The Duels was created to challenge long-standing conventions in professional golf. By rethinking how athletes and their followers coexist in modern sports fandom, our series paired golf’s winningest athletes with YouTube’s most-loved creators and built a content series featuring real performance and real stakes.
Ultimately, we wanted to bring one of the world’s oldest sports into the present moment.
As the first of its kind, The Duels marked a clear departure from traditional golf tournament coverage. Rather than separating elite play from culture, the series brought the two together, making room for chemistry, rivalry, and competitive pressure to unfold naturally over time. Athletes weren’t protected or polished; they were participatory, vocal, and emotionally invested, mirroring a broader shift across sports toward access, authenticity, and personality-forward storytelling – and one that we felt the golf industry was in desperate need of.
As for our creators, many of them grew up watching and admiring the very athletes they were ultimately paired with, stepping into a new kind of team golf format for LIV Golf’s content ecosystem.
But what made The Duels especially unique was golf itself.
Unlike most professional sports where the distance between fan and pro is insurmountable, golf remains one of the rare disciplines where highly skilled amateurs can meaningfully compete alongside the game’s best. These creators weren’t simply influencers; they were legitimate golfers who understood shot shaping, course management and competitive pressure.
That proximity created something powerful: authentic chemistry, mutual respect, and real competition. For creators who grew up as fans, the experience was deeply personal. For audiences, it was proof that The Duels wasn’t a gimmick – it was a credible, compelling collision of creator culture and professional sport.
The format was informed by trends reshaping the sports industry in 2025, with YouTube emerging as a primary destination – not a secondary outlet – for daily sports consumption.
The Duels demonstrated a new blueprint for golf – and sports at large – proving that professional competition can live inside creator ecosystems without losing integrity, all while expanding reach, relevance, and affinity in the process.
Our 2025 Duels generated more than 77.7M total views across YouTube and supporting social platforms, combining reach from both brand and creators.
The campaign produced 650+ social posts, including more than 60 posts published by the LIV Golf teams and pro athletes and 205+ in-feed posts by influencers and creators, with hundreds more published across brand and creator Stories.
On YouTube, 32 total videos drove 16M views, with the series’ five hero tournament videos garnering 10.5M combined views and more than 6M total hours watched.
Our social content garnered more than 3.5M total engagements and 17.25M media impressions, including features from Newsweek, Hypebeast, Golf Monthly, Golf.com, USA Today and The Dallas Morning News, among others.
