Brooks Koepka Quits LIV Golf, US Sports Global Expansion

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2:34Coming up, we'll talk with a company that wants to simplify the fan experience by putting everything you need from buying a ticket to ordering a hot dog on one platform. Plus, why American sports leagues are prioritizing global expansion. All that is on the way on the Bloomberg Business of Sports, but we start with a big headline in the golf world. Brooks Koepka is the first player to officially leave the Saudi back to live golf, and it doesn't look like he'll be the last. Joining us to discuss the latest twists and turns in the world of golf is Anne Liguori. She's covered 26 Masters and dozens of other major golf championships, and she's the author of the book Life on the Green, Lessons and Wisdom from Legends of Golf.

3:23And welcome back to the Bloomberg Business of Sports. Hey, guys. It's always great to talk to you. Yay. Well, let's start with Brooks Kepka. What really – now, he says that he is leaving Liv because he wants to spend more time with his family and take him on his word on that. your thoughts about this well knowing Brooks Koepka he has been disenchanted with Liv for a long long time I can't even believe that he went to Liv but you know I can remember back at the Masters in 2023 you know he admitted that he might not have joined Liv at all had it had he been fully healthy and playing great golf at the time.

4:14But around probably middle of 2022, you know, he had an injury, one injury after another. And he really didn't know what his future was going to be on the PGA Tour or in golf overall. And so when Liv came to him and offered him all that money, and you know, it's upwards of 100 mil from what I've been gathering, They never report what the exact totals are. But, you know, he just it was an offer he could not refuse at the time because he wasn't healthy at the time. And since then, he obviously got 100 percent healthier. He started he played decently, really well on live the first couple of years.

4:59He was actually the league's first five time individual winner. He won in 2022. He won in 2023. He won in 2024. But this past year, 2025, he did not win at all. And, you know, he just wasn't happy. You could see on his face when I saw him at the majors, he was not happy at all. And he did terrible at the majors. So the writing was basically on the wall. So when he left, when they came to terms, I was not surprised. So it really was not. And how big of a hit is this for Liv? Liv has obviously signed plenty of people. They're expanding globally. But with him leaving, how big of a hit is it? It's a huge hit.

5:44I mean, Liv's been struggling from the beginning. I mean, look, they've spent$5 billion in Saudi funding since the start. And what are they getting out of it? You know, they're not making money. You know, it's not really sustainable. How many people really watch it on TV and follow it? So losing one of their biggest stars, Brooks Koepka, is a huge blow to live in, which brings up what about who will be the next star to leave? Will Bryson DeChambeau be the next? I mean, his contract is up at the end of the 2026 season. And he has said things like, you know, things have to change. Things have to get better.

6:27Things have to improve. Either he will bolt, he might be the next one to bolt, or he has tremendous leverage to make gobs and gobs of money for Liv to keep him. So, yeah, it was a huge blow to Liv to lose Brooks Capcom because they really haven't signed any big-name stars recently at all. And so they're getting younger players, players whose names aren't that recognizable, who really want to go to make big bucks. But they haven't really signed any big name of late. And so losing Brooks is a huge blow to them. And the ramifications that they might lose Bryson DeChambeau and others are real. Well, where does this now bring any kind of merger between Live Golf and the PGA?

7:20Or is that just dead? You know, it's been dead for a while, Michael. Michael, I have to say the PGA Tour, because of Live, which Phil Mickelson predicted years ago when he kind of initiated this whole Live controversy, the PGA Tour raised the pot, so to speak, for the PGA Tour players. And so you have all these signature events now on the PGA Tour calendar that are paying$20 million in prize money. And the Players' Championship went up to$25 million. So the players are on the PGA Tour are extremely well paid. I don't think they feel like they have to merge with Liv. I don't think the PGA Tour feels there's anything to gain to merge with Liv and to work with Liv.

8:13So, again, that's another sour point for LIV because I don't think the LIV players who wanted a merger to play on both tours, I don't think they're going to get that. And of course, a lot of the players, only players who qualify from LIV can play in the major championships. And that enters a whole conversation about official ranking, world ranking numbers, et cetera, et cetera, which they still are not giving to LIV players. So, yeah, there's really no need, in my opinion, for the PGA Tour to make any kind of deal with Live Golf. So, two-part question from me. Number one, what does Brooks Koepka do next?

9:05Does he jump back over to the PGA Tour? And B, or two, where does Live go from here? when you lose some, a big name like Brooks, I wonder, does this signal the end of live golf or how do they move forward? So one, where does Brooks go? And two, where does live go? Yeah, no good questions. I mean, the first question, where does Brooks go? Well, the PGA tour has not made any decision about what they will do to accept any player who leaves live. You know, any player who went to live from the PGA Tour was automatically banned from the PGA Tour. Now, does the PGA Tour all of a sudden turn around and say, welcome back, Brooks?

9:52No, they really don't. So as much as I'm sure they'd love to have Brooks competing on the PGA Tour, and he's such a star and he's such an incredible golfer. He's won five major titles. they're going to really have to come up with a decision that they're going to have to live with not only for Brooks but for anybody else who leaves live and you know you got to know that the PGA Tour players don't want to accept these guys why you know they're thinking well wait a second these guys left the PGA Tour went to live to make all this money and now they went back No way. So it'll be interesting to see what the PGA Tour does.

10:35Where does that leave Brooks? Brooks can still play in the major championships. He still qualifies based on his winning the PGA Championships and the U.S. Opens. He can still play in the majors. he may play the DP World Tour in Europe. From what I had read, the P.J. Tour, you cannot play the P.J. Tour for at least a year once you get off live. I've read conflicting reports about that. But the P.J. Tour, bottom line, and has to come to some kind of agreement about what they're going to do with live players who want to rejoin the PGA Tour. And so far, they have yet to do that. What is the relationship like between the PGA Tour and live golf?

11:34From what I've been told, it seems pretty cordial, but with the PGA Tour doing increasingly better, and now with Brooks leaving, I have to imagine that maybe there might be some tension or some nervousness from live golf surrounding this big ordeal when the PGA Tour is winning and then they just lose one of their biggest names. How is their relationship right now? Well, you know, the Liv Golf now is run by a guy named Scott O 'Neill. He is Liv's new CEO. And yeah, and his background, you remember Scott. He was formerly CEO of Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment, owners of the 76ers and the Devils, and then was president of Madison Square Garden Sports.

12:15If you were to listen to Scott, you would think that everything's really cordial and that, you know, negotiations and talks are moving forward. But Brian Rollap, the CEO of the PGA Tour, you know, former NFL executive, really hasn't said much about Liv. And again, I go back to my earlier comments. Exactly. He's been very quiet. He has his own agenda. And I don't think the agenda is to work with Liv at all. They really don't need Liv, going back to my earlier comments. And right now, I think the tour's main focus is with the competition committee, the future competition committee that's actually led by the appointed Tiger Woods as the head of that committee.

13:04So, they're trying to figure out how do they make the tour even more popular and even more successful commercially and they're working on that. And they really, in my opinion, aren't even thinking about live. They don't really need live at all. So, you know, yes. Is it cordial? Yes. But you would seem to think that there's really no progress being made at all to have any kind of merger in the future. Our thanks to Anne Liguori for joining us. She's a longtime sports journalist and is also the founder and president of the Anne Liguori Foundation. Up next, we turn to how U.S. sports leagues are making a big push for international fans.

13:50For guest host Randall Williams, I'm Michael Barr. You are listening to the Bloomberg Business of Sports, Bloomberg Radio around the world.

14:10Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value and fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real. Lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. At Vanguard, institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a commitment to your clients. We're talking top-grade products across the board of over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, and traders. These folks live and breathe fixed income. So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself at Vanguard.com slash audio.

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16:04This is Bloomberg Business of Sports from Bloomberg Radio. This is the Bloomberg Business of Sports where we explore the big money issues in the world of sports. I'm Michael Barr. And I'm Randall Williams. Randall is jumping in this week for Damian Sassower. Vanessa Perdomo joins us a little later on in the show. This past year, the NFL had the Minnesota Vikings play in Dublin and in London in back-to-back weeks. It was the first time ever the NFL had one team play overseas in consecutive weeks, and it probably won't be the last. It's part of a larger push for more international engagement, each of the major U.S.

16:41sports leagues, making global expansion a big priority. Bloomberg opinion columnist Adam Minter wrote his last piece on this shift called American Fans Aren't Enough for U.S. Sports Anymore. And he joins us now to discuss. Adam, welcome to the Bloomberg Business of Sports. Thanks for having me back. Yay, team. Man, you have a great article here. And you're right. American fans aren't enough for U.S. sports anymore because there's a lot of global money out there, Adam. There absolutely is. And, you know, the leagues have known this for a long time. But as I write in this piece, you know, a number of factors have converged over the last year to really encourage them to go out and finally grab at it.

17:28And that's what we've seen. And fans are experiencing it. I mean, if you're a fan of the NFL, you're getting accustomed to getting up at 9 a.m. for that international game in the middle of the season. But it's not just the NFL, of course. I mean, the NBA is looking and will likely in the next couple of years expand with a European league. You see the Masters Tournament in golf. They're actually making an effort to bring in more foreign champions into their game. So it's all across the board. And it's a really exciting time for anybody who wants to see these leagues expand their market share. If you had to bet on one of these leagues, let's say the NFL and the NBA specifically, to win internationally with their business.

18:11Obviously, the NFL wants a 16 international game schedule. The NBA wants this European league. Which one do you think will be more successful and why? I think it's going to be if you had to bet, I think you'd have to bet on the NBA simply because it's an international game. And, you know, some of the best players in the league right now are coming out of Europe anyway. I mean, at this point, Europe is becoming almost a farm team of its own for not just the NBA, let's face it, but also the NCAA recently at the top level of the game. So I think you have this convergence of interest and talent that makes it very easy for the NBA to expand its business and its links to Europe.

18:52But it's not just Europe, of course. There's a huge, huge market for basketball in Asia Pacific and specifically China, where arguably the NBA is the most popular league in the country. So it already has a big, big lead in this race, if it is a race between it and the NFL. And I think, you know, at least in the short to medium term, I think you'll see the NBA pull ahead. In soccer, the National Women's Soccer League, they have made an announcement, hopefully, that will also help them go globally. What is that? Well, there's a few things they've done. One is they've just announced a bunch of streaming and broadcasting agreements overseas, which should expand the market.

19:35But the big thing that they did is they got rid of the draft and they basically opened up the league so that, you know, the teams have to appeal to players. And this is how the rest of the world does soccer. You know, the draft isn't done anywhere else. So it sort of converges the NWSL with how the rest of the world does it. It makes it more part of the global market for women's soccer talent. And I think that's going to be a huge advantage. It already is. as it seeks to expand its reach. The biggest thing that I've heard when talking about international expansion, specifically with the NBA, is that this is all going to reach a climax at the 2028 LA Olympics because of the fact that people believe that Team USA will no longer be the favorite with LeBron, Steph, and KD.

20:26Probably not playing. KD, I think, could, but Steph probably not. What do you think that says about the state of basketball? Well, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I think the betting money right now is on France to give the U.S. another really good run for its money. You know, Wemby alone is a one man wrecking crew. And I don't know that the U.S. has has an answer for him. But I think what it says about the game is it's become a global game. And in a sense, the NBA is, you know, the NBA has always been very progressive in terms of seeking to appeal to global audiences. But, you know, it's sort of a turning point in the way that 1992 and the Dream Team was a turning point where, you know, suddenly the NBA was lifting the curtain on a global game.

21:11Now the global game is saying we've arrived, we deserve an equal role on the stage. And you're going to have players like Wemby, you know, who I think has a very good chance of being, you know, one of the faces of the Olympics, signal that this is no longer something that the U.S. and the NBA and the NCAA, for that matter, have a monopoly on. And you could look at that as a negative for American basketball. But for the NBA, which has always had its global aspirations, it's a huge opportunity. So now let's talk a little bit about European football, a.k.a. soccer. And I wonder, you know, they're going through this messy surge right now, but one day Messi won't be playing.

21:49And I wonder how many times can the MLS and its clubs offer a, quote, messy sized contract in order to continue this supercharged wave that they have? Or is there something else that they can do to win? Well, that's that's that's the big question. And, of course, they continue to sign these sort of later career players and it's worked for them to an extent to build local fan bases. But ultimately, they have to do what they just did, which is announce that they're going to align their calendar with the rest of global football. And that's going to, you know, previously, you know, they were playing in the heart of summer in part because you have these teams in northern states.

22:33You know, I'm from Minnesota. The Loons, nobody really wants to see the Loons playing in February in the midst of a blizzard, you know. And so but that's what's going to that's potentially what's going to happen now that the MLS has put its calendar starting, I believe, is it next year on aligning it with the rest of the global calendar? And that should make it easier or it could make for MLS to get access to other global talent and compete for global talent, not just this retiring, you know, late career talent, but younger talent. On the other hand, it also makes the talent that's in MLS more vulnerable to other leagues.

23:11But ultimately, MLS is going to have to be able to play on the same field, if you will, on the same pitch that these other global leagues are. And one of the ways they're going to do that is by aligning their calendars. You wrote that the NBA still loses money on its international games. But the NHL says that, hey, you know what? we would probably make more money playing overseas games at home. Talk more about that. Yeah, I mean, again, it's expensive for any league to take its players, its staff, you know, the NFL. I mean, to move an NFL team to Europe or Brazil or Australia, which they're doing next year, I mean, that's a lot of equipment.

23:51So it's a very, very expensive endeavor. The NHL is facing the same thing. They're playing more and more European games. They know that if they stayed home from a pure dollar standpoint, they'd be making more money by playing those games at home. But the loss, if they are loss leaders, and we don't know, I asked and I couldn't get a good answer on whether the NHL loses money on its European games. But, you know, assuming that they are not making as much money over there, they're looking at a bigger picture. And the bigger picture with the NHL in Europe is you have more and more European players, especially Swedish players in the league.

24:30And the NHL says, you know, if we've got the best Swedish players in the world playing in North America, why wouldn't we bring that back to Sweden, for example, and play some games there, play some regular season games of consequence over there and build our audience there? And so that's what they're doing. And I don't want to call it a loss leader necessarily, but it's certainly not their biggest revenue generator. But they're taking the long view. And really, they have no choice. If they want to grow, they're going to have to be growing outside of the U.S. as well as within North America. We have yet to mention the MLB, which just came off a stellar World Series.

25:06And I wonder how much they're thinking about international expansion. And obviously we have Shohei Otani and others who are leading the way in terms of, you know, Canada, Japan, all of those things. What is the MLB strategy moving forward? Right. Well, MLB is like, you know, like, frankly, like the NBA and the NFL. It's looking at 2028 where it will be featured. Baseball will be featured again in the Olympics as a way to to boost global interest. But right now, you know, things are going so great for MLB in North Asia, Japan and Korea and to a lesser extent in Taiwan. I think they just want to continue to build that out, continue showcasing the Asian stars who are who are obviously bringing an enormous viewership.

25:52I mean, let's recall, you know, some of these recent World Series games have had bigger viewerships in Japan, where they're shown in the morning a country with a smaller population than they do in the US. Not every game, but some of them. So, I mean, there's still a huge opportunity for them to grow audience there, to grow sponsorship revenue there, to grow merchandise revenue there. And of course, they also have their tremendous business in Latin America. But like all these three major leagues looking at LA28, that's going to be their opportunity to really showcase that they have a global game and perhaps expand their marketplace elsewhere.

26:31You also wrote about Notre Dame, and your title is Notre Dame shows that the bowls need fixing. Yes. First of all, I don't understand how Notre Dame got left off the list. So Notre Dame said, you know, as the Fighting Irish, fine, we're not playing in any bowls this year. Oh, go cry about it. Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. I mean, well, now what happens here now? What reshapes the whole College Bowl playoff series? Well, I mean, it's funny. I was just before I was going out with you guys, I saw none other than Snoop, who sponsors his own bowl, the Arizona Bowl. I believe it's the gin and juice by Snoop and Dre Arizona Bowl.

27:24He was just calling for the expansion of the CFP to 24 teams. He wants the Snoop Ball to be one of those 16 games? Let me tell you something about Snoop. He is never, ever afraid of a check. He's got his mind on his money and his money on his mind. Absolutely. You saw he caught a kickoff at the game? I didn't, but it doesn't surprise me because of that youth football league that he once had. Right, right, exactly. But, you know, I think it's interesting that you see, you know, Snoop is not afraid of a dollar. And I think that's ultimately what this comes down to is the bowl games are still worth money, you know, and they're worth money because they are they're shown at a time when there's a lot of college basketball and bowl games do better viewership than college basketball.