More golf fans tuned in to watch the final round of LIV Golf Chicago than the final round of the Procore Championship on the PGA Tour.
An estimated 20,000 more golf fans tuned in to watch the final round of LIV Golf Chicago over the Procore Championship on the PGA Tour last Sunday.
According to Sports Business Journal’s Josh Carpenter who provided a latest update on X / Twitter, an approximate 89.000 viewers were locked in for Jon Rahm’s three-shot victory in Chicago that also saw him capture the season-long Individual Championship.
But that is where the Au and Bu audiences diverged – only around 69,000 saw Patton Kizzire driving to triumph in the Procore Championship in Napa, California.
The offered the first event in the new FedEx Cup Fall schedule.
The latest viewership of PGA Tour is almost 220000 less than the final round of the same event last year which marked Sahith Theegala’s first win.
Carpenter considers this year’s final round overlap with the Emmy’s likely played some part in the drop off in figures.
The final round of the Procore Championship finished more than three hours after the conclusion of LIV Golf Chicago.
LIV Golf beat PGA Tour for viewership figures on Sunday.
In either case, it represents the first time that LIV Golf has been able to dethrone the PGA Tour in terms of final round viewership strictly via the CW network.
The latest figures do not include numbers through the LIV Golf App or its YouTube page, so you could argue LIV Golf absolutely trounced the PGA Tour for total viewership over the weekend.
While LIV Golf topped the PGA Tour in viewership for the week-end, Golf Channel analyst, Brandel Chamblee, who is a man who once played on the PGA Tour, claims that the next numbers coming out of the Saudi-backed circuit will be far lower than their predictions.
Scroll below for Chamblee’s tweet….
“Billions for golf megastars & LIV is still in the witness protection program of sports viewership,” read the post by Chamblee who has been a staunch critic of LIV Golf since its launch in 2022.
Even partially due to the attempts to “scale” the count-fair motleyness of the 16th hole at the WM Phoenix Open and the Seve-like passion of the RyderCup they don’t succeed not to speak of the lack of ideas’ innovation and the source of the investment.