Want more from Front Office Sports
in your search results?
Nearly two years after the debut of the Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy-backed golf simulator league TGL, the inaugural WTGL match averaged 97,000 viewers on ESPN on Sunday afternoon, with the TV audience peaking at 138,000 viewers.
LPGA Tour cable telecasts are averaging 87,000 viewers during the 2026 season (excluding major championships).
Los Angeles Golf Club, led by Michelle Wie West, beat New York Golf Club 3–1. In Oct. 2025, Wie West told Front Office Sports she “would love to” see a women’s version of TGL and added, “We’ll see what happens.” Now she’s playing in it.
The debut went up against a full slate of Week 9 NFL action, along with plenty of other live sports competition on Sunday afternoon, including PGA Tour golf: final round coverage of the World Wide Technology Championship, a $6 million fall series event, started at 3 p.m. ET on Golf Channel; that broadcast averaged 110,000 viewers. Blades Brown, the 19-year-old phenom, became the youngest PGA Tour winner in modern history, beating Ben James in a sudden-death playoff.
ABC had an NWSL quarterfinal playoff match, Spirit-Thorns at 3 p.m. ET; viewership for that match has not yet been released.
WTGL’s second match aired Tuesday on Ion, the Scripps-owned over-the-air network; viewership for that broadcast will be available later this week. The league has eight more regular season matches over the next 35 days. Five matches will air on weeknights in primetime on Ion, one match will be on a Sunday evening (Dec. 6) on ESPN2, and ABC will air a doubleheader on the afternoon of Nov. 29, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Four playoff broadcasts will air Dec. 20-23 across ESPN, ESPN2, and Ion.
The men’s TGL league averaged 498,000 viewers per match in its first season, and 488,000 viewers per match in Season 2.
TGL’s third season debuts Dec. 27 on ABC—also on an NFL Sunday like it did last year, when its season opener on Dec. 28, 2025 drew 646,000 viewers on ABC.
WTGL has a separate broadcast team from TGL. The league’s season-long purse is $11 million, which is higher than three LPGA major championships, though $10 million less than the $21 million in prize money that the men in TGL competed for each of that league’s first two seasons.
