Welcome to Issue #42
“I’m pretty sure if the PGA Tour were handed $6 billion it would’ve done a better job with it”
Rory McIlroy
What’s on my mind this week
LeBron launching a golf YouTube channel and already passing 500,000 subscribers, Fresh Tape still waiting to get paid by LIV but getting an unprecedented amount of free PR in the meantime, Matt Fitzpatrick asking whether golf really needs playoffs (during the playoffs), Bryson calling the media "the mafia", media day going well then, "without Scottie" becoming an actual golf betting market feels like the highest compliment in sport, Asterisk Talley missing an LPGA event because of school last week, Rory missing school because of a PGA Tour event this week, the days getting shorter is golf's annual reminder that you definitely should have played more this summer.
In the news
Why it matters: LIV CEO Scott O'Neil says the league is working to close new investment on a "very compressed timeline", while acknowledging unpaid vendors, cancelling its Michigan finale and seeking player commitments for 2027.
Our Take: LIV's challenge is no longer simply finding replacement capital. It is restructuring the old business while convincing players and investors the new one is worth committing to. O'Neil is trying to reduce a cost base built under PIF's generous funding model, resolve outstanding vendor obligations and secure enough elite players to satisfy the reported conditions attached to new financing, all at once. LIV 1.0 was built on effectively unconstrained sovereign capital. LIV 2.0 will have to operate under conventional investment discipline. That means fewer events, tighter costs, external scrutiny and investors expecting a return. The question is whether LIV can make that transition without losing the talent and product quality that give the business its value in the first place.
Why it matters: Fanatics has signed a multi-year deal with the European Tour Group covering Ryder Cup Europe and the DP World Tour, including official Team Europe replica competition clothing for the first time.
Our Take: The replica kits are the interesting part. Golf has always sold event merchandise, but it has never developed football's recurring economics of team identity, where supporters buy the same shirt worn by the players they follow. The Ryder Cup is unusually well suited to testing that model because allegiance already exists beyond individual golfers. Fanatics now controls the retail, e-commerce, licensing, wholesale and product infrastructure required to monetise it. If replica apparel works at Adare Manor, the commercial opportunity extends beyond one Ryder Cup into a permanent Team Europe consumer proposition between matches. Golf has spent years trying to manufacture team fandom. Europe already has it. Fanatics is now testing how much that allegiance is worth.
Why it matters: American Express has become Official Payments Partner of St Andrews Links, with eligible Platinum and Centurion members receiving an exclusive application window for the chance to purchase 2027 golf packages, including the Old Course.
Our Take: The payments designation is almost secondary. American Express has increasingly built its premium-card proposition around privileged access to scarce sporting experiences, and few assets in golf are scarcer than an Old Course tee time. Importantly, Amex members are not guaranteed access. They receive a dedicated application window before St Andrews Links uses its existing random-draw mechanism. That protects the Links' scarcity model while creating a new commercial layer around it. For St Andrews, the partnership monetises access without simply auctioning tee times to the highest bidder. For Amex, it adds another difficult-to-buy experience to its membership proposition. If access to golf's most desirable tee sheets can become a financial-services benefit, the tee time itself becomes valuable sponsorship inventory.
Pic from DP World Tour
Worth your time
Read: Front Office Sports’ fascinating look at how LeBron is muscling into YouTube golf, and just how quickly he’s catching the established names
Listen: Ok, a bit of self-indulgence with this one. I recently chatted with Robby and Jonathan on The Hole Story podcast about The Business of Golf, my six-year-old said it's great so that's good enough for me
Watch: The Ryder Cup documentary that never gets old. Luke Donald, Rome and a very happy European team. (Apologies in advance to our American friends)
Feature Story
What happens when the sponsor becomes part of the infrastructure
When T-Mobile's Director of Sports Sponsorship, Mike Gendreau, sat down with the USGA at Pinehurst almost a year ago, it wasn't a typical sponsorship conversation.
Across the table was Anthony Santora, the USGA's IT Director, with a list of things he wanted to improve.
Running a golf championship creates an unusual technology problem. Unlike a stadium, the venue stretches across hundreds of acres. Officials, staff and spectators are constantly moving. Terrain varies. Some locations are remote. Then, when the championship ends, the operation moves somewhere else and many of the variables change again.
Santora had also seen what T-Mobile was already doing through its relationship with the PGA of America.
"They had experienced some of the connectivity challenges in the past," Gendreau explained, "and recognised that the system they were using to mitigate some of that just probably wasn't optimal."
What followed was less about finding somewhere to put T-Mobile's logo and more about identifying where its technology could make a USGA championship work better.
When the product must perform
The first major test came at the 2026 U.S. Women's Open at Riviera.
Rules officials present a particular challenge. They are dispersed around the course, making decisions while play continues around them. They need information, video and access to colleagues wherever a ruling happens.
The existing set-up had limitations.
"They were using an antiquated system in the past," Gendreau said. "Anthony recognised that they needed a system that provided better connectivity and enhanced mobility. There are no command centres that exist on golf courses. You've got hundreds of acres, sometimes these are located in pretty remote locations."
T-Mobile's answer was an optimised slice of its 5G network.
Network slicing effectively allows dedicated network capacity to be optimised for a particular function. At Riviera, USGA rules officials equipped with connected devices could access video and communicate with colleagues while moving around the course. The same underlying capabilities were also deployed for ticket scanning, selected point-of-sale terminals and rapid content delivery.
"We put forth a solution that was going to help them modernise how the rules review platform will work," Gendreau said.
That sounds like a technology project because, operationally, it is one.
Commercially, however, it is also a sponsorship.
And that's what changes the value of the relationship for both parties.
A different kind of accountability
Traditional sports sponsorship already creates considerable value. Brands buy access to audiences, association, hospitality, activation opportunities and engagement.
T-Mobile hasn't abandoned any of that. It just added another layer.
Its actual product is being asked to perform.
That changes the accountability. A successful activation can be judged by reach, engagement or brand metrics. Technology being used inside championship operations has a more immediate test. It has to work.
The additional responsibility creates risk, but it also creates opportunity.
Gendreau describes T-Mobile's approach as having "evolved to partnerships", with a different accountability attached to those relationships.
The order of those priorities says something about how T-Mobile approaches the partnership.
"We really started to transform how we think about these relationships, leading with what is the role that T-Mobile's network and solutions can provide in terms of streamlining event operations for our partners, but then also delivering incredible fan experiences."
Operations first. Fan experience second.
Alongside access to an attractive golf audience, the USGA is giving T-Mobile an opportunity to embed its technology in the operation of the championship itself.
Golf as a proving ground
The value for T-Mobile goes beyond the conventional benefits of sports sponsorship.
Golf gives it a live environment in which to prove its technology and, if that technology performs, the opportunity to deepen its relationship with the USGA and build a case study that could be used elsewhere. Golf happens to provide an unusually demanding testing ground.
"Golf probably presents the most complex environment," Gendreau said. "You have topography, hundreds of acres that need coverage, and the events move from location to location. That's a very different environment than a stadium or even a Grand Prix."
But that's also where value comes from.
T-Mobile accepting operational responsibility means its technology is exposed to the possibility of failure in a live championship environment. But a network functioning perfectly in a controlled demonstration proves relatively little. Technology performing across hundreds of acres during a USGA championship demonstrates something considerably more meaningful.
Gendreau also sees a product-development opportunity.
"These are opportunities that also allow us to stress test the network and ultimately lead to commercialisation of those solutions down the line."
When the network becomes the activation
The next step is using that same infrastructure to improve the experience for fans.
T-Mobile's initial USGA deployment already included consumer-facing benefits, but Gendreau sees considerably more opportunity in what connectivity can eventually do for the way golf is watched and experienced.
"Not only are we using the network to enhance what's happening on the ground, but also delivering new broadcast experiences," he said.
Golf also creates an unusual broadcast challenge. A television production is trying to cover dozens of players spread across a large field rather than action occurring inside a fixed stadium. Connectivity can potentially make cameras, data and content more mobile.
"Golf is just such a great opportunity for that," Gendreau said. "Drone cameras, different ball tracking technology. This is an audience that is yearning for more data, and there's so much more that I think audiences are going to respond to."
This also changes what a T-Mobile activation could look like.
Instead of simply telling golf fans what its network can do, T-Mobile has an opportunity to let them experience it. A different camera angle. Faster content. More data. A better-connected experience on the grounds.
The product becomes part of the activation.
What T-Mobile is really buying
This is why looking at the USGA agreement simply as another golf sponsorship misses much of its potential value.
T-Mobile still gets the things brands have traditionally wanted from sport. Golf offers an attractive audience, major championship visibility and cultural relevance.
But T-Mobile is also getting access to something else, real operational problems its technology can try to solve.
Golf gives T-Mobile technically difficult environments in which to deploy its network. The USGA gets solutions to operational challenges. Fans can ultimately get experiences built on top of that infrastructure. And T-Mobile gets another opportunity to demonstrate what its technology can do in a demanding live environment.
There is an important limit to the argument. T-Mobile isn't indispensable to the USGA simply because its technology now supports championship operations. Nor does proving something in golf automatically make it transferable everywhere else.
But operational integration can make a partnership harder to reduce to a simple exchange of rights for money.
The more T-Mobile embeds itself in how the championship operates, the stronger the relationship with the USGA can become.
The logo still matters. The audience still matters. The activation still matters.
But T-Mobile is trying to add something more valuable underneath them: a product that solves a real problem, proves itself while doing so and creates the infrastructure on which the rest of the partnership can be built.
The most valuable sponsorship asset may no longer be what the brand puts around the event. It may be what the brand puts inside it.
One thing from history
The golfer who couldn't take the money, so he gave it to the caddies
Pic from Caddie Hall of Fame
This week's BMW Championship at Bellerive looks like one of the PGA Tour's newer creations. But its history stretches back more than a century, to a golfer who had a problem with money he couldn't keep.
In 1916, Chick Evans did something no golfer had managed before him. He won the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur in the same year. He was 26, one of the most famous amateur golfers in America, and soon found another way to make money from the game: recording a series of instructional phonograph records.
Evans initially considered using the proceeds to buy his mother a house. There was a problem. Under golf's strict amateur rules, personally accepting money connected to the game could jeopardise the status that allowed him to compete.
So he found another use for it.
Evans wanted the money to help send deserving golf caddies to university. He worked with the Western Golf Association, and in 1930 the Evans Scholars Foundation was established. That autumn, Harold Fink and Jim McGinnis became its first two scholars at Northwestern University.
The idea kept growing. So did the tournament that would eventually help fund it.
The Western Open had first been played in 1899. In 2007, it became the BMW Championship, with the tournament's proceeds going to the Evans Scholars Foundation. Since BMW took over, the championship has contributed more than $63 million towards caddie scholarships.
This week, 50 of the world's best golfers compete at Bellerive for a place in the Tour Championship. Behind them sits an education programme supporting a record 1,260 Evans Scholars at 27 universities across America.
It started because one golfer made money he couldn't spend.
A quick housekeeping note
Over the next few weeks, we'll be making some brand updates. In the meantime, if the next edition doesn't land in your inbox, check your spam or promotions folder and mark it as a trusted sender. That's the best way to make sure you don't miss anything during the transition.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David