelt to speculate on what golf on television will look like a year or two from now.
“I don’t know what I don’t know in terms of the contracts. How long do they run?” he asked. “This changes everything from a TV perspective I would think. If you’re CBS or NBC or whomever has paid for one thing, well now it’s going to be a different entity – which I think this new entity is going to sit down and say, ‘Alright let’s talk about what it’s going to cost to have us on your air.'”
LIV Golf made waves and drew the ire of PGA Tour officials, players and fans with each new announcement of a superstar player signing. Often when a big name got announced as a new addition to the league, details of a signing bonus worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars followed.
SVP said where LIV will benefit is in the potential with a new rights deal.
“You bought players, but on LIV you just didn’t have the distribution where you were being consumed as a product,” he said. “You need to have a television partner where you have eyeballs. They didn’t have that.”
LIV Golf went the entire 2022 season without a TV broadcast partner in the United States. Just ahead of the start of the 2023 season, the league announced an agreement to carry the final two rounds of tournaments live on The CW. And not all CW affiliates across the country even opted to air coverage, thus drastically impacting viewership.
