LIV Golf flopped on another prime opportunity to compete with the PGA Tour on Sunday.
The Saudi-funded golf league was gifted some advantageous circumstances from the PGA Tour during Sunday afternoon’s competing final round broadcasts. CBS’s broadcast of the PGA Tour’s Zurich Classic was hamstrung by a power outage and weather delay that kept live golf off the air from 3 p.m. to 5:15 p.m. ET. Instead, CBS was forced to air a replay of the 2024 Zurich Classic during that window until play resumed later in the evening. At the same time, over on FS1, LIV Golf had its final round broadcast from Mexico, with heavy hitters like Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm contending for a win.
None of that mattered when it came to the television ratings for each event.
CBS averaged 1.63 million viewers for its final round broadcast of the Zurich Classic, a figure that incorporates over two hours of non-live golf, while LIV Mexico averaged just 110,000 viewers on FS1. Those numbers continue an embarrassing trend for LIV Golf, which was optimistic prior to this season after striking a new media rights agreement with Fox Sports.
FS1 averaged 110,000 viewers for Sunday’s final round of LIV Golf Mexico City, won by Joaquin Niemann.
Saturday coverage: 84,000 on FS1
Friday: 30,000 on FS2 pic.twitter.com/96H2tvv93g— Josh Carpenter (@JoshACarpenter) April 29, 2025
For what it’s worth, the Zurich audience declined 12% from last year’s 1.85 million viewers for Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry’s win in the team event. But if one includes just the live golf portion of the CBS broadcast (5:15 p.m. to 7:40 p.m. ET), the final round averaged 2.29 million viewers, a 24% jump versus last year.
But the real story here is that over a million more people decided to watch a replay of last year’s PGA Tour event than watched LIV Golf’s live event at the very same time. And while commercial viability doesn’t really matter for LIV, whose Saudi benefactors are clearly willing to lose billions of dollars to float a golf circuit that nobody cares about, the league is on its deathbed from a perception standpoint.
Once seen as a legitimate competitor and threat to the PGA Tour, LIV now stands as the butt of every golf joke. How much longer this nonsense will continue is the only question golf fans care about at this point.
