Have Golf Fans Clocked Off For The Season? Worrying PGA Tour Ratings Show Substantial Drop-Off

Since the new NFL season began in early September, TV viewing figures in relation to golf have taken a pretty significant nosedive - although, that is no real surprise.

Looking at historical patterns, the sport which involves flag hunting has almost always taken a backseat to the game in which players try to avoid a flag, but the sheer scale of what is taking place in 2024 could be seen as fairly concerning for golf's stakeholders.

Over the course of the entire 2024 regular PGA Tour season, including the four Major championships, an average of 2.8 million people tuned in to watch Sunday's action.

That number drops to 2.2 million if The Masters, The Open Championship, the US Open, and the PGA Championship are excluded and is around 20% down (2.7m) on its previous year, according to Sports Business Journal's Josh Carpenter.

It should be noted, however, that those numbers are for linear TV viewing and do not including streaming, which is becoming an increasingly popular way for fans to watch golf - especially the younger ones.

Nevertheless, the comparative data for the first three events of the 2024 FedEx Cup Fall series is far from ideal.

At the Procore Championship - the opening FedEx Cup Fall tournament which took place between September 12-15 - an average of 69,000 people tuned in on Golf Channel to watch Patton Kizzire blitz the field by five at Silverado Resort's North Course. According to Golf.com, that is over 75% down on the same tournament 12 months prior, at which Sahith Theegala triumphed by two strokes.

Meanwhile, the LIV Golf League's Individual Championship round was only watched by around 89,000 on The CW that same weekend as Jon Rahm just pipped Joaquin Niemann to the title in his debut year.

In the Procore Championship's case, at least, it's not quite as simple as the majority of people just completely losing interest like that. On the one hand, there was NFL on at the same time, and on another, the Solheim Cup had taken up a lot of people's time after recently morphing into a tighter-than-expected finish at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club.

And while the finale of the Procore Championship was a disappointing one in terms of PGA Tour engagement, women's golf enjoyed a real red-letter day.

As Team USA finally claimed the beautiful glass trophy back from their European rivals in Virginia, an average TV audience of 657,000 was watching. That was up almost 400,000 from Finca Cortesin the year before and even roughly 70,000 higher than the 2021 running on US soil.

Following a two-week break which involved the Presidents Cup, it was a similarly underwhelming picture for the PGA Tour as the Sanderson Farms Championship took centre stage. An average of 136,000 people watched Kevin Yu edge past Beau Hossler in a playoff, with not much positive change from the same tournament a year prior.

The most recent PGA Tour event to be completed was a brand new event at a stunning golf course in Utah, with the Beehive State making its long-awaited return in the form of the Black Desert Championship.

But even the low-scoring action at Black Desert Resort, which saw recent Korn Ferry Tour winner Matt McCarty win by three, failed to pull people's attention away from the oddly-shaped ball and back to the spherical one with an average of 117,000 fans watching on TV.

Ultimately, there are a number of factors which produce the numbers seen in this article, but it remains apparent that golf is just not as popular as football when it comes to what a US audience wants to settle down in front of at the weekend. 2024 is hardly an outlier in regards to this pattern, and it seems unlikely that will change any time soon.

The ongoing dispute over the direction men's pro golf is headed will not be helping either, as many fans continue to air their frustration over the amount of time that is being taken to find a resolution.

If the sport can find an immediate solution to the immense drop-off in TV viewership between September and January, it will be all the healthier for it. Perhaps a potential return for Tiger Woods at the Hero World Challenge in December could play a part. But with a recent back surgery for Woods having just taken place, the chances of the 15-time Major winner playing in The Bahamas are likely to be slim.

Or maybe The Showdown - a made-for-TV match between four of golf's very best which is slated for December - could help to fill the gap? That will not aid the PGA Tour, however, as the fixture is not affiliated with them nor any of their rivals.

Whatever happens, the PGA Tour will hope there are more positive signs across the final five FedEx Cup Fall events of the season...