Can Fox Find Success in Return to Golf—Now With LIV?

It looks like Fox will be making another attempt at broadcasting professional golf in 2025.

A source confirmed to Front Office Sports that the network is closing in on a media-rights deal with LIV Golf, which has been looking for a new U.S. TV partner after two seasons on The CW. Fox’s discussions with LIV were first reported by Sports Business Journal.

This would be Fox’s first golf deal since it opted out of its $1.1 billion USGA contract in 2020—just five years into the 12-year pact. Fox is still paying more than half of that annual $93 million rights fee for the U.S. Open and all other USGA events, while NBC, which now holds those rights, is paying the rest.

The final round of the last U.S. Open on Fox in 2019 averaged 7.31 million viewers in prime time from Pebble Beach. That was the network’s highest golf rating. Joe Buck led the golf coverage for Fox, which pushed boundaries as an early adopter of several now-staples of golf on TV like shot tracers.

Back in the late 1990s, Fox made a bid for PGA Tour rights that ultimately failed. Between 1996 and 2001, Fox had a roughly one-third equity stake in the Golf Channel, which simulcast early-round PGA Tour coverage on some Fox regional sports networks. 

Changing Clubs

The CW’s LIV deal was revenue-sharing only, but Fox will pay LIV a “modest rights fee,” according to Puck News, and both its main broadcast network and cable channels like FS1 and FS2. 

Sports agency CAA, which also works with the PGA Tour, has been helping LIV in its latest media-rights search. Another TV suitor that emerged along the way was TNT Sports, which broadcast this week’s “Crypto.com Showdown” featuring LIV’s Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka against the PGA Tour’s Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler.