LIV Golf: The Strategy of Knowing What to Copy

Imitation they say is often the best form of flattery.

I'm an occasional golfer and casual golf fan. What I enjoy is sitting down on a Sunday night to follow the final round of a major golf championship, but I certainly can't claim to be an expert on the game.

Still, last week I was surprised to read the reports around what looks like the beginning of the end for LIV Golf. After more than $5bn of funding from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund since its launch, LIV is reportedly preparing for a possible Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing as it tries to find a way to survive. The league has also laid off the majority of its workforce, with many employees due to leave at the start of September as LIV scales back its operations.

Whatever your views are on LIV, it has been one of the most fascinating stories in sport over the last few years. The money, the controversy, the players it lured and the battle with the Rory McIlroy-led PGA Tour turned professional golf into something resembling an episode of EastEnders. If you aren't up to speed on golf, LIV was to golf what Donald Trump is to politics: big, loud, in your face and on a mission to rip up the norms associated with one of the most traditional games we know.

But what interests me isn't really the money or even the hullabaloo around it. What I find most interesting is what happened to the original concept that LIV launched with and where it has ended up.

LIV arrived with the ambition of disrupting professional golf and creating something very different from the PGA Tour, which had operated unchallenged for decades. Yet, four years on, parts of LIV's proposition have moved noticeably closer to the thing it originally set out to disrupt.

And that got me thinking about imitation and the use of it as a business strategy.

Imitation is a legitimate business strategy

People usually think innovation is about coming up with a completely new product or technology. This isn't always the case. Some of the most successful companies in the world have built their businesses by watching what someone else has done, working out what works and doesn't, and then finding a way to do it better, faster or cheaper. I could go down a rabbit hole and talk about Chinese brands, but I won't.

There is a body of management thinking behind this. In 1966, Theodore Levitt, a Harvard Business Scholar, wrote an article called Innovative Imitation. He challenged the assumption that innovation was always superior to imitation, arguing that there could be a strategy in learning from what someone else had already done.

There is even a name for this approach: the fast follower. You don't necessarily need to be the person who takes the first risk or makes the first move. There can be value in watching someone else make that move, learning from what they did and then tweaking the idea for yourself.

The advantage is fairly obvious. The first company has to take the risk, educate the market, spend the money and make the mistakes. The follower gets to watch all of that happen and then decide what is worth copying and what isn't.

A friend of mine often uses a saying that won't make it into any management theory textbook but does a good job of summing up the concept: the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese!

Let's look at the art of imitation a little closer.

Imitation isn't the same as copying. You can copy what a successful company does without understanding why it works. The part of a successful business that is easiest to copy is what you can see. What makes it successful is the part that is harder to see, and that is usually where the real value sits.

You can't just copy and paste an idea from one market into another and expect the same result. You have to understand the market, the customer and the context in which the original idea became successful first.

Sport gives us some pretty good examples of this too.

Darts is one of the better examples of imitation and, in turn, disruption done well. The PDC didn't need to reinvent darts. It focused on changing the experience around it, making the venues bigger, the players more recognisable, the walk-ons more theatrical and the whole thing much more television-friendly. It took a simple game that people already understood and made it more entertaining and commercially attractive.

The European Super League went in the other direction with football. It tried to reinvent one of the most established competitions in sport, the Champions League, with a breakaway competition where the biggest clubs had guaranteed places rather than having to qualify on sporting merit. It quickly discovered that some of the things it saw as problems were actually part of what people valued: history, rivalry and sporting merit. You can't just manufacture that, and the whole thing collapsed in less than 48 hours after an extraordinary backlash from supporters.

Saudi Arabia is taking another route in football. It is trying to challenge the traditional dominance of European leagues like the Premier League and La Liga through huge investment in players, clubs, infrastructure and competitions. But the Saudis aren't really trying to reinvent football because they know football doesn't need to be reinvented. Saudi is just trying to become a much bigger part of the football world.

And then there is the LIV story and where the Saudis seem to have got it wrong.

So what was LIV actually trying to disrupt?

When LIV arrived in 2022, it was difficult to miss. Some of the world's biggest golfers were offered enormous guaranteed contracts and a new league appeared seemingly overnight, backed by the financial muscle of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.

The Saudis gave it instant credibility by getting Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and others to come onboard and leave the PGA Tour. It was obvious this wasn't going to be a quiet alternative competition sitting in the background.

LIV wanted to change professional golf.

The format itself was part of the disruption strategy. LIV tournaments were originally played over 54 holes rather than the traditional 72. There were no cuts, players started together using shotgun starts and music and entertainment were built into the event experience.

The most interesting change was the importance given to team golf.

Team golf wasn't exactly a new idea. Golf already had the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup, and those competitions have some of the biggest audiences and strongest connections in the sport. But they were occasional events happening every couple of years alongside the main individual-based tour.

LIV made teams part of the weekly product, with player captains, team identities and standings, while the individual competition sat alongside a team competition.

And this is important because the lesson from LIV shouldn't simply be that disruption failed.

Some of the concepts LIV identified were probably right.

Professional golf had, and still has, issues around its format, its presentation and the way fans engage with players. The best players don't always play against each other often enough, the schedule can be difficult to follow and golf can sometimes feel designed around the traditions of the sport rather than the way younger audiences consume entertainment today.

LIV saw some of that and, to be fair, tried to address it.

Where LIV misjudged

Where it misjudged was in assuming that because there were flaws in professional golf, the whole model needed to be reinvented.

I think what LIV learned, probably the hard way, was that golf wasn't broken. It just had some things that could be done a bit better. And you can see that in the direction it has taken since.

One of the clearest signs came with the move to 72 holes for the 2026 season.

LIV retained the team competition, shotgun starts and its more entertainment-focused product, but the individual competition moved to the traditional four-round format, the same as the PGA Tour.

What stood out to me was that the biggest disruptor and challenge to professional golf was now moving back towards one of the core elements of the concept it had originally set out to disrupt.

LIV also started to introduce more of the competitive structures that are familiar in traditional professional sport. For 2026, the league expanded its relegation zone, introduced points for every finishing position and expanded the pathways for players to earn their way into the league through LIV Golf Promotions and the International Series.

LIV originally arrived with guaranteed contracts and a very different concept of how professional golf should operate, but was now putting greater emphasis on performance, qualification and the consequences of where you finish.

That was quite a change in direction.

If you want to compete seriously for the attention of golf fans, players, sponsors and broadcasters, there is probably a limit to how far you can change the format of something that people have already understood for generations.

LIV could have kept the teams, the shotgun starts and the entertainment-focused approach while accepting that some of the traditional elements of professional golf worked for a reason.

Being different isn't always being better

This is where I think businesses can sometimes get disruption wrong.

People become obsessed with the idea that the market leader must be missing something because otherwise there wouldn't be an opportunity to disrupt them. So disruptors look at what they are doing and decide that the answer must be to do the opposite.

This works sometimes. Take Lidl and Aldi's model and challenge to traditional retail.

However, the incumbent has often survived because it understands something that challengers don't, or has a unique selling point that, as the name suggests, is unique.

That doesn't mean the incumbent is perfect. One of the benefits of having a challenger is that it forces the incumbent to stay on its toes. Lidl and Aldi's approach has driven the larger traditional retailers to review their approach and, as a result, put customer value back at the forefront of the agenda.

I think the lesson LIV Golf is learning is that there is a difference between finding something that needs fixing or a little tweak and deciding that the whole concept needs replacing.

You can copy a product. You can't necessarily copy the reasons the product works.

That is the real lesson I take away from LIV Golf and its mission to take over professional golf.

LIV introduced team golf, music and a very different format to the PGA Tour. However, it couldn't manufacture the history and traditions that had built up around professional golf over decades. The big names and big money could get people's attention, but they couldn't create that connection overnight.

As time passed, LIV had to bolt back onto its product elements it had originally set out to get rid of, bringing its offering back closer to what the PGA Tour had already established.

Interestingly, the imitation hasn't only gone one way.

LIV's existence forced the PGA Tour to look at itself too, and it has made changes to its schedule, elite events and planned 2028 restructuring, showing that even the incumbent has lessons to learn from the challenger.

That is probably the most useful thing competition can do. The disruptor doesn't always replace the incumbent. Sometimes it forces the incumbent to improve, while the challenger learns that some of the things it wanted to disrupt worked for a reason.

LIV may ultimately be remembered less for replacing the PGA Tour and more for forcing professional golf to evolve.

What LIV Golf has taught me is that the art of imitation is knowing what to copy, what to change and most importantly, what to leave alone.

Blog by Padraig O'Donnell