If you ask those at the Tour, the brand-new campus, which opened officially on New Year’s Day, will be the Tour’s bridge (or should we say moat<\/em>) to the future. Tour HQ will house the day-to-day operations of golf’s largest professional tour, and its next-door neighbor will house the day-to-day operations of the Tour’s moneymaking business<\/a>: media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Look, the point of the building beyond anything is to bring better content to our fans. To increase the level of production, the quality of production, and the quality of content that we bring to our fans,” says Luis Goicouria, the Tour’s SVP of media. “Because ultimately, it all stems from that, right? That’s number one. We feel like, if you do that, your business grows.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the critical exception of the editorial operations of network TV broadcasts (those will remain with NBC and CBS), everything touched by PGA Tour “media” will pass through the Death Star II. That includes YouTube, player content, PGA Tour Live and International broadcasts, studio shows, and anything else that isn’t already paid for by CBS, NBC and Golf Channel. In a world where sports leagues are much closer to media companies than ticket salesmen, that makes the new PGA Tour Studios the most valuable space in the Tour business without a tee box or a putting green.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nobody will dispute that the new facility is dazzling.<\/em> The building features 165,000 square feet of space; seven studios (with the capacity to grow to 12), six studios with massive LED walls, eight control rooms, eight voiceover rooms, and, yes, a movie theater. Now that it is open, the new facility will house the entirety of PGA Tour Live broadcast production, allow for the creation of several international-specific broadcast feeds, and give the Tour the capacity to create multitudes more content than ever before, including for sports far outside of golf. In a twist, perhaps the most impressive piece of the whole facility is what isn’t <\/em>in it: the Tour built 25 percent of the new facility to sit empty on opening day, future-proofing the building for whatever sparkling new gadgets become a part of the Tour’s media business in the next 25 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But those sparkly stats fail to close a critical plot hole: Why build another <\/em>Death Star? Even among those in the know in sports media, there is little consensus for why the Tour elected to spend untold millions building a new facility for media, particularly as other leagues are shrinking the size of internal media, consolidating content efforts, and, in the NFL’s case, threatening to disband certain pieces of their state-run operation altogether. Even if the untold millions for the Tour’s new facility were greenlighted in 2019, long before golf’s cash craze reached a fever pitch and these sports-wide trends became established, the business case is curious. In a world where sports media companies are learning to construct whole programming schedules with fewer voices, smaller overhead and tighter budgets, is it smart for the Tour to be quadrupling down in those same businesses?<\/p>\n\n\n
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