LIV Golf burst onto the professional golfing scene back in June 2022 with one sole ambition: to topple the PGA Tour.
The powers that be at LIV Golf may dispute that statement, but it was obvious for everyone to see that they wanted to end the PGA Tour.
They signed huge names from the PGA Tour, including the likes of Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, Cam Smith, Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson.
LIV Golf was loud, brash, in-your-face and, quite frankly, everything that the PGA Tour wasn’t. However, while some people warmed to LIV, there was always something missing. The biggest problem they had was the fact that the tournaments were meaningless.
Without any history or prestige, tournament wins carried no intrinsic meaning, and golf fans in general struggled to warm to the product.
Plenty of mistakes were made along the way, but perhaps their biggest error was failing to grasp the glaring gap in the market regarding the timing of their schedule.
LIV Golf missed an opportunity for a unique selling point
One of LIV Golf’s major mistakes was believing that staunch PGA Tour fans would be drawn to their product.
With that in mind, why didn’t LIV Golf attempt to exist alongside the PGA Tour rather than compete directly with them? They had an obvious opportunity to do exactly that by simply setting up their schedule differently.
The current PGA Tour season runs from January to the end of August, and that is set to be condensed down to around seven months from 2028 onwards.
Meanwhile, LIV’s season ran from February through to August. The best move they could have made would have been to set up their schedule to run from October through to early July.
This would have had two big benefits, one for themselves and one for golf fans in general.
LIV Golf would then have had two or three months early on in their season when none of the big PGA Tour events were being played. They could have played their Australian and South African events in November and December, with the eyes of the golfing world tuned in.
This would have been great for golf fans because the dead time of the year with no big events would have been filled up with stellar fields on LIV Golf.
The LIV Golf hierarchy from the early days will undoubtedly admit that they made plenty of mistakes, and they have proven to be costly with the product almost certainly now finished as a major golf tour.
However, failing to take advantage of the huge opportunity they had for a unique selling point by adjusting their schedule was arguably the most costly error of the lot.