LIV Golf begins new era after withdrawal of Saudi funding with fans still unconvinced

Jon Rahm, along with Bryson DeChambeau, is the biggest draw for fans among the LIV players. Photograph: Charles Laberge/AP

That was before DeChambeau started building his YouTube channel featuring footage of his workouts and personal guide to his life as a pro golfer. It was this kind of individual brand building and media strategy that LIV welcomed while the PGA only recently loosened its restrictions on what its golfers can post.

“I pretty much get everything through YouTube because I’m part of the younger generation,” Robbins said. “I follow live tournaments, but other than that, I am more attracted to the personality-driven side.”

The problem for LIV is that Robbins was here to see DeChambeau, not the Crushers team that he captains. Few fans were wearing LIV merchandise despite the outfit’s intense marketing effort to try to popularize the team-based concept that separates it from the PGA. The course featured team-branded pop-up bars and signs with QR codes encouraging attendees to join specific fan clubs. One team, the Southern Guards, celebrates by doing the “rhino jive” and asked fans to post videos of their best efforts. In the “Fan Village,” attendees could receive a temporary tattoo with their favorite (or newly adopted) team. Maybe fans would be more invested if the tattoos were permanent.

If LIV has any future, then it will need the likes of Robbins and other American fans to find a team and start buying merchandise and pledging allegiance to the Rangegoats or Crushers or Hyflyers. Inside the course’s largest merchandise tent, however, most of the space was devoted to selling agnostic LIV-branded clothing.

“I think the team format is transformational,” O’Neil said. “The players as partners is something that doesn’t exist in the world of sports.”

O’Neil cited not just the high audience turnout in LIV events in Australia and South Africa, but how those audiences welcomed the national affiliations of teams like the Southern Guards (South Africa), Ripper GC (Australia) and Korean GC (South Korea). Before DeChambeau teed off, four parachuters descended waving the flag of OKGC, a recently rebranded team that is the first to be directly anchored to the United States. O’Neil insists that several of LIV’s players are dedicated to making the team concept work, and reports have surfaced that a core part of O’Neil’s strategy is finding investors for the 13 existing teams.

That was the same reasoning adopted by Jeff Eisenhard and Michael Cafferky, two friends from nearby Reston, Virginia who purchased a $29 day pass to watch some of the world’s best players up close. Like Robbins, they also consider themselves obsessed: they play in a fantasy golf league together and have attended several PGA tournaments as spectators.

Yet they never check the LIV standings and scoff at the notion that anyone – even those attending that day – pays any attention to the team standings that LIV believes is essential to the league’s survival. “If it was drizzly and cold, I wouldn’t be here,” Eisenhart quipped. Instead of purchasing the four-day grounds pass, they admitted that they would be following this weekend’s PGA Tour event so they could pay attention to their fantasy golf teams.

“This team concept is just silliness,” Cafferky said. “Nobody is connected to these teams or franchises.”

If LIV hopes to survive, especially without one of the world’s wealthiest backers, then it will need to reach these fans before it runs out of money.