How TGL’s game stays on par with golf’s changing demographics

What do you get when you combine PGA Tour golfers with screens, mics, a rotating green, and a handful of other twists? TGL, aka TMRW Golf League, the new-age golf competition founded by Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and sports exec Mike McCarley in tandem with the Tour.

Golf has long been associated with an older audience. A 2017 Sports Business Journal study that’s still often cited found the average age of a PGA Tour fan at the time was 64, and the country-club vibes of the sport have left it largely associated with an older, affluent, white male audience.

The emergence of TGL, which recently wrapped its second season, is one of the latest in a line of indicators that image is starting to change. The median age of Season 2 TGL viewers was about 56, and about one-third of the audience was made up of 18–49-year-olds, according to the league.

TGL execs are working to push that median age down even further, while also expanding into other less traditional golf demos, according to Peter Jung, CMO of TGL parent company TMRW Sports. The tech-forward format does some of that work on its own, and player-led, social-first content is another key element of the effort. The WTGL, TMRW’s women’s league created in partnership with the LPGA, is set to make its debut this winter, and should help draw in the growing women’s sports crowd.

“Looking at where we prioritize to grow our fanbase, I think that younger sports fan audiences are ripe for more TGL and WTGL,” Jung told Marketing Brew.

Hot mic

As is the case with most sports, Jung said the linear broadcast audience is still “enormously important” for TGL, which airs on ESPN. From Season 1 to Season 2, average viewership remained about flat, down just about 2% from 498,000 to 488,000, according to TGL. Unique viewers rose about 8%, from 20.2 million to 21.8 million.

To reach younger fans, though, TGL is doubling down on social, Jung told us. In Season 2, 44 social videos clocked more than 1 million views each, up from 12 in Season 1, per TGL. Across the board, league video viewership increased 186%, from 81 million to 232 million, and all seven teams grew their follower counts by at least 18%.

Behind-the-scenes player content is key to TGL’s content strategy across platforms. It’s an approach that’s popular in seemingly every major sport, but it hasn’t quite taken off in golf.

“Unless you’re at the top of a leaderboard, [fans] are really tracking a few [players] on a given weekend,” Jung said.

TGL athletes, however, are all mic’d up during competition. “It’s a little bit of a liability,” given the vocabulary of some athletes, but it also can provide a “rawness” to TGL’s content that resonates with modern sports fans, he said.

Lake view

Influencers and athletes from other sports have helped create engaging content, too, Jung added. TGL has a network of more than 60 creator partners, including golf-endemics like Roger Steele and others with more of a general lifestyle focus, and the league has worked with athletes like Jason Kelce, who joined the broadcast booth for several matches last season.

Even the tournament experience itself—which is meant to be entertaining, shorter than a typical golf tournament, and more accessible to sports fans with its team format—is designed with young, social-savvy fans in mind, according to Donna Tuths, president of the Americas at Two Circles, a sports and entertainment marketing agency that works with TGL on content and audience growth.

“They produce something that is a content-first product,” Tuths told us. “It’s made for TV.”

On target

Social content strategy will be integral to the development of the WTGL fandom as well. As the league gets off the ground, Jung and his team have been working to identify segments of fans they consider “prime prospects” for WTGL.

The group that’s most likely to tune in consists of about 20 million fans with “a high propensity and interest in women’s sports,” Jung said. They also happen to be the youngest of the half-dozen segments identified, and will be targeted with paid media buys and other social content in the lead-up to Season 1, he said.

Media partners and sponsors for WTGL are still being ironed out, but the partnership trajectory at TGL indicates interest from brands. TGL more than doubled its number of partners YoY, and all teams have at least two sponsors, according to the league. New sponsors last season included AT&T and Mike’s Hard Lemonade, contributing to a multi-category presence that spans finance, apparel, lifestyle, and beverage brands, according to research from SponsorUnited.

Although TGL is a young league, it’s riding a wave of fan and brand interest in emerging sports, and Jung says it’s “here to stay.”