Welcome to Issue #15
"You don’t know what pressure is until you play for five bucks with only two bucks in your pocket."
Lee Trevino
What’s on our mind this week
Rosey reeling in the years, Dahmen nails it with the greatest ever sponsors exemption letter, Kansas the new golf hub, WM mayhem in full flow, LIV finally gets OWGR recognition (too little, too late?), Morikawa’s chipping looks awfully familiar, only 62 days until the Masters
In the news
Why it matters: South Korean fashion retailer F&F, which previously signalled intent to
exercise its Right of First Refusal (ROFR), has agreed to stand down following intensive due diligence. This clears the path for U.S.based Old Tom Capital, led by the Roosevelt family, to move toward a definitive agreement. The reported bid exceeds $3 billion, marking a massive exit for Centroid Investment Partners and a landmark profit for F&F.
Our Take: What appeared to be a contested sale has evolved into a strategic hand-off. F&F’s decision to monetise its stake rather than double down on control is a pragmatic pivot. It secures a windfall for shareholders while avoiding the overpayment risk that often plagues private equity exits. For TaylorMade, Old Tom Capital represents a shift toward a Brand Platform model. Unlike traditional PE, Old Tom’s portfolio, including Quiet Golf and TMRW Sports, suggests they view TaylorMade not just as an equipment manufacturer, but as the cornerstone of a broader lifestyle ecosystem. The marquee contracts with Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and Scottie Scheffler provide stability. The next phase likely prioritises digital-first expansion and lifestyle crossovers to justify a $3B-plus valuation.
Why it matters: Ford has been named the Official Vehicle of the LPGA Tour in a multi-year deal, marking the Tour's first official automotive partnership since Kia concluded its 11-year relationship after the 2021 Kia Classic.
Our Take: This is a benchmark deal for non-endemic sponsorship in 2026. Historically, auto brands approached the LPGA cautiously, prioritising surface visibility over deeper integration. Ford is doing the opposite. A central pillar of the agreement is the Power Her Drive mentorship program, designed to provide career coaching and business resources for rookies and second-year players. By focussing the partnership on mentorship rather than car placements at the 18th green, Ford is buying into the storytelling economy. This signals the LPGA has moved from the visibility phase into the credibility phase. For brands watching from the sidelines, the message is clear. Modern sponsorship ROI increasingly depends on measurable impact rather than impressions alone.
Why it matters: DP World has signed a landmark five-year agreement to become the Title and Official Umbrella Partner of the Professional Golf Tour of India (now the DP World-PGTI Tour). The deal extends far beyond naming rights, focusing on infrastructure, professional standardisation, and a guaranteed competitive pathway linking Indian talent to the DP World Tour and global rankings.
Our Take: This is "sports-as-logistics." DP World isn’t merely sponsoring golf; it’s structuring the supply chain. For a company that already controls nearly 26% of India’s port market, anchoring the domestic golf tour is a strategic play to deepen its "Silk Road" influence. By creating a controlled development pathway, DP World ensures that the next generation of Indian stars remains within the established ecosystem rather than being lured by rival ventures. In the modern game, whoever controls the progression pathway ultimately controls the market.
Pic from LPGA
Worth your time
Read: Gary Player’s Black Book ‘The Black Knight’ shares his views and life lessons on family, golf and business in this honest and frank book.
Watch: Flightpath Shark Tank Pitch A premium golf accessory brand with more than $11.8 million in sales but could not convince a single Shark to invest.
Listen: Dan on Golf Dan Rapaport chats to Matt Fitzpatrick and legendary caddie Billy Foster live from the WM Phoenix Open. This is Dan’s favourite interview he’s ever done, worth a listen.
Podcast: The Complete History & Strategy of The NFL Ahead of Super Bowl weekend, this is a really deep dive into the NFL from the Acquired podcast guys. Fascinating stuff.
Feature story
What FIFA’s Lenovo partnership reveals about golf’s technology future
Pic from Techradar
When Lenovo announced its FIFA partnership at CES 2026 in early January, the scale was difficult to overstate. All 48 World Cup teams would receive identical AI analytics capabilities through Football AI Pro. Digital twins of every stadium. Three-dimensional player avatars analysed in real time. AI-powered command centres monitoring everything from fan flow to player movement across sixteen cities in three nations.
The ambition was unmistakable. Sport positioned as a technology platform rather than a broadcast product.
Golf announced an expanded AWS partnership that same week. The PGA Tour outlined plans to use AI to personalise content and extend international broadcast delivery. The progress was real and meaningful. The difference in ambition was also clear.
The more relevant question concerns structure. Whether golf’s fragmented model limits its ability to capture the compounding value created by centralised technology investment.
What Lenovo is actually building
FIFA’s Lenovo partnership represents operational transformation.
Football AI Pro, built with Lenovo’s AI Factory, orchestrates multiple agents analysing millions of data points across more than 2,000 metrics. Historically, wealthier federations built private performance systems while smaller nations competed with limited insight. Lenovo’s platform standardises access to match analysis, opponent scouting, performance tracking and tactical modelling.
Analysts compare team patterns using video clips and three-dimensional avatars in real time. Coaches explore how tactical changes might perform against future opponents. The system analyses hundreds of millions of FIFA-owned data points to generate insights across text, video, graphics and visualisations, supporting prompts in multiple languages.
Digital twins of all sixteen stadiums extend beyond static modelling. These are live operational environments that mirror real-world conditions, allowing organisers to model crowd flow, test emergency scenarios and coordinate logistics before issues materialise on site. Tournament management becomes predictive rather than reactive.
Pic from PGA Tour
An Intelligent Command Centre will support all functional areas at FIFA, generating AI-produced daily summaries while monitoring World Cup operations in real time. Inputs from cameras, sensors, ticketing systems, transport networks and security infrastructure are aggregated centrally, concentrating decision-making that previously sat across multiple organisational layers.
This is infrastructure investment measured in the hundreds of millions of US dollars and designed to persist beyond a single tournament cycle. Systems deployed for 2026 form the foundation for 2030 and beyond. FIFA is building assets it owns and controls, deploying them uniformly across its most valuable property.
Golf’s response
Golf is not standing still.
The PGA Tour’s expanded AWS partnership announced in January 2026 processes more than 30,000 shots per tournament, operating at production scale across over 40 stroke-play events each season. Beginning at THE PLAYERS Championship in March 2025, the Tour introduced AI shot commentary in TOURCAST, using machine learning and generative AI to provide written context for every shot.
The underlying infrastructure is sophisticated. ShotLink’s radar-plus-scoring system tracks ball-in-motion data from tee to green, supported by 4K video across in-play and selected out-of-play areas. Two-dimensional camera images are converted into three-dimensional coordinate maps, enabling deeper data manipulation.
AWS has shifted camera operations into the cloud and plans to do the same for video cut-down workflows. This consolidation replaced multiple legacy systems with a single workflow, improving availability and speed.
Pic from Sports Performance Analysis
The Tour’s World Feed, launched in March 2025, uses generative AI-powered commentary to produce broadcast graphics and statistics for distribution across more than 200 countries and territories. The DP World Tour named AWS its official cloud provider in 2025, extending AI-driven multilingual translation across broadcasts.
An AI Course Setup Tool, presented by Morgan Stanley, debuted at THE PLAYERS Championship in 2025, using historical data and weather forecasts to inform pin positions and course difficulty. These initiatives improve fan experience and operational efficiency.
These initiatives also operate at a different scale and under different ownership structures.
Industry estimates place PGA Tour technology partnerships in the tens of millions of US dollars annually. Lenovo’s FIFA deal sits in the low hundreds of millions across the World Cup cycle. More significantly, FIFA’s investment produces shared infrastructure deployed across elite competition. Golf’s technology investments remain distributed across Tours, Majors, equipment manufacturers and broadcast partners, each with separate incentives and budgets.
Why scale matters now
Technology spending in sport is shifting from enhancement towards infrastructure.
Data rights are becoming monetisable assets alongside broadcast rights. Sponsors increasingly expect integrated platforms rather than isolated activations. Private capital shows greater interest in sports businesses that resemble scalable systems rather than event-led media products.
In that environment, fragmented investment risks diminishing returns. Incremental improvements retain value. Platform-level coordination compounds it.
The NFL, NBA and Formula 1 have pursued similar strategies. Broadcast agreements now include data rights as negotiable assets. Technology partnerships extend across multiple seasons into sustained platform development. The infrastructure itself becomes a defensible asset.
Golf’s structure makes this coordination more challenging. Achievable, but dependent on deliberate alignment among stakeholders accustomed to operating independently.
Fragmentation as constraint and advantage
FIFA operates as a single governing body controlling the World Cup. Global rights are negotiated centrally, and technology is deployed uniformly across participants.
Golf operates as a collection of competing interests. The PGA Tour, DP World Tour, LPGA, LIV Golf and the four Majors control separate commercial rights. Players manage individual endorsements. Equipment manufacturers invest independently.
For technology partners, this complexity limits integration and scale. A PGA Tour partnership does not extend to Augusta National or St Andrews. Coverage remains partial. Standardisation becomes challenging.
Fragmentation also delivers benefits. It enables experimentation. TGL exists because of structural flexibility. Equipment brands drive innovation through R&D investment that may not occur under centralised control. Individual players build powerful personal brands independent of Tours.
It constrains platform economics. No single entity can guarantee deployment across elite competition, enforce unified data standards or coordinate long-term infrastructure investment at scale.
The upside remains distributed. Equipment brands capture R&D returns. Players capture brand equity. Tours capture media value. Platform-level value remains largely uncaptured because no mechanism exists to coordinate investment and distribute returns proportionally.
This reflects golf’s history and culture. It also represents a strategic choice with implications as technology becomes central to sports entertainment value.
What golf could borrow
Digital twins could materially improve major championship operations. Live replicas of tournament venues would enable real-time modelling of crowd flow, weather impact and security response, allowing organisers to coordinate decisions before issues escalate.
Command centres monitoring pace of play, spectator movement and hospitality utilisation would improve efficiency and experience. Tournament operations currently rely on distributed decision-making across committees, volunteers and staff. Centralised data would accelerate response times.
Three-dimensional player modelling could enhance broadcast storytelling and coaching insight. The PGA Tour already captures extensive shot data through ShotLink.
Extending this into biomechanical analysis during competition would create value for broadcasters and players alike.
Smart wayfinding linking courses, practice facilities, hospitality areas and transport hubs would improve on-site experience, particularly at sprawling venues during major weeks.
The most transferable opportunity may sit below the professional level. A unified platform offering amateur golfers access to swing analysis, course strategy and performance tracking, built on professional-grade infrastructure, would extend value beyond broadcast audiences.
The Tour holds much of the underlying data and partnerships through its AWS relationship. The challenge lies in organisational alignment across stakeholders required to coordinate development, share costs and distribute benefits.
Sports as technology platforms
Formula 1’s transformation under Liberty Media followed a similar arc. Investment in data infrastructure and digital content preceded viewership growth and rising sponsorship values. Drive to Survive succeeded because the underlying systems already existed.
The NBA has partnered with Microsoft, Amazon and Google to deliver AI-powered fan experiences and personalised content. Data rights now sit alongside media rights as monetisable assets.
FIFA’s Lenovo partnership accelerates this direction. The World Cup functions as a global technology deployment as much as a sporting event. Infrastructure built for 2026 becomes reusable, creating platform value that compounds rather than depreciates.
Golf’s distributed investments improve individual properties incrementally. Whether platform-level value can be captured without coordination mechanisms remains unclear.
The governance trade-off
Golf’s structure reflects history and culture. Independence, tradition and local control remain central to its appeal. Centralisation carries risk. Homogenisation could erode mystique. Governance reform would be complex and political.
That trade-off is strategic.
Golf can continue pursuing distributed investments that improve individual properties. It can also explore mechanisms enabling coordinated infrastructure where shared value justifies alignment. The first path preserves existing structures and avoids political complexity. The second creates assets that compound over time but requires stakeholders to balance individual interests with collective benefit.
Neither approach is inherently superior. The decision depends on whether leadership believes platform-level coordination delivers returns exceeding those achieved through distributed spending.
Other sports have pursued centralised approaches. FIFA, the NFL, NBA and Formula 1 have accepted coordination costs in exchange for infrastructure value.
Golf has not yet reached that conclusion collectively.
Pic from Golf.com
What this means for golf
Golf’s technology investments are meaningful and growing. The comparison with FIFA highlights what centralised, platform-level investment enables at scale. The constraint is structural.
As technology increasingly influences competitive positioning across global sport, governance becomes strategy. Fragmentation that once enabled innovation may complicate coordination when platforms create compounding value.
That challenge extends beyond software. It requires alignment, incentives and shared ownership models across events and Tours. It requires stakeholders to conclude that collective infrastructure investment delivers greater long-term value than isolated initiatives.
The platform question is already being answered elsewhere in sport. FIFA has invested in centralised infrastructure. Formula 1, the NFL and NBA have pursued similar approaches. Each concluded that coordination complexity is justified by the value created.
Golf faces the same question with a different starting point. Its structure allows considerable investment flexibility, and it may complicate coordination as platform economics increasingly shape sports value.
That question extends beyond technology choices. It reflects governance priorities. Governance evolves more gradually than software.
One new thing
Can this new AI start-up actually fix golf's planning problem?
Pic from ApexGolf
A quick note: you'll still get One Thing from History in most editions, but when a new and innovative golf start-up catches our eye (like ApexGolf did this week), we'll dig into what makes them worth watching.
ApexGolf launches this spring as an AI-powered app combining practice plans, golf-specific fitness, and weekly schedule adaptation. Targeting time-starved golfers wanting structured improvement, the AI learns goals, facilities, limitations, and schedule, building adaptive weekly plans.
Market reality
The AI coaching space is crowded. 18Birdies, SportsBox AI, and countless fitness apps already offer personalised golf training. ApexGolf's practice-fitness integration differentiates them, but most golfers struggle with consistency, not lack of plans. The core question: will golfers follow AI-generated schedules, or will this join the downloaded-but-unused app graveyard? Success depends on engagement, not technology.
Our view
If they nail UX and truly adapt to behaviour rather than generating static plans, they could own the "personal golf trainer" niche. They need retention data, not downloads.
More broadly, ApexGolf's launch signals belief in golf's digital transformation. Investors are betting golfers will pay for software solutions to performance problems. The real test: are we approaching saturation in AI golf coaching, or is the market still fragmented enough for newcomers? Success validates the premium app model; failure suggests golfers want human coaches or free content, not AI subscriptions. Watch their six-month retention rates. That's the metric that matters for this category.
Next week
We chat with Alissa Kacar (aka @newladygolfer) about forging a career in golf as an influencer, content creator and media personality.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David