LIV Golf just made a thunderous entrance into South Africa and our CEO, Andrew Ross has a few things to say about it.

With deep experience launching and evolving disruptive sports formats like T20 cricket, Andrew unpacks what the arrival of LIV really means for golf, sports marketing, and the traditional institutions that now face a very modern challenge.

Love it or hate it, the LIV model is forcing change. If you work in sport, it’s time to pay attention.

24,000 tickets sold on day one. Whatever your opinion, you can’t ignore that.

As expected, the public interest has been intense, and I’m sure a host of corporate packages are being snapped up as we speak.

As the consumer, broadcast, and commercial worlds all change at breakneck speed, this is the best thing to happen to golf in years.

But I doubt the “old guard” institutions like GolfRSA will see it the same way. 

Change challenges entrenched power and control. It makes incumbents uncomfortable. But there’s very little I can see that South African golf in the broad sense won’t benefit from with a showcase spectacle like LIV arriving on our shores.

I’m more than qualified to have an opinion on this.

You see, early in my career, I was lucky to play an instrumental role in the development and formation of the T20 Cricket product, helping roll it out to stadia around the country, then the world.

We delivered Sports Presentation programmes for the inaugural World T20, IPL, CLT20, and hundreds of Proteas domestic and international games. But it’s easy to forget this new format was not welcomed with open arms.

We fought for over a year for innovations we knew would differentiate the format, like cheerleaders on the side of the pitch, in-game pyro, DJ boxes, and more (all ideas borne here in SA). Ideas now so commonplace, they seem odd when they’re missing. Yet at the time, at the start of this fledgling format, it literally “just wasn’t cricket.”

Over 50% of domestic media coverage of the first South African Pro20 (we couldn’t call it T20 as there was a sponsor conflict) was negative. Soundbites from captains called it “slap and tickle cricket” and said it would never last. 

Slowly, year after year, the tide turned.

Audiences realised what they, their families, and their weekends wanted had been in front of them all along. They just didn’t know it yet because they’d never seen it packaged this way.

Today, purists aside, it’s impossible to imagine a cricket landscape without Twenty20. It brought new blood into the sport. It created innovations, controversy, heroes, and villains. But more than anything, it served the broader game harder than many realise.

And that’s where LIV Golf is now – controversial, divisive, and (gasp) non-conformist. And it just sold 24,000 tickets in one day. That’s not noise – that’s a signal.

With all the controversy, its renegade status, and its disruption of the old guard, it will ultimately benefit the broader game, politics aside.

You don’t have to like LIV Golf. But if you work in sport, you’d be an idiot not to pay attention.

Bravo to the big thinkers.

There’s more than enough space in this new world for everyone.

It’s a bold new world, and you get nowhere by standing still.

For the first time in South Africa, I’ll be watching golf with keen interest.

– By Andrew Ross, CEO, Chaos Theory