2025 To Be Year Of Innovation, Change

High-tech golf league kicks off calendar that also features athletics' Grand Slam Track

- Reuters

LONDON - As a jam-packed sporting year featuring a much-praised Olympic Games rolls to a close, it is tempting to expect that 2025 will be a more sedate one.

But that is not the nature of a sports industry continually evolving to slake the thirst of a demanding public that seemingly can never get enough of their chosen product.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that tradition and maintaining the status quo no longer cut it in a competitive world intent on wringing every dollar out of sporting endeavour.

Novel ways of delivering sport to a high-tech generation are now paramount and the Christmas decorations will hardly have come down before golf – arguably the most conservative of all sports – welcomes the aptly named Tomorrow's Golf League (TGL) which kicks off in Florida in January.

Created by former world No. 1s Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, the new made-for-TV indoor team format featuring state-of-the-art golf simulators and shot clocks resembles a cross between an arcade game and crazy golf.

However, the world's best are on board for a venture designed to hook a generation of fans who no longer have the time or patience to watch five-hour rounds.