The Saudi Arabia-backed breakaway professional golf tour, LIV Golf, has agreed a deal to broadcast its events in the US on the CW Network, a channel best known for carrying teen dramas including Gossip Girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The agreement ends a months-long search by LIV Golf to find a broadcast home in the US, hampered in part by the breakaway group’s attempt to disrupt professional golf even among a voracious market for live sport broadcasts.
Several large US networks, including Paramount’s CBS, Comcast’s NBC and Disney’s ABC, were not interested in bidding for its rights given their existing commitments to the established pro tour, the PGA.
The value of the LIV Golf rights to the CW was not disclosed. Executives within the league had contemplated using what’s called a “time-buy”, paying a network to carry an emerging event yet to prove its popularity, as Golfweek reported last year. In its inaugural 2022 season, LIV streamed its tournaments on YouTube and its own website.
Dennis Miller, CW’s president, said in a statement it would be the first time in the network’s 17-year history that it would carry mainstream live sport.
Backed by more than $2bn from the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund, LIV Golf emerged last year as a formidable rival to the PGA Tour, luring top-tier players like Phil Mickelson, Sergio Garcia and Brooks Koepka away from prestigious PGA Tour events with cheques reported to run unto the hundreds of millions of dollars.
LIV Golf is battling against the PGA Tour in an antitrust lawsuit, while the PGA launched a countersuit in October. Both cases are expected to continue into next year.
Critics of LIV Golf have pointed to Saudi Arabia’s lavish attempts to burnish its global image through sport, a practice known as “sportswashing”, despite human rights violations and the murder in 2018 of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi embassy.
For its part, the CW is an unexpected choice for live sport as it is better known in the US as a destination for sitcoms and dramas aimed at young adults. Launched in 2006, it is the successor to two now-defunct rival minor broadcast networks, the WB and UPN, which competed for young audiences with programming such as Dawson’s Creek and America’s Next Top Model.
Nexstar Media, a publicly traded owner of 200 local US television stations, took a 75 per cent stake in the network last year.
The second LIV Golf season of an anticipated 14 tournaments is scheduled to begin next month in Mexico.
Additional reporting contributed by Sujeet Indap
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