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TGL, the indoor golf league co-founded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, is already considering expansion after a successful debut season, which included an average of 513,000 viewers per match on ESPN platforms.
Regular-season matches were up 21% over the programming they replaced (mostly college basketball) in comparable 2024 ESPN and ESPN2 windows.
According to one billionaire team owner, those TV ratings were much better than the league was anticipating.
The most-watched TGL match, 1 million viewers on ESPN for Woods’s league debut on Jan. 14, was “about four times what people thought it was going to be,” Marc Lasry, owner of The Bay Golf Club, told Front Office Sports.
Here’s the math: Lasry, the former co-owner of the Bucks, estimated that a good rating for a PGA Tour event would be 2.5 million viewers, and indicated TGL was aiming for one-tenth of that.
“We came to the conclusion you’d at least get 250,000,” he said. “So, ESPN would be happy, and I think the league would be happy.” TGL finished the regular season averaging more than double that figure.
Lasry thinks the success TGL has found on TV will help keep it on air and generate more revenue for the league long term.
“The idea was you did a three-year deal, and that if things worked out, you would have a new media deal based on the fact that more people are watching,” he said. “And if things didn’t work out, it was fine—at least ESPN got a fair deal. I think the first season actually worked out far better than we thought.”
ESPN is reportedly paying “less than $10 million” for the first two seasons of TGL, according to CNBC Sport.
Lasry, whose Bay GC ownership group includes Warriors guard Stephen Curry and former Golden State stars Andre Iguodala and Klay Thompson, pinpointed TGL’s shorter broadcast window, compared to traditional golf, for part of the ratings success.
“What all the networks wanted, especially ESPN, was something on for two hours,” he said. “So that’s how the whole idea started. It was really Tiger and Rory’s idea. Can we do this in two hours? And the only way you could do it was actually play 15 holes, do a simulator, and I think they came up with a great idea.”
Next up for TGL, which wrapped up its first season in March, is growth, which could include a seventh franchise, and incorporating LPGA Tour players into the mix. For example, Los Angeles Golf Club owner Alexis Ohanian recently told FOS he wants to own a women’s TGL team in the same market if the league adds women’s franchises.
