TGL season review: First year was something new, fun and cool

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — Mike McCarley is sitting in the TGL owners' box, sport coat off, about two hours before what would turn out to be the final match of the stadium golf league’s inaugural season, and he’s talking about the fruit he had eaten the afternoon before — eight kinds.

He had just watched a documentary where a woman drinks a 60-ingredient smoothie every morning. There’s something, he explains, about eating as many food items as possible in a day to help promote the biodiversity in your gut. He tried dragon fruit the night before. Looked good, tasted weird.

“Oh,” McCarley says, as he picks away at that night’s offering, “they have figs tonight.”

You could say TGL was its own fruit plate through its inaugural season — the combination of the game’s top-ranked players (11 of the top 15 in the world) and team owners from other sports — all successful in their own right — coming together for something the same, but different.

It was always supposed to be additive to the professional golf calendar (it’s a line repeated by the players, McCarley, and one of the other co-founders, Rory McIlroy, frequently — a not-so-subtle dig at LIV Golf, which has long been considered a disruptive addition to men’s golf), and two years ago McCarley was invited by the then-chief executive of the Royal & Ancient, Martin Slumbers, to make a presentation at the famed St. Andrews to the other R&A heavy hitters about what his plan was going to be for a golf league played on a simulator in south Florida. 

By most of the key metrics, McCarley tells Sportsnet, the first season was a success. It was something fun, something different, and frankly — it was cool.

“We set out to do something,” McCarley says. “To create a new version of golf that would attract a younger audience, and when we hear back from them that ‘This is working,’ then that was very rewarding.”

The final series wrapped Tuesday night with, perhaps, the moment of the season, with Billy Horschel rolling in a double-breaking 17-footer for birdie on the penultimate hole of the match and celebrating like he had just won the lottery (his expletive-laced, fist-pumping effort would not be appropriate if he won, say, the Masters) to put Atlanta Drive GC (Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay and, sitting for the finale but also part of the team, Lucas Glover) ahead for good against New York Golf Club.

Atlanta defeated New York, 4-3, in the second match and captured the SoFi Cup in a clean sweep in the best-of-three finale.

McCarley, who had spent two decades as a television executive, most recently with NBC, worked with McIlroy and Tiger Woods to develop the concept for this simulator league that boasts a 50-foot-high screen and a rotating, half-a-million-pound green.

The team owners for the first season included Atlanta’s Arthur Blank (who also owns the Atlanta Falcons) and New York’s Steve Cohen (who also owns the Mets). It was broadcast on ESPN in the U.S. and the players included world No. 3 Xander Schauffele, up-and-coming superstar Ludvig Aberg, two-time major champion Collin Morikawa, Netflix fan favourites Sahith Theegala, Min Woo Lee and Rickie Fowler, American Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley and, of course, McIlroy and Woods themselves.

McCarley points to the Presidents' Day (Family Day in Canada) triple-header as a watershed moment. There was “real buzz,” he explains, with so many kids and families in the stands through the holiday. 

“I’m not a big ‘Let’s reflect’ guy, I’m always looking at how we can improve. But there have been moments this year where you see something and it hits,” McCarley explains. “You build a business like this, and you can measure success in a lot of ways. But if you can measure it by cheers and smiles from kids and building a sense of community, then that day felt really good.” 

Although not official yet, the second season is a go.

Earlier reporting from the Sports Business Journal at the launch of TGL stated most of the golfers from 2025 had signed two-year deals, while McCarley tells Sportsnet he told his staff nine months ago to start developing a “Season 2 wish list.”

“I'm sure there will be plenty of thoughts going into how do we make ‘2.0’ even better than this was,” Fowler said Tuesday night.

Expansion is the latest buzzword, though, and those conversations are continuing. It helped, in 2025, that almost three-quarters of the participants lived in Florida already (and most in the Palm Beach area). McCarley tells Sportsnet that TGL has had people from all leagues — including professional Indian cricket — visit at some point and some of the team owners have visited more than once. The Palm Beach Post reported Tuesday that the owners of at least four other NFL team owners attended at least one match, along with the owners of the Colorado Rockies, Seattle Kraken and Toronto Maple Leafs.

Toronto’s Larry Tannenbaum, the owner of the WNBA’s Toronto Tempo, was also amongst those who visited. He sat behind Serena Williams — who (along with her husband) is involved with the ownership of the Los Angeles Golf Club and was recently announced as a part owner of the Tempo — at a match.

All of golf’s governing bodies have also visited the SoFi Center at some point this year, including Golf Canada and even a group from Augusta National. Mike Whan, who is the CEO of the United States Golf Association (essentially the stewards of the North American game, including the rules), was at the first match in a showcase of support, McCarley says, who called that “really meaningful.”

Although it was a made-for-TV product, the in-person experience just got better each week, McCarley explains. Yes, it’s golf, but it’s also a stadium sport — so attendees immediately felt it to be familiar. There are television timeouts — and a referee, a shot clock, music, an in-arena host and a T-shirt toss. Plus, LED boards that wrap the field of play with advertising and scoring updates. You certainly didn’t think golf would have ever been presented as such, but it was.

The technology story, meanwhile, was always going to be a big part of the first season — for better or worse.

With a laugh, Andrew Macaulay — who is TGL’s chief technology officer — tells Sportsnet of how, after Shane Lowry’s first-ever shot in TGL was tracked and registered, he and his team had a mini celebration. There were some adjustments that needed to be made through the season (at one instance, the technology registered Tommy Fleetwood’s grass divot and not the ball he hit) but overall, the system worked — and it can only be improved on. It’s net-new technology, after all.

“I am ecstatic, I suppose. The way everything went — it must be close to 1,000 shots hit into the screen during live matches, and we had one tracking issue. A few oddities in the game. But it was a very small number of shots I was worried about. Everything else worked. The turntable turned, the green undulated, the bunker lip raised. It was check, check, check from a physical standpoint of it working as intended,” Macaulay tells Sportsnet.

“When I first got the call (from TMRW Sports, the umbrella ownership company of TGL), like, ‘Hey we’re trying to figure this out,’ this is basically what we came up with. It wasn’t originally going to be such a big scale. But this is what we came up with and everyone latched onto it, and we thought, ‘Well, we better make sure we can make this happen.’”

The neat part about a first-of-its-kind effort is that the gameplay could be changed on the fly. Based on both audience and player feedback, TGL organizers made an early-season pivot in how teams could utilize their hammers (allowing for more uses of the two-point-potential flag) and that immediately improved the scoring dramatics. Although there is a 40-second shot clock, there were times when matches seemed to drag on — especially in blowouts — but such is the case in any sport. Schauffele, who was part of the New York Golf Club, also seemed to think the schedule for Season 2 should wrap up a few weeks earlier.

“I'm sure a lot of fans and the producers … and everyone is going to have a little bit of input (on what’s next),” Schauffele said Tuesday night. “I think just us players sit down in the off-season with our team … and see how they can tweak everything — whether it’s shortening the season or having it end sooner. Having it end just before The Players (Championship), that would be something that we’d be up for.” 

So, the first TGL season is complete. No one really knew what to expect — because, yes, at the end of the day, it was just guys hitting balls into a screen — but as the red-and-white confetti fell Tuesday night to celebrate Atlanta’s 2025 SoFi Cup victory, there was McCarley. His sport coat was on now. He was smiling. He was enjoying the fruits of his labour.