Breakaway sporting competitions are almost as old as professional sport itself. Ever since 21 northern English rugby clubs set up their own League in 1895 over a row about wanting to pay their players, two codes of rugby have (more or less) happily co-existed – although ironically Rugby Union is now by far the more commercially successful. Often discussions around breaking away from established competitions or formats start as behind-closed-doors affairs, used by teams or competitors as leverage to push their agenda with governing bodies that fiercely defend their hold on a sport’s revenue streams. Think of Billie Jean King in her campaign for equal prize money in women’s tennis, or Ferrari’s threat to set up their own Formula-1 championship but which ended in a new financial agreement.
Helicopters and fake dollar bills
At the other end of the spectrum, bids to disrupt the established order of world sport can be breathtakingly audacious and flamboyant. Perhaps the most infamous example is when Allen Stanford, a millionaire later convicted on multiple counts of fraud, landed his helicopter on the hallowed turf of Lord’s cricket ground, laden with a ‘treasure chest’ of dollar bills, to announce a new T20 competition between England and a Caribbean team nicknamed the ‘Stanford All-Stars’. The competition folded after two matches when Stanford was arrested, and the English Cricket Board terminated its contract with the disgraced millionaire. It later emerged that the dollar bills in the chest were in fact fake.
More recent in the memory is the short-lived idea of the European Super League in football. Fronted by senior statesmen from two European super-clubs, Florentino Perez of Real Madrid and Andrea Agnelli of Juventus, and with funding from JP Morgan, the move to create a new competition between 20 of Europe’s elite clubs provoked a widespread backlash from fans, former players and managers, other clubs, broadcasters…even politicians waded into the debate. The plug was pulled three days after its announcement.
54 ways to annoy the PGA
Against this backdrop comes a new golf format and competition called the LIV Golf Invitational. It starts in less than a month with a 3-round / 54-hole tournament (LIV = 54 in Roman numerals) at the Centurion Club, north of London. Funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, this breakaway movement has, like so many others, attracted controversy, ire, and resistance from the sport’s incumbent governing bodies the PGA and EGA, organisers of the main US and European golf tournaments, respectively.
Despite decent publicity and a former World No. 1 in Greg Norman as front man, the new format has been slow to attract high-profile players. With the PGA insisting that all players apply for waivers to play in the new competition at risk of exclusion, several well-known names such as Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods have pledged allegiance to existing tournaments. Nonetheless, despite the headwinds, Norman is quietly confident of attracting the big names seen as crucial to making the competition a success; in recent days, Lee Westwood, Sergio Garcia and Phil Mickelson have indicated that they are keen to participate.
Lessons on how to make the break
So with these examples of (attempted) breakaway competitions, are there some comparisons to be made and lessons learned for how to make a success of it? Here are my suggestions:
So while we wait to see how the new LIV Golf concept fares, there is also something to be said for officials at global sporting organisations keeping an open mind themselves. When several Indian international cricketers broke away to form a new domestic T20 cricket competition, the Board of Control for Cricket (BCCI) in India promptly banned the players and then launched their own version of the same idea. The Indian Premier League (IPL) is now the BCCI’s biggest revenue earner and one of the top 5 most lucrative of all sports tournaments in the world. And it all started with a breakaway.