Tiger and Rory reinvent golf

Welcome back to a new year of Scoreboard. It’s been a busy week for TKO, the listed entity housing both WWE and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

On Monday night, WWE made its debut on Netflix as part of a 10-year, $5bn live streaming deal. The same day, Meta announced that UFC boss Dana White was joining its board of directors, giving the social media company a direct line into Donald Trump’s inner circle.

You can read more on White’s Silicon Valley move in this profile, and we’ll have more on Netflix and WWE in the days and weeks to come.

It’s also been a big week for serial sports investor David Blitzer. The billionaire Blackstone executive has stakes in the Philadelphia 76ers NBA team, the Washington Commanders in the NFL, and a string of European football teams.

But two of his most recent investments made their long-awaited debuts in the past few days: simulator golf league TGL and women’s volleyball competition LOVB. We’re taking at look at both of them in today’s newsletter.

And finally, the next edition of the FT’s Business of Football Summit is fast approaching, and the line-up is already stellar. Chelsea chair Todd Boehly, Atalanta owner Stephen Pagliuca, and Crystal Palace chair Steve Parish are among the many big names on the agenda. You can get all the details and bag yourself a ticket here. But before you do that, do read on — Josh Noble, sports editor

Virtual golf makes its prime time debut

Is professional golf’s salvation to be found on a space age sound stage in South Florida? This week the game’s latest attempt to capture a younger demographic — with Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy at the helm — made its much hyped debut.

TGL is an indoor golf simulator league backed by the forces trying to prop up the PGA Tour against the Saudi-funded upstart LIV Tour. TGL created a half-dozen 4-man teams of PGA Tour pros to face off midweek in the winter months. The fancy indoor venue along with the forced banter and gamified rivalries aim to bring in the TikTok generation, otherwise indifferent to a traditional outdoor weekend golf tournament.

The opening match featured the New York Golf Club, owned by the hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, against the Bay Golf Club underwritten by billionaire and private equity manager Marc Lasry (note that while the teams have been assigned geographic orientations, all the matches happen at the SoFi Center near Palm Beach).

The two biggest players involved in TGL, Woods and McIlroy, showed up to offer their support last week, with their opening TGL golf shots to happen in the coming weeks.

The reviews and TV ratings — it aired in a prime slot on ESPN — proved decent. And its backers (a veritable who’s who of sports investing) have an easy answer to any criticism from golf purists: this isn’t designed for you.

But the clouds over the broader professional golf landscape remain ominous. The PGA Tour and the Saudi Public Investment Fund have still not struck a deal to reunify the game (the PGA Tour has already taken a multibillion-dollar investment from the so-called Strategic Sports Group to revamp its circuit). And so the LIV Tour’s biggest stars including Bryson DeChambeau, Cam Smith and Jon Rahm are not yet allowed in the TGL nor the PGA Tour with the likes of Rory and Scottie Scheffler.

The TGL cannot erase the schism but once a week for a couple of hours, the pyrotechnics are an intriguing distraction.

One sport, two very different investments

This week also saw the debut of LOVB Pro (League One Volleyball) — a new professional women’s volleyball league backed by Ares Management, David Blitzer, Atwater Capital and VC-firm Left Lane Capital.

The idea is to build a competition strong enough to keep the biggest US players at home. Until now, top American athletes typically head off to Europe or Asia once they turn pro.

The Ares-backed project comes four years after CVC Capital Partners made a big bet on the sport. In early 2021, it set up Volleyball World — a joint venture with FIVB, volleyball’s governing body, at a valuation of $300mn.

Both initiatives have something in common — a belief that volleyball is massively under commercialised. Investors point to estimates that somewhere between 700-900mn people are interested in the game worldwide — a figure boosted by a significant following in China.

But while LOVB and VW are both bets on the sport, they have highly contrasting approaches to capitalising on its popularity.

CVC’s focus has been on decluttering the international calendar, centralising media rights and giving fans a one-stop shop for accessing volleyball content through a dedicated streaming service. In turn, the firm believes, that should yield further benefits, such as more interest from sponsors and more valuable data rights once volleyball betting takes off. By partnering with the game’s governing body, CVC is hoping to bring about change from the top down.

LOVB has a totally different angle. It started five years ago as a network of amateur clubs. It now has 58 of them, where 1,500 junior teams play. All those young players pay membership fees, which — as in other junior sports in the US — can cost thousands of dollars a year. The pro league is the final part of the plan, essentially a landing zone for the players that emerge from the club network.

As such, LOVB looks like a pretty typical private equity roll-up, where a firm buys up a number of small players in an industry to create one large consolidated business. The company’s current business model is more like a chain of gyms, than its stated goal of creating “the NBA of volleyball”.

Media rights and team franchise sales are a longer-term play for LOVB, and very much part of the investment thesis. But for now, the pro league appears to be more of a marketing tool than a revenue source.

Transfer Market

Former Manchester United chief executive Richard Arnold has signed up as non-executive chair of Teneo’s financial advisory sports practice. An accountant by training, Arnold became CEO at Old Trafford following the departure of Ed Woodward, but stepped down in 2023 as Sir Jim Ratcliffe was negotiating his stake purchase.

Highlights

• Chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen has joined forces with German technology investor Jan Buettner and New York-based Left Lane Capital to launch a league that takes inspiration from sports such as Formula 1 motor racing.

• Real Madrid is battling to save a billion-euro project to make its stadium a world-class concert venue after being forced to halt music events that turned the football club into the world’s richest noisy neighbour.

• David Beckham’s branded businesses paid out about $124mn in dividends, with profits surging thanks to endorsements, digital content and launches of new consumer products.

• Hockey is more than a game in Canada; it’s a cultural phenomenon. But the sport’s popularity has fallen away in recent years. Many blame the decline on the cost of equipment and the increasingly competitive nature of the game.

Final Whistle

It’s been a good few days for those who enjoy over the top celebrations. New AC Milan boss Sérgio Conceição decided to recreate an old dance routine to mark his side’s last gasp victory over rivals Inter in the final of the Italian Supercoppa (now played in Riyadh).

But even more striking was the jubilant reaction of Barcelona president Joan Laporta to a court ruling granting the club permission to register two of its players despite is ongoing financial issues. The fist-pumps and hugs are the latest sign that competition in the courts is an increasingly intrinsic part of modern elite football.

La Liga, which previously barred Dani Olmo and Pau Victor from playing for Barca, has appealed, so the celebrations could still prove shortlived.