With the first season of TGL in the books, TMRW Sports CEO Mike McCarley says expansion and moving to other sports may be on the horizon.
After years of ideating, iterating, and delays, the first year of TGL concluded Tuesday night with Atlanta Drive GC defeating New York Golf Club for the inaugural SoFi Cup title. TMRW Sports‘s innovative simulator golf league, featuring 24 of the world’s elite golfers spread across six teams, played from a technologically novel, custom-built arena in South Florida, was something the sports world had never seen before.
So, how do you quantify or qualify success for a type of league that has never existed before?
Sitting at a roundtable in an empty auxiliary room inside Boston’s Hynes Convention Center earlier this month at the annual MIT Sloan Sports & Analytics Conference, TMRW Sports CEO Mike McCarley was asked to assess an ambitious, audacious experiment he spent the last four years pouring everything into. As more stakeholders brought their different ideas into the mix, McCarley said they helped fine-tune his vision, which centered around the core idea of bringing a younger and more diverse audience to the game he loves.
“It’s about creating a larger funnel or more funnels to ultimately get to and attract golf fans,” McCarley told Boardroom, calling himself his harshest critic. “The success is any media metric that’s obviously really important in today’s age, but there are indicators of longer-term cultural relevance that are really important too, especially this early on.”
TGL will likely be judged on ESPN television ratings and overall revenue, but McCarley was most pleased by internal data that showed that its percentage of viewers in the coveted 18-49 demographic was on par with the NBA as the youngest in pro sports. He also took great pride in families watching together at home, college fraternities tuning in as one, and celebrities coming to SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens en masse, varying from Josh Allen holding his bachelor party at a match to Celine Dion delivering a viral surprise performance during a break from the action.
McCarley first began noticing the golf simulator trend a decade ago in Asia, where he said it outpaced the number of people playing on traditional 18-hole courses. That trend has traveled and translated here in the U.S. The National Golf Foundation estimates that 18.4 million people participated in off-course golf activities last year, which include driving ranges, indoor simulators, or entertainment venues like Topgolf. Converting that interest into a new pro league became one of his north stars.
McCarley spent more than 20 years at NBC, including a decade as the network’s president of golf and global strategy and the Golf Channel president. Knowing the game inside and out around the world and his ability to connect with the world’s greatest golfers enabled McCarley to not only conceive of this grand indoor golf simulator concept, but to partner with Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy to found TMRW Sports in 2022 and collaborate directly with the PGA Tour to create TGL.
With Tiger, Rory, and the PGA Tour on board, other superstar golfers, ESPN, and team owners like Fenway Sports Group, Steve Cohen, David Blitzer, Arthur Blank, Marc Lasry, Venus and Serena Williams, and Alexis Ohanian soon followed. So did brand and advertising deals inside and outside the golfing ecosystem. TGL’s playoffs showcased new commercial partners like AG1, Hard Rock Bet, Mastercard, Seminole Casino Coconut Creek, Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, Stanley 1913 brand, and Verizon as part of the broadcast.
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The league’s pièce de résistance, though, is the SoFi Center. After a 2023 storm delayed the building and league’s launch by a year, the tech-forward, custom-built simulator arena debuted in January with a 64 x 53-foot simulator screen, a 22,475-square-foot green with a 41-yard-wide topographically morphing surface, an audience on top of the action, and mic’d up players to help shine a light on golf’s brightest stars.
“We built a venue and created a competition that was thinking about the modern media consumer first,” McCarley said.
TGL’s debut on Jan. 7 was more like a television series pilot than the inaugural game of a sports league. McCarley said that the TV presentation, venue experience, the players’ familiarity with the format, and their competitive energy improved as the season progressed. The biggest change was tweaking the hammer rule — which teams could throw to make one of the match’s 15 holes worth two or three points instead of one — to give the competition more structure. TGL ran different simulations and consulted with players and teams to make a data-based decision that made for a better product.
“It immediately had the intended impact on the competition,” McCarley said.
Like Netflix‘s Full Swing, a major function of TGL is to be additive and complementary to what the players are doing on the PGA Tour, and that impact has been felt on social media. Players have gained followings from viral moments that never could’ve come up on tour without trying too hard to be someone they’re not.
@espn #TigerWoods just needed a mid-round snack from Charlie 😅 #TGL #golf #chickenfingers #funny
♬ original sound – ESPN
“They’re some of the best people in the world at what they do and that’s entertaining enough,” McCarley said, “but we’re going to put you in an environment where your discussion as a team about the strategy of getting the ball in the hole in the fewest number of strokes is entertaining to people. And then you get in some of the lighter moments and tense reactions to a big putt going in or out.”
McCarley and TMRW Sports are already looking at what the future will look like for both TGL and the company as a whole. That could mean expanding TGL teams and venues in the next year or two Stateside, with sports owners across pro sports looking to get in on the action. Ohanian recently told CNN that top women’s players may also be included in TGL. Then, the TGL concept may expand to different countries around the world.
TMRW is also not limiting itself to golf by any stretch. Now, sports with a long and storied history are wondering how they can replicate the TGL model to reach newer, younger audiences.
“We have been pitched nearly every sport around the world,” McCarley said. “What we’re trying to create is a version of that sport that is rooted in the basic traditions and rules of that sport but looking at it through the lens of a fan in 2025. So what that sport is, and when we move into it next, we’ve got a nice little roadmap. More to come for sure.”
One of the surest signs you’ve made it as a startup is when people are coming up to you and asking, “How can we create the TGL of x sport?” It was the position Netflix was in when it created Drive To Survive with Formula 1, with leagues scurrying to produce similar products to bring their respective leagues into the modern era. After one season of TGL, TMRW seems to be in a position of strength not only to improve golf’s image but also to apply that approach elsewhere.
“It’s a great spot to be in,” McCarley said.
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