Gambling on Golf

•  Recent legislation has opened the path for sports betting, with deals already signed in most of the major sports. Golf leaders, including PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan, have made it clear that golf will be no different.
•  The PGA Tour has tapped IMG Arena, a sports betting service and content hub, to distribute official Tour scoring data for media and betting use. The Match between Tiger and Phil was the first to include statistical data to showcase the real-time odds of a players winning a hole or pulling off a certain shot, while promoting sponsor MGM Grand.
• While it may take a little while, legalized golf gambling is going to become as synonymous with golf as Tiger Woods.

New Distribution Platforms for Golf Coverage

• According to the National Golf Foundation, 22 million people watched streaming coverage of a golf tournament in 2017, and more than 1-in-4 Americans (age 6+), 82 million people in total, consumed some form of golf media in 2017. Golf consumption habits continue to change, and that won’t stop in the foreseeable future. New ways to consume golf media are on the way.
• PGA Tour Live is now part of the NBC Gold subscription offering while the PGA of America signed a deal to be part of streaming service ESPN Plus. With the availability of tournament-specific mobile apps, a growing presence of digital content, and expanded hours of tournament coverage, live streaming is on the rise. 
• With the PGA Tour’s domestic network and cable TV deals expiring in 2021, the future landscape for golf’s media engagement across multiple platforms soon could look very different from how we currently know it.

Summary Of Our Early Findings Relevant To The Goals

• Our first hour of research was spent finding two trends that could be supported with multiple sources. We found that almost all golf industry trends were hidden behind paywalls, so we had to get creative with the two trends we found. We surmised through multiple articles of the same subject being mentioned that these were golf trends, and then we did additional research to back that up, thereby providing two trends in the golf industry.
• As well, all the publicly available articles that we did find, do discuss golf industry trends from 2020 to 2025. We did see these in paywalled sources, but we do not have access to them. Given this fact, we are suggesting pivoting the research, which is outlined in our scoping below.
• One thing that hampered our research, other than the paid sources, was the fact that we did not know what to focus on. Industry is a broad term. Please let us know what our focus should be. For example: golf equipment trends, golf course trends, golf participatory trends or anything specific. We have provided some interesting choices in the scoping below, that can be changed with a simple comment.
• Additionally, we assumed a global focus for this research. If a more targeted approach is desired, for example, the United States, this would have to be clearly communicated to us in any reply.
• Please select one or more of the options provided in the proposed scoping section below.