The Pitch: Why Rory McIlroy is wrong about Tom McKibbin’s PGA Tour snub
VESTED INTEREST: Rory McIlroy earns millions in bonuses through the PGA Tour's Player Impact Programme. It's in his interest to push the brand. Pic: Eóin Noonan/Sportsfile
Amid the predictable criticisms through social media, golf commentary and from Rory McIlroy - that Tom McKibbin has made an error by joining LIV Golf – there is a lack of hard facts, analysis and forecasting.
The acquisition of Europe’s most prodigious star by the Saudi Public Investment Fund has been a strategically brilliant move for McKibbin and for LIV, no matter what side of the Saudi-US fence you sit.
Despite some pompous statements that this is a quick financial fix for a greedy young pro, McKibbin’s decision not to play a full rookie season on the PGA Tour is backed up by sound evidence that this is the right move for him and his brand.
Central to that will be the ongoing deterioration of the PGA Tour as it continues to self-sabotage out of existence, quickly being outthought and outfought by an organisation which is no longer a disrupter, and is now a dominant player.
As US TV audiences continue to spiral downward – just 236,000 Americans watched the final day’s coverage from the PGA’s AmEx on the Golf Channel last week – LIV is building only one way.
But let’s start with the financials, because let’s not pretend different, professional golf is all about the money and future revenue.
Tom McKibbin has earned €2.82m in his five years as a touring professional, playing in 71 competitions, winning one.
This works out at almost €40,000 earned per tournament – while each LIV player is guaranteed approximately €50,000 for finishing last – in any of this year’s 14 events.
This was to be McKibbin’s first full year on the PGA Tour where he could expect to have pocketed $1.5m (€1.44m) in prize money – the average earnings of a touring pro in the US.
He may have done better, or worse, but either way the earning potential is dwarfed by what he can expect to draw down in prize money in year one.
To forecast what this might look like, let’s look at the most similarly profiled player who has made the switch from the DP World Tour to LIV.
Adrian Meronk in the 2023 season was one of the European Tour’s hottest properties – despite being snubbed by Luke Donald as a Ryder Cup pick – and like McKibbin saw his future with LIV.
That proved a sound call as Meronk earned $5.3m in prize money for his first full season in 2024, excluding a multi-million dollar sign-on fee, pushing earnings over the $10m mark.
If he were to last on the PGA Tour it would have taken Meronk at least six years to achieve such earnings, based on average income.
The contract agreement fee already banked by Tom McKibbin sits at $5m before he even strikes a ball, as part of John Rahm’s team, Legion XIII, where he also lines up with Tyrrell Hatton and the young American Caleb Surratt.
Rahm has already earned more than $200m with LIV, and the team is gobbling up commercial deals which will reflect well on the four players and their bottom line.
The team has just announced a $40m deal with luxury sportswear brand Greyson Clothiers.
McKibbin will now play in tournaments, each with a guaranteed prize fund of $25m, with $20m going to the individual players purse, and $5m going in team winnings.
Next we’ll look at McKibbin’s own future image potential as both a professional golfer and a now significant sports brand in his own right.
There is a likelihood, thanks to a Fox Sports deal to broadcast LIV golf events, that McKibbin’s profile will surge significantly in the US, more than had he gone with the PGA Tour.
The Fox deal and playing alongside Rahm – the tour’s biggest non-US star - will present far great access to US screens where traditional PGA broadcasters focus only on the big names in each event, with much larger fields.
A fascinating analysis by Josh Bennett, a golf business analyst in the US, found that coverage of the opening day of the AmEx featured shots by just 25 players out of a field of 155 professionals, over a three hour and 47 minute broadcast on the Golf Channel.
Of the players who were not stars, three who featured in the top five leaderboard - Hayden Springer, Zac Blair and Aldrich Potgieter - received zero screen time on the channel.
Would McKibbin – as a non-US player - have been any different?
Attention on players is one thing, but attention on the tour itself is becoming a significant problem for the PGA, though there was some comfort last Sunday when Rory McIlroy’s shootout with Shane Lowry and others reached almost 4m viewers on CBS.
The Rory factor being the significant driver here, and it must be said, the 232,000 who tuned into the previous weekend’s finale were also contending with the NFL conference championships – as was the case last year, when twice that number watched the AmEx.
Where everyone can agree is that the medium to long-term financial success of golf is all down to future audience – an area in which LIV is strategically, and in real-time, hammering the PGA Tour.
This was best identified last week, perhaps more than the McKibbin announcement, when the Saudi league announced a deal which plays directly to the youth and the less-traditional mature audiences through a deal with Rick Shiels Media.
Shiels - with a YouTube following of three million subscribers and a combined 2.5m followers on TikTok, Instagram and ‘X’ – is the biggest non-tour playing influencer in golf.
A piece with Bryson De Chambeau – in which Shiels had a 10-shot start – has been watched 2.7m times, while the PGA Tour regularly struggles to get to 100,000 views for its content on YouTube.
“Alright guys, I have officially signed with LIV Golf – I’m a LIV Golf Ambassador,” Shiels, in that now familiar Bolton brogue, announced to his legions. “I am proud and excited of the incredible content coming your way.”
That will feature 10-shot challenges at each LIV event, various matchplay 2v2 games featuring rival team players from the tour, along with other engaging productions.
The tour described the deal as a “multi-year strategic partnership, marking the first official collaboration with a major content creator”.
“The partnership aims to connect professional golfers with a new generation of fans, leveraging Shiels’ dedicated audience and fun content strands and LIV Golf’s innovative approach to the sport,” it said.
Much of Shiels' upcoming work will focus in on promoting the likes of Tom McKibbin and other rising stars of the Tour, adding multiples to the players' value and worth.
It’s not surprising that Rory McIlroy was unhappy with his fellow Holywood Golf Club member, when he said his advice would have been not to go to LIV.
“If I were in your shoes, I would make a different choice than the one you’re making,” McIlroy told reporters, that he had advised young Tom.
“If I were in his position and I had his potential, which I think I have been before, I wouldn’t make that decision.”
Let’s not forget Rory earns tens of millions of dollars in bonuses from the PGA Tour to promote the game through its Player Impact Programme, so he has vested interest in pushing the brand.
Like everyone else who sees the PGA Tour as standalone, McIlroy will have to get over it and realise that not everybody - particularly the young - are that interested in product anymore.
A significant development in how sports and athletes are portrayed in gaming has seen the acquisition by Electronic Arts (EA) of TRACAB Technologies, a leader in advanced sports optical tracking and analysis solutions.
The investment will see the use of TRACAB’s technologies, through advanced AI, machine learning and real-time sports data gathering, to advance how personalities and stars are created in lifelike animation.
The TRACAB investment will support EA’s ambition to towards the eagerly awaited EA Sports app, an expected game changer in the world of gaming when it’s released in the year ahead.
