[PHOTO: Kevin C. Cox]

LIV Golf will play its first event of the 2025 season under lights.

The Saudi-backed circuit will tee off next month in Riyadh at night. Though there is a novelty to the game being played after dark, the move is to cater to American television audiences at the request of LIV’s new television partner in the US, Fox Sports. The event will begin at 6:15pm local time in Saudi Arabia, meaning a start time of 10:15am in the eastern time zone of the USA (but 2:15am on Australia’s east coast).

A source familiar with Fox Sports leadership tells Golf Digest that other events may be televised under the lights, specifically international competitions. “You can’t tape delay events, not in 2025,” the source said. “If it’s not live, it’s a ratings killer.”

Ratings have been a major issue for professional golf the past year – PGA Tour Sunday ratings were down 19 percent in 2024 – although LIV has struggled to attract an audience in America since its launch in 2022. While forming a partnership with CW in 2023 was initially seen as progress, reruns of syndicated shows routinely outperformed live LIV events. It’s performance on the CW was so poor that LIV began reporting their own metrics, although the self-reporting stopped as those numbers continued to spiral. In the LIV individual championship in Chicago last year, only 89,000 people tuned through the CW to watch Jon Rahm clinch the title. For context, the Solheim Cup’s audience that weekend was seven times bigger.

Fox was in discussions with LIV Golf during its inaugural season in 2022, and the company originally partnered with former LIV chief executive Greg Norman to launch a rival league against the PGA Tour in the 1990s that ultimately failed to come to fruition. Why a new deal came to pass now has ties to Fox’s grander plans with the World Cup. Fox has held US broadcasting rights for soccer’s premier event since 2015, although Netflix recently acquired domestic streaming rights for the 2027 and 2031 Women’s World Cups. Of specific pursuit, however, is the 2034 Men’s World Cup, scheduled to be held in Saudi Arabia, the financial backer of LIV Golf. Despite controversy surrounding the event – both the bidding process and the country’s track record with human rights abuses – the fight to attain streaming rights is expected to be fierce. Technically FIFA will reward those rights; conversely, it is widely considered in the industry that Saudi Arabia will ultimately decide who gets said rights.