SporNew professionalt: sports leagues are launching. Will enough people care?
Wyndham Clark of The Bay Golf Club plays his shot from the fourth tee during their TGL presented by SoFi match against the New York Golf Club at SoFi Center on January 07, 2025 in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
Mike Ehrmann/tgl | Tgl Golf | Getty Images
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Happy New Year! To kick off 2025, three new sports leagues are launching this month.
TGL, the indoor golf league created by TMRW Sports (a venture founded by Tiger Woods, Rory McILory and media executive Mike McCarley), debuted Tuesday in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
Last night, Atlanta hosted Salt Lake in the first-ever pro match for League One Volleyball, a new U.S.-based professional women’s league.
And Unrivaled, the three-on-three women’s basketball league, debuts next week on Jan. 17.
I watched TGL’s debut on ESPN, which featured golfers including Ludvig Aberg, Wyndham Clark and Xander Schauffele hitting into a giant screen and putting on an indoor green that changes its structure depending on the hole.
While I was watching, my 4-year-old buzzed around me, as he always does. He was repeating his favorite saying of the moment, which he crimped from an episode of “Bluey.”
“And whyyyyyy should I care?”
I couldn’t help but link his endless repetition of Unicorse’s catchphrase with what I was watching. There have been many attempts at inventing startup sports leagues over the decades, and almost all of them have either failed or stayed small.
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Part of the problem has been that most of the leagues (XFL, Slamball, Big 3) haven’t incorporated the top athletes in their sports.
That’s not the case with any of these leagues. Besides Woods and McIlroy, TGL will showcase many of the best golfers in the world.
Brittney Griner, Breanna Stewart, Angel Reese and Cameron Brink are among the WNBA stars that will play in Unrivaled (Caitlin Clark won’t.).
More than 80% of the U.S. Olympic volleyball team will be playing in LOVB, said Katlyn Gao, League One’s co-founder and CEO, who is counting on the level of competition to drive the league’s success. Matches will air on ESPN+.
“This is the NBA of volleyball, and it’s never been seen before in the U.S.,” said Gao in an interview. “We’re going to market with the best players. That’s our strategy.”
The inclusion of the league’s top talent could make Unrivaled an extension of the WNBA and serve the same role as Formula 1′s “Drive to Survive” or other documentary series that got fans more interested in the athletes and the league, said Craig Barry, TNT Sports’ executive vice president and chief content officer, in an interview. Warner Bros. Discovery owns the exclusive broadcast rights to Unrivaled. Games will be shown live on TNT, truTV, and Max, the company’s flagship streaming service.
“In addition to the game itself, you also have the opportunity to create a deeper emotional connection between fans and these players,” said Barry. “You see the follow-on docs – Netflix’s ‘Receiver’ or ‘Quarterback’ or ‘Drive to Survive’ – you know how those stories end. With this, we can tell the story as the season progresses.”
Barry says he’ll define success by a consistent uptick in ratings as the weeks go by. The ratings during week 1 are almost irrelevant, he said. What matters is that TNT’s storytelling and the league itself become more popular over time.
“It doesn’t have to be a huge audience, it just has to grow a little bit week over week,” Barry said. “This is a marathon. You have to build the product.”
This is also going to be an obstacle for TGL. Watching on Tuesday, I thought the technology was amazing, but the stakes were virtually non-existent. While many of the best golfers are playing, a successful sports league requires more than that. It has to give people a reason to care.
This is not lost on McCarley, who used to run The Golf Channel before co-founding TGL. It’s hard to manufacture drama in Week 1, but as the weeks go by and matches are decided on the last hole, the players’ competitive juices will give fans a reason to care, he said.
“We’ve seen it in practice matches. When the matches get tight at the end, the joy of competition comes out,” said McCarley in an interview. “They will compete over throwing a piece of paper in a trash basket. It’s live and unscripted, and the different cast of characters each week will lead to new sets of storylines.”
