TGL exec: T20 saved cricket. Tiger and Rory’s new league can do the same for golf

Professional golf isn’t just moving with the times. It’s doing somersaults.

If 72-hole stroke play is a book, then TGL is a film. Why lock into boring pages when a film does everything for you?

Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy‘s new indoor simulator league speaks to the move from tradition and into short-form golf, increasingly played away from grass. Cricket fans have heard this before too.

Andrew MacAulay, the Chief Technology Officer for TMRW Sports and TGL presented by SoFi, can see parallels between the two sports where the original long forms are being sidelined to accommodate new approaches.

“The viewers that tune into TGL will include all the golf fans but it’s going to include anyone who’s a sports fan and wouldn’t have dreamed of watching traditional golf. They’re going to tune in and they’re going to be excited, they’re going to have a team, and they’re going to root for that team, just like you’d have in any other sport that you don’t have in golf until now,” MacAulay told NCG.

“The parallels are very similar. I would argue T20 saved cricket – the longer forms were all vastly reduced audience, and I think – I’ve lost track of time, was it 20 years ago the innovation happened? And now look at where cricket is. The tide raised all votes in that sense, and I think there are a lot of parallels to what we are doing.

“The beauty of it is it won’t put off the older audience because they’ll come for other reasons, but I think this mix of tech, there’s not even a name for this, it’s a hybrid. It’s not e-sports, we’re not using controllers. It’s not that, but this mix of real and tech together.

“I think that can happen in many sports actually and I think the younger audience is attracted to that – two hours, there’s a beginning and end, there’s a winner and a loser and you’re done. Golf has never really had that.”

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T20 cricket and golf with TGL have ‘a lot of parallels’

90 overs, or up to 540 bowls, are completed in a day of test cricket. This count is more than halved in T20 and slashed in the newer Hundred tournament, allowing spectators to enjoy an evening of sport in a couple of hours, a format MacAulay likens to TGL where he now works after eight years at TopGolf.

The former Leeds University student brought vast experience in the sport’s most popular ball-tracing and entertainment concept to TGL, which will see PGA Tour stars play matches by hitting balls into a screen with virtual holes, held at the SoFi Centre in Florida.

As part of the TGL Golf League, which was masterminded by Woods, McIlroy and Mike McCarley’s company TMRW Sports and launched in January 2025, MacAulay and his colleagues have produced a 64 x 53-foot screen, a 22,475-square-foot short game area and incorporated real turf conditions to bring golf indoors like never before.

The team suffered a large hiccup in November 2023 when the dome roof suffered structural damage. The start was delayed by a year, but MacAulay and his colleagues utilised “the gift of extra time” to develop a format which includes a shot clock, referees and time-outs.

“I think there’s plenty of runway and room for this. For over a year, I’ve had a season two list which was my way of saying that’s a great idea, I don’t have time to do that in season one, but we’ll put it on season two, and in a weird way, season one will be the worst season because we fully intend every year to be better than the previous one.” MacAulay added.

“It’s going to be amazing, but the next one needs to be better and season three needs to be better than two and that’s our plan. If you’re talking about more generally, I think there are more innovators out there trying different ways to merge technology with traditional golf.”

Six teams of four PGA Tour players play matches from January to March in a schedule that coincides with the PGA Tour 2025 schedule. Scottie Scheffler isn’t involved, but 13 of the top 20 players in the world are on the roster.

McIlroy, who leads the Boston Common team with Adam Scott, Keegan Bradley and Hideki Matsuyama, hopes TGL will carry golf into the 21st century and appeal to a larger audience with a concept that isn’t alien to those who use Trackman and other ball-tracing technologies, but a wholly new competitive environment for a sport that is played in open air 99% of the time.

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This type of shape-shifting technology has been adopted in other quarters by brands and golf coaches who want to take innovation in golf to the next level, like TGL. The league uses a putting surface with 600 actuators underneath to change the slope.

Putting green technology is also the subject of Platform Golf’s ethos. Platform Golf uses cutting-edge technology to have players hit putts on a tilting green and hit approach shots from uneven lies.

The surfaces can be controlled by the user to recreate any situation encountered by any green. The practicality and value are of no end for coaches such as Claude Harmon III, one of the best coaches in the business, who has now become an ambassador for Platform Golf.

“These platforms allow us, as coaches, to teach situations that couldn’t usually be replicated away from the golf course – skills like putting on real greens and shooting from uneven lies. It’s a game changer no matter the ability level of golfer using it,” Harmon said.

Leading up to the inaugural match on January 7, 2025, golf fans were thrilled by footage of Woods hitting balls into the screen. TGL presents a chance for the 15-time major-winning legend to extend his career in a virtual world without the force of the elements of outdoor tournaments. Ironically, Woods announced in March he’d ruptured his Achilles and had surgery.

It’s another golf-viewing product to be scrutinised too. Traditionalists who like their four-day tournaments (and five-day test matches) might turn their noses up as they might to the LIV Golf League, the new circuit which has rocked the sport with a shorter 54-hole format.

Trying to be the next best thing is often met with scowls and scepticism, but the enthusiasm is bursting from MacAulay and his technology team, which has created an immersive new golf experience inside a 1,500-seater arena that, to its credit, isn’t just another golf tour.

“Our broadcast producer and director have an amazing set up being installed with 90 cameras, mostly robotic so he doesn’t have extra people out on the field with handheld cameras, he wants it to feel like magic that you get to see all of these different angles,” he said.

“We’ve got a spider cam, a sky cam flying through the air like other stadiums, rail cams, robo cams, an RF cam which is a radio-controlled thing that rolls around. We’ve got all that but you’ve got to stitch that with the virtual part of the game.

“So in the game, we’ve created and placed cameras in the game, so you’ve got the behind-the-shot of the golfer, you see the ball hit the screen, the ball drops away out of sight and you see the virtual ball continue beautifully down the fairway, but then there are computer cameras, game cameras that are stationed along that hole and the director can cut to whatever virtual computer camera they want.

“If it is on the side of the fairway and you’re watching that ball fly left to right and then go down, you’ve got that camera. You’ve got cameras around the green to watch it come in, you’ve got the camera flying behind the golf ball, so we’ve got cameras that you can’t have in real life unless you have a drone following the golf ball which the pros won’t like!

“The virtual cameras can go anywhere. If you want a camera in the middle of the fairway to watch it go right over your head, no problem we can put that there because it doesn’t really exist in the game. It’s not an obstacle to the ball. It’s going to be pretty cool to watch this fusion of real-world cameras and virtual-world cameras all stitched together to tell the story.”

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