At LIV Jeddah event last week, Phil Mickelson carried on about his belief that the PGA Tour and LIV Golf are trending in opposite directions. The Tour, he said, is on a downward spiral, while LIV is the future. It’s an opinion, of course, and one that is pretty easy to objectively disprove. But when has that ever stopped Mickelson?

Lefty is incentivized to prop up LIV Golf because the more the upstart league thrives, the better it his for his future finances. However, all the strong-arming in the world cannot make half-truths (at best) the full truth, and a couple of PGA Tour superstars popped back at him this week in the press conferences leading up to the CJ Cup in South Carolina.

“Man, I love Phil, but I don’t know what he’s talking about,” said Jon Rahm, who has been close to Mickelson for a long time. “I really don’t know why he said that. There’s been some changes being made, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going down, right? I truly don’t know why he said that. Don’t know. I really, I really don’t know. I think there’s some great changes being made and great changes for the players on the Tour. I truly don’t know what drove him to say something like that.”

The changes Rahm is referencing are underway. The Tour’s top players have all agreed to play in the same PGA Tour tournaments in the future, and that’s going to start in a big way in 2023 with 17 tournaments (including the four major championships) in which every big-time player that hasn’t already defected to LIV will tee it up.

“I’ve spoke about this at length, and I think the people that have decided to stay here and play these tournaments, they or we haven’t done anything differently than what we’ve always done, right?” said Rory McIlroy on Wednesday. “We’re playing these events, we’re PGA Tour members, we’re sticking to the system that has traditionally been there. The guys that have went over to LIV, they’re the ones that have made the disruption, they’re the ones that have sort of put the golf world in flux right now.

“I guess for them to be talking the way they are, it’s bold and … I think there’s a ton of propaganda being used and all sorts of stuff. I certainly don’t see the PGA Tour trending downward at all. All the talent, most, 95% of the talent is here. You’ve got people like Tom Kim coming through who that’s the future of our game.

“I don’t agree with what Phil said last week. I understand why he said it because of the position he is in, but I don’t think anyone that takes a logical view of the game of golf can agree with what he said.”

McIlroy is literally correct in that 95% of the talent is on the PGA Tour. Currently, 19 of the top 20 players in the Official World Golf Rankings play on the PGA Tour. To be fair to LIV, it currently does not receive OWGR points for its events, and Abraham Ancer, Joaquin Niemann and Dustin Johnson are just outside that top 20, but it’s not certain that they would be inside the top 20 if they were all still on the PGA Tour.

Regardless, McIlroy is correct. Logic and reason — not to mention data — show that Mickelson is incorrect about his assertion at the moment. That could change, of course, but the current gulf between LIV and the PGA Tour is a lot wider than Lefty has insinuated.

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Brooks Koepka won the LIV Golf Jeddah event over the weekend, which few people watched and even fewer attended. In a vacuum, this was strange moment in the sport: Koepka, a four-time major champion, led a terrific leaderboard — Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia, Peter Uihlein, Matthew Wolff, Paul Casey and Joaquin Niemann — that nevertheless lacked any buzz, even when Koepka got emotional about how difficult golf has been for him over the last two years.

That’s not to say LIV Golf Jeddah didn’t matter. It was clearly meaningful to its participants and those running the upstart league. However, something Phil Mickelson said earlier in the week kept reverberating as most of the sports world ignored the better story: Four-time major winner nearly cries after beating other major winners in $20 million golf tournament because he didn’t know if he was ever going to play again.

Koepka’s triumph was not the focus, though. Why is that?

Well, there are a thousand reasons, perhaps the foremost of which is that LIV Golf is not played in a vacuum. Among those factors is that the event was played in Saudi Arabia, which has accumulated a reputation for running this league with one eye on normalizing its human rights issues. So, that’s part of it.

Golf fanatics have thus far refused to see it as a legitimate league given that LIV relies on a shotgun start, plays 54 holes without a cut and doesn’t exactly boast a great roster of golfers beyond its top 10.

Mickelson, not in that top 10, disagrees. He spent the week in Jeddah touting LIV as the future of the sport.

“As I said earlier, for a long, long time, my 30 years on the PGA Tour, pretty much all the best players played on the PGA Tour, at least for the last 20 years,” said Mickelson. “That will never be the case again. I think going forward you have to pick a side. You have to pick what side do you think is going to be successful.

“And I firmly believe that I’m on the winning side of how things are going to evolve and shape in the coming years for professional golf. We play against a lot of the best players in the world on LIV, and there are a lot of the best players in the world on the PGA Tour. And until some of the — well, until both sides sit down and have a conversation and work something out, both sides are going to continue to change and evolve.

“And I see LIV Golf trending upwards, I see the PGA Tour trending downwards, and I love the side that I’m on. And I love how I feel. I love how I’m reinvigorated and excited to play golf and compete. I love the experience. I love the way they treat us.”

It’s certainly interesting that Mickelson claimed LIV Golf is trending upwards. To date, many have posited that the primary drive of traffic or viewership to LIV Golf has been its splashy signings, including that of Mickelson. It has also added Johnson, Koepka, Niemann, Garcia as well as reigning Open champion and Players champion Cameron Smith.

The way LIV has gone about these signings has been smart, too. It spaced them out such that there was a steady stream of intrigue and interest in the acquisitions. However, those signings are only serving as flash points for the league. 

In fact, interest in LIV is waning rather than increasing. Research conducted by Golfdatatech obtained by CBS Sports shows that only 23% of respondents believe LIV Golf is a “good” idea, down from 27% in a previous iteration of its polling. Additionally, 58% believe LIV is a “bad” or “very bad” idea, up from 50%. (Four versions of research have been conducted since LIV started.)

Contrary to Mickelson’s claims, this shows LIV Golf is not trending upwards — at least when it comes to buy in from fans.

The majority of folks polled by Golf Datatech (66%) agree that they “don’t like that Saudi money is funding” LIV Golf. This figure has been consistent throughout the last several months.

Even more interesting are the YouTube numbers. Across the five events before Jeddah (for which data was not yet available), Boston did the best viewership by far. That event coincided with Smith’s signing. Chicago, the event directly after Boston, did the second-worst with Bangkok coming in last by a wide margin.

LIV Golf is broadcast on other platforms globally; YouTube is not the only place you can watch worldwide. However, the YouTube-only data seems to back up what others have posited about how big-time signings are the only primary catalyst driving interest in the league.

Perhaps that changes in the months and years to come, but the data doesn’t seem to support Mickelson’s theory. That doesn’t mean it won’t in the future, just that it doesn’t right now. 

Mickelson is paid handsomely — like many others — to spout LIV Golf’s talking points for the purpose of turning the tide on the PGA Tour. That is their best interest, of course, but it doesn’t make those statements true. LIV is hardly the only organization that touts itself in that manner, though it does stand out given the circumstances.

One day, Mickelson may indeed wind up on the “winning side” of all this. We won’t know that for several years, maybe even longer than that. As it stands now, though, one cannot objectively make that claim. LIV Golf is simply not flexing all over the PGA Tour as some would like you to believe.

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