On a pristine financial spreadsheet, launching a professional sports league must look wonderfully straightforward. The formula is seemingly frictionless on paper: recruit a roster of instantly recognisable athletes, secure robust broadcast and distribution channels, and back the entire enterprise with a generous marketing budget. Somewhere further down the document, almost as an inevitability, an audience arrives to consume the product and validate the investment.
That final, passive assumption, however, deserves far more scrutiny than it typically receives from deep-pocketed backers. Modern sports fans already have their weekends meticulously organised around established competitions, often carrying loyalties that have been inherited across generations from people who are no longer around to explain the origins of their devotion. A newly minted competition is not merely asking for a casual glance; it is demanding valuable space in an already crowded diary and, eventually, a permanent place in someone’s emotional life.
Recent developments across high-profile properties such as LIV Golf, The Hundred, and SailGP expose some uncomfortable underlying assumptions about how modern sporting audiences are built, particularly when aggressive investors expect accelerated spending to compress a process that historically takes decades to mature.
1 – LIV Golf has to give its stars something worth winning
LIV Golf’s initial recruitment strategy was built on the premise that bringing together a critical mass of famous golfers would inherently create a compelling reason to watch. There was clear commercial logic to this approach. Recognisable players drastically reduce the immense marketing work usually involved in introducing a new competition to the public, and their established personal followings give organisers a ready-made baseline of attention somewhere to start.
Yet, a professional golfer’s appeal is deeply shaped by the historical and cultural circumstances in which audiences watch them compete. A familiar player chasing a career-defining major championship carries an institutional weight and narrative gravity that the exact same player appearing in a newly created, corporate-backed event simply has to establish completely afresh. The stakes need to genuinely mean something to the viewer at home, no matter how substantial the cheque awaiting the winner at the final green.
LIV’s Chapter 11 filing in September, alongside a proposed restructuring plan designed to give participating players majority ownership stakes, makes the stark economics of the enterprise impossible to sidestep. Attributing that financial and operational outcome entirely to weak fan attachment would undoubtedly be simplistic. It does, however, sharply elevate the core question of what baseline demand the league can actually sustain on commercially viable terms over the long haul.
The circuit’s team-based competition format offers a potential structural route to deeper fan interest, provided supporters can eventually develop meaningful reasons to follow those specific teams well beyond the presence of just one marquee golfer. That requires structural continuity and competitive consequences that everyday people can easily understand and care about. A dedicated fan should have an emotional stake in who wins and loses when their favourite player is having a dreadful afternoon on the course.
Signing a superstar athlete gives a league immediate access to their existing sporting ability and surface-level attention. However, how much of that audience actually follows, and how regularly they tune in, needs rigorous testing before it is ever baked into long-term revenue assumptions.
2 – The Hundred needs room to develop its own loyalties
Criticism of English cricket’s short-form tournament, The Hundred, can occasionally drift into the condescending suggestion that anyone genuinely enjoying the spectacle has somehow misunderstood the traditional fabric of cricket. That is a deeply curious posture for any sport or governing body explicitly hoping to attract new demographics who previously felt that the game was somebody else’s exclusive pastime.
There is, admittedly, tangible evidence of that new audience arriving at grounds across the country. By the conclusion of its first five seasons, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) reported that an impressive 203,000 people had purchased tickets for their very first live cricket match specifically through The Hundred. Furthermore, the competition’s dedicated women’s tournament recorded a robust 349,401 attendances in 2025 alone. Those concrete figures undoubtedly deserve a central place in any fair assessment of the format’s cultural impact.
The much harder strategic issue, however, is determining what happens after a pleasant day out in the summer sun. A casual spectator can thoroughly enjoy a single match day experience without ever developing much subsequent interest in that team’s next fixture or championship standings. That consumer reality directly affects the cost of selling the next ticket and diminishes the long-term value that a corporate sponsor can reasonably attach to the commercial relationship.
Deep-seated county loyalties cannot simply be administratively reassigned to whichever urban franchise happens to look convenient on a geographical map. Equally, a young child attending their first professional game has no historical obligation to inherit the traditional preferences of the members’ pavilion.
To overcome this, teams need to provide supporters with enough ongoing familiarity to build lasting memories around. Recognisable players certainly help in this regard, as does maintaining authentic contact between competitive seasons without treating every single digital interaction as just another blunt ticket promotion. Repeat attendance and continued organic interest would ultimately tell investors far more about the competition’s true foundations than another impressive launch announcement ever could.
3 – SailGP makes the first encounter easier
In contrast to golf and cricket, SailGP starts with a distinct structural advantage: much of its potential audience has relatively little established sailing consumption habits to disrupt. Because the sport does not occupy a traditional, deeply entrenched place in the weekly sporting calendar, it can introduce a viewing habit without first having to persuade someone to surrender their existing Saturday rituals.
The global racing league’s national teams offer an immediate geographical and cultural foothold for viewers, while short, fast-paced races contested in identical foiling catamarans make the visual spectacle immediately accessible long before viewers fully understand the finer technical details of wind angles and fleet tactics. There is plenty of high-octane action to watch simply while you work out what everyone on the water is actually trying to achieve.
Despite these advantages, SailGP still faces the notoriously difficult business challenge of converting spectacular viral footage into regular, engaged viewing habits. A dramatic video clip can travel widely across social media because a high-tech boat appears to be doing something physically unreasonable. However, following the next Grand Prix requires genuine interest in the human personalities aboard and the long-term consequences of the championship standings. Making the initial encounter visually frictionless gives the competition a fighting chance to develop that deeper interest over time.
There is always a persistent temptation among financial backers to assume that fans will eventually catch up with the sheer scale of monetary investment. Yet, a new league is ultimately asking busy people to make room for it in lives that are already completely full of sport they already care about. Financial spending needs to reflect that reality, with just as much strategic thought given to why someone would willingly return as to what might attract them for a single afternoon. Otherwise, every single season becomes nothing more than another expensive introduction, and backers will need an extraordinary amount of patience to let loyalties develop naturally.
