Can anyone tell me why there is so much money in golf??

Because there are people, a lot of people, who both play it and watch it on telly?

Phil Mickelson reportedly being paid $200m to play in the new LIV series?!?

This is more "why is there so much money in sport washing oppressive regimes" than why golf.

Loads of rich pensioners like golf (my FIL for one). I can appreciate the skill in the game but it's not for me.

$200M is the total prize pot I think but still a lot even when split among the players.

Golf is an easy game for men to play regardless of their fitness levels. This is not the same as saying it is easy to play well however wealthy men can walk around a golf course chatting to friends and customers, claiming to be playing a sport without any real need to prepare. These people won't be very good because they haven't prepared but being rich they hope to buy their way to being better. After spending lots of money on new kit they are encouraged to fly to expensive and exclusive places to play. It is like a cheap version of the yacht club - a chance to show off your money and appear to be active and exciting.

My father in law plays (since his retirement) and he’d spend every last penny he has on playing it, buying significantly more expensive stuff to play it fractionally better, watching everything and anything about it on PPV or whatever it takes.

I still don’t get the obsession, but I can see he loves it.

One of the participants - possibly mickelson - was interviewed and wittered on about '...golf having done so much good throughout history'.
He wasn't challenged on that outpouring of utter verbiage; what a bag of bollocks.
The LIV competition is nothing other than sports washing.
It's nothing more than money-grabbing by the participants.
Tawdry.

$200M is the total prize pot I think but still a lot even when split among the players.

No, BBC reporting that Michelson is getting $200m and Dustin Johnson is getting $150m in appearance fees. $25m prize fund, Winner gets $4m, last place 120,000 or something.

To stop all those fairways/greens being turned into estates. 😉

I ride past a golf course on my my to the local trails, every single time I see golfers I want to do the Klaxxon jackass scene and sing Bob Marley- One Glove!

Mate of mine, a German judge, or rather fella of GF's mate, plays golf.

Golf in Germany is still very much a rich man's game.

No pay and play courses.

You need to complete a a Platzreifeprüfung (I kid you not.... exam to see if you know how to conduct yourself on a gold course (and people wonder why this place annoys me so ****ing much)).

Went to the driving range with him for a laugh. He was kinda upset that me, a lowly, mere carpenter could hit the ball with a three iron a darn sight further and straighter than he could with his fancy drive. I was only allowed on the driving range, not the course, because I haven't completed an exam nor been recommended to be a member.... This club was just outside Munich and the joining fee alone was several thousand euros. I used to pay £9 for a round BITD.

I like the game, not so much those that play it. It's a nice way of spending a few hours outside, but then again the driving range is good for that.

My old man played lots until his health meant he couldn't walk around the course. Lots of gammon types, Essex wide boy ****ers, UKIP candidates..... But then again his club is near fake tan central so is to be expected.

he’d spend every last penny he has on playing it, buying significantly more expensive stuff to play it fractionally better,

Sounds a lot like most mountain bikers

Lots of very wealthy finance companies seem to want to throw investors money at it for some advertising and nice days out for directors

The people who play it are rich, as in 1 percenter rich, therefore advertising revenue is ridic

Sounds a lot like most mountain bikers

Certainly sounds like me. I’m not into golf but have customers who are and I don’t understand it but they really do enjoy it much as I enjoy mountain biking. Are there more of them and hence more money?

Not sure if golf in the UK is as elitist as in other countries.

Plenty of pay and play places where you can play a round for under £20 on a weekend.

The only golf club near Munich where you need not be a member of any other club to play (but still have to have your Platzreife) still costs 40€ for a round. Yearly fees are crazy.

Plenty of plumbers and plasterers vans in the car park of my dad's club...

Interestingly, golf in the us has a very different image to over here. Ive been in phoenix during golf week a couple of times and the whole city comes out to party, the opposite of what you'd expect here..

You know how you’ve bought into carbon fibre, 29” wheels, dropper posted, 12 speed, single ring, boost etc etc etc

Same thing. A carbon fibre shaft on their big ****ter is probably 0.1% better

I find the idea of watching golf absolutely incomprehensible, but blokes called Oly who wear polo shirts, own BMW’s with private number plates and live on soulless estates of 4 bedroom detached Lego houses love this shit

Hang on, why ask about the money in golf? Have you seen the state of football?

My father in law plays (since his retirement) and he’d spend every last penny he has on playing it, buying significantly more expensive stuff to play it fractionally better, watching everything and anything about it on PPV or whatever it takes.

I still don’t get the obsession, but I can see he loves it.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people say the same thing about bicycle obsessed family members.

As above, wealthy guys play golf. Sponsors are paying to get the attention of those wealthy guys.

Hang on, why ask about the money in golf? Have you seen the state of football?

at least football is accessible and (can be) exciting to watch. unlike formula one where many many talented engineers are employed to chuck money down the drain. for the record i have no interest in football, but i’m interested in F1 results.

my dad is scottish. he played golf until he was physically unable to. i can understand the appeal, but beyond the driving range it isn’t for me.

he and his expat scottish pals only got into the local, english, club because one of their wives got invited to join (as a ladies member) by someone she met through the WI or the church or something similar. the 70’s were a simpler time, until you end up with a bunch of glaswegians in your fancy club.

perhaps more amusingly, my sister married a scratch golfer (from up north) who after the union, was always my dad’s partner for the “invitation”. as a result my dad’s name is all over the boards that record the winning of such illustrious prizes. the posh chaps aren’t impressed and consider my brother in law a ringer.

i’d sooner ride a yeti than join a golf club (in england) winkface

Lots of very wealthy finance companies seem to want to throw investors money at it for some advertising and nice days out for directors

Theres an entertaining episode of Revisionist History about cross referencing two data sets - one a golf equivalent of Strava where players upload their stats - the other being the measures of performance of the companies they're the captains of. Theres a pretty perfect inverse relationship between how keen on golf these people are and how well their companies perform. The keener the golfer the poorer the share performance and more bancruptcies they've presided over

The bosses of Leerman Bros all went on a golf jolly on the Friday before the bank tanked  the following Monday - the biggest corporate failure in history on the horizon and they still felt a bit of golf was the bigger priority. Now they run and own golf clubs and those fail too.

Same thing. A carbon fibre shaft on their big ****ter is probably 0.1% better

yeah, but it's only 0.1% better if you get everything about the stroke absolutely perfect. If you don't hit it perfectly it's 20% worse.
Unfortunately the sort of people who buy into this are only capable of doing a perfect stroke 5% of the time. Or less.

Bit like cycling really...

Only real interaction I have with golfists is an ex-girlfriend's son who was a pro in the 00s.
He started playing so he could get some time with his dad, who was a mad keen golfer. And also CxO of a big corp based in London.
The sad thing about the (w)hole gig was that every time his son reached a major golfing milestone his dad would suck and stop speaking to him for a few weeks. It happened a lot because in 30 years of playing golf, daddy dearest had never amounted to anything, son was playing off scratch before he'd even joined the senior ranks of the club IIRC.

Not sure if golf in the UK is as elitist as in other countries.

Plenty of pay and play places where you can play a round for under £20 on a weekend.

It certainly has a big elitist element with members only clubs where you have to be the right sort of person to have a chance of getting in. But the UK also has loads of low entry cost courses that are just pay and play.
I used to play quite a bit and really enjoyed it and I played in jeans and trainers with a set of clubs that cost £100. Paying £10 to play would have been on the high end for any courses I played at.

It may have eased off a bit now but growing up in the stockbroker belt in the 90's the golf club was basically seen as the place where the 'serious' business types did their networking, well away from the lower classes and where you're unlikely to be overheard.

Cue all the greasy pole climbers getting into golf almost as a way to further their careers. If the MD or CEO invites you for a round at their club you had to be able to make a good show of it if you wanted that promotion.

The actual game seemed distinctly secondary.

It’s not know as “green heroin” in China for nothing. And have you seen fuel prices recently? Follow the money.

Local council course near us is about to close, but my dad and I both started playing on pay to play council courses. I've not paid for decades and gave my clubs away on FB last week - had half a dozen enquiries, so obviously popular.

It's not as elitist in the UK as people like to think. Depends how up your own arse you are, as with most things.

Loving the comments about paying silly money for marginal gains and image on a mountain bike forum. Hello kettle, I'm a pot 🤣🤣

One of the participants – possibly mickelson – was interviewed and wittered on about ‘…golf having done so much good throughout history’.

I heard this too and did a double take. It was Mickelson.

Churchill called golf "A good walk ruined."

Alexi Sayle called it "A good **** ruined."

I love golf, wish i could still play just now but had to stop due to hip impingement, new hip coming this year so may go back to playing.

Not sure why there's so much vitriol for it on here, i used to play at a club where the guys i went round with were pretty normal folk, joiners, plumbers, etc, loads of pensioners but they stuck to their own days/rounds, yes you had some rich, but they tended to be more self made, so owned a plumbing/joinery/garage. There were some proper wealthy folk who were muppets, but they avoided the normal players most of the time anyway.

Kit wise, i find mtb costs more for me in the long run, fitness wise, a round of golf tends to be a 6 mile walk, carry the bag and it's getting you out and doing stuff, not to mention the actual golf bit.

I also like watching it, because you can see the skill and accuracy at work, the top golfers battling it out and seeing the outstanding shots, as well as the bad ones.

The new LIV series is basically the Saudi tourism board, when I say tourism I mean willy waving. That's why they are getting paid crackers amounts. It's a way of saying "don't look at the bad stuff, look at all this money".

Thankfully some of the press are asking the right questions and making the golfers feel awkward for at least 30 seconds.

https://twitter.com/Mockneyrebel/status/1534494437077835777?t=DxBM-PFbCy0kJYZNWLh7NA&s=19

TBH, it's more of a 6 lane motorway than a maze...

To be honest, they're having a real go at this LIV tour about the Saudi backing, i'm not sure why it's such a central thing, as Saudi backing is in almost every sport, they own football clubs, they put a fortune into the likes of F1, the World Cup is also coming up without much bad press.

If i had a guess, i'd say that the negativity around the LIV tour was a concerted effort by the PGA and other golfing associations, it's a bit like the UEFA / Superleague thing.

I take the piss out of a mate for playing golf - probably not fair. If you’ve never tried it, it’s a fiendishly difficult game to play. A few hours walking around trying to find your ball, of which you spend what, maybe ten minutes or less addressing and hitting the bloody thing? 😀 It’s not for me, but I might give it another go when I’m less able to run, etc.

Anyway, I don’t think this is about golf, the game. It’s about regimes with more spare cash than most western economies can even dream of, using it to sports-wash their regimes. Boxing. Football. Motorsport. Horse Racing. Players getting shorty when they’re asked difficult questions. Press conferences “moderated.” Interviewers who ask difficult questions being ejected and barred from subsequent PCs. The return on investment isn’t counted in percentage profits here, it’s access to wealth, it’s the parties on yachts in the marinas near the courses and the chats about what block of super expensive apartments in London are going to be bought for loose change to keep the money safe and clean.

I’m not a fan of the sport itself but like a lot of others, I watch the Ryder Cup, maybe the Masters and the Open highlights and draw my conclusions about the players from the interviews I hear during those tournaments. I have to say, I’m surprised with how wrong I’ve been about some of them. I had no idea what ****s some of them really are.

Go to Scotland and you'll observe golf is very accessible, and a darn sight less elitist than most sports.

It's less shoppingtastic than cycling I'm sorry to say.

I'm with Alpin.
Being on the Swiss German border, all the German golf emporiums are full of Swiss golferists doing golfery with their golf bats.

Not about the money at all. No pay to play here.

The LIV tournament isn’t even televised, it’s some pro-am format. I’m not really sure how it’s enhancing saudi reputations either. The faces on the players being asked difficult questions is great. Be interesting to see if Joshua gets as much grief for his fight in Riyadh

Like cycling; golf got a boost in lockdown, I think after a bit of declining interest, there's been a surge. It's wildly popular again. I think I read a stat a while back (probably an airline mag or something) that 1 in 3 adults in the US will read about, watch, or play golf actively. In advertising alone, there's probably no other non-Olympic sport with that sort of reach.

he’d spend every last penny he has on playing it, buying significantly more expensive stuff to play it fractionally better,

Sounds a lot like most mountain bikers

I couldn't believe he'd written that without clocking the irony.

So mayhe - with the sums involved - cycling isn't the new golf quite yet?

They're working on it though...
https://www.thesauditour.com/en

I dont play Golf, have no intention of.

The game itself looks like quite good fun, i can see the skill involved up to a point, and furhter, ive seen incredible shots on youtub and thought "is that REALLY all skill, can human fast twitch muscle really (remotely via a long ish bat) hit a ball 100m+ and sink it into a hole < 3" wide?"

But i know too many peoiple who play golf who are grade A nozzles.
White range rovers, trophy wife, My Daddy is going to sue your daddy, the whole package.
its a business thing. Its Linkedin for deals you wouldnt want to write down.
Yuk.

Its not about the game, i wouldnt fit in there (or want to). I'll stick to push bikes. Those guys are infalliable heroes, to a man.

carry the bag

LOL! Who actually does that any more, I thought everyone had remote control trolleys?

It’s less shoppingtastic than cycling I’m sorry to say.

Nah, same woo and marginal gains to be had over getting actual lessons and building skill. It's every bit as bad as cycling but for some reason travel insurance actually covers clubs properly (or did when I last had it).

Be interesting to see if Joshua gets as much grief for his fight in Riyadh

I can kinda understand boxers/MMA fighters taking the money - in their game you have a short shelf life, and it's a case of making your money and getting out before you suffer permanent damage, so grabbing easy cash makes more sense (even if the cash is unethical).

Golfers and footballers less so, IMO, so it's only right that multi-millionaires like Eddie Howe and those golfers face awkward questions about who pays their wages, when they don't need the money and could easily make shed loads elsewhere.

In advertising alone, there’s probably no other non-Olympic sport with that sort of reach.

It's been in the Olympics since 2016 😁

LOL! Who actually does that any more, I thought everyone had remote control trolleys?

Again, it's a sport that is accessible to all, but those who don't earn fortunes can't buy all the kit, same in cycling, we don't all hit the trails on santa cruz bikes. When i last played (about 3 years ago) the only person who had a remote trolley in our group was a joiner, and the remote trolley thing was a bit useless then, maybe better now, but carrying was just easier.

Be interesting to see if Joshua gets as much grief for his fight in Riyadh

I kind of agree. Yes, on the face of it a Saudi backed sports tournament is a bad thing. But so many other elements of sports sponsorship or venue choice is just as shitty and tawdry. Unless you are the PGA and have an vested interest in this being seen as next level of bad it's just more of the same. Not saying it should be happening but loads of people should have grown some principles in other sports too and plainly haven't. So these guys are just added to heap of self serving obscenely rich sports mercenaries.

I'm 50 and I still don't 'get' sponsorship. Beyond the sports manufacturer personal sponsorships which is obvious and works, I just don't see how it's worth the outlay in terms of return. Have I, a pleb, had my purchasing choices influenced by the brands that sponsor teams or events - maybe I have and I'm too stupid to realise. I guess Rebull is an example of why I'm wrong - they must spend bazillions on all the sports they are involved in but would as much expensive fizzy cough mixture tasting gob be sold if they didn't? Do wealthy (and therefore you'd imagine financially astute) golfist fans change their carefully worked out banking, auditing or investment choices based on the bank or audit company sponsoring a golfering competition? Even if you go there and get invited into a corporate tent and have a warm glass of fizz. And in a tribal sports like football - put your name on a shirt and yes the fans of that team might think warm thoughts about you. But the vast vast majority of people who care about football loath your team - whichever team that is. Wouldn't just as many Man City, Leeds or Liverpool fan consciously or subconsciously avoid any brand on the front of a Man Utd shirt as Man U fans spending money on their stuff that would not have otherwise?

Then there are the vanity sponsorships - Inios - how much money is he investing across a bunch of sports? How can there possibly be a return there for a brand there very few will consciously associate with a purchasing choice; but perhaps he just does not care.

"People have been shit for ages so we probably shouldn't start telling them they are shit now" seems like a very odd mindset.

Trying to approach from a objective perspective, we have a group of people who want to participate in a outdoors activity that requires driving out of town to access large enough space with facilities to support said activity. Activity requires specialist equipment that changes with technological advances and fashion and is marketed by brands and professionals.

Could be either bikes or golf

Quick google suggests golf is the 10th most popular sport in the world with 450 million participants, if you presume they pay £1000 for bats and £3000 for fees, travel etc then you get a very large number. I bet i'm way under on the cost of both, and the 200m comes in at 0.01% of it. All the other 9 sports above require a lot less upfront equipment costs to participate (mostly single bat or ball sports).

Anyone got a firm idea of how much a set of clubs and green fees cost?

I can kinda understand boxers/MMA fighters taking the money – in their game you have a short shelf life, and it’s a case of making your money and getting out before you suffer permanent damage, so grabbing easy cash makes more sense (even if the cash is unethical).

Golfers and footballers less so, IMO, so it’s only right that multi-millionaires like Eddie Howe and those golfers face awkward questions about who pays their wages, when they don’t need the money

Not sure about your numbers here. Eddie Howe is currently on £3M a year. Anthony Joshua's lifetime earnings are in the hundreds of millions. He has already earned enough that his kids and grandkids could live in luxury without ever doing a day's work, and that's without the £100m+ that he's reputed to be on course for in Saudi. It's not like he's going to be worried about keeping the heating on in his old age.