The PGA Tour and DraftKings today announced an expansion of their multi-year content and marketing relationship that now designates DraftKings as the first “Official Betting Operator of the PGA Tour.” In July 2019, DraftKings became the Tour’s first “Official Daily Fantasy Game of the PGA Tour” as part of a multi-year, exclusive arrangement.
“The growth in consumption and fan engagement we have seen over the last year in our DraftKings Daily Fantasy games has been tremendous,” said Norb Gambuzza, PGA Tour Senior Vice President, Media and Gaming. “The expansion of the relationship to now include sports betting is a natural evolution and one that fully supports and promotes the PGA Tour’s objectives of reaching and engaging new segments of fans while introducing them to our players, tournaments and media platforms.”
By becoming the first to join the Tour’s Official Betting Operator program, DraftKings will have rights in the United States to use PGA Tour’s trademarks and to advertise on the Tour’s media and partner platforms, plus content and video allowing DraftKings’ Sportsbook to create pre- and post-game betting programming, as well as distribution of highlights to users who have placed bets.
“DraftKings and the PGA Tour have continued to make history with the innovative additions to our agreement which began last year,” said Ezra Kucharz, Chief Business Officer of DraftKings. “Golf has been an especially important outlet for fan engagement over these past few months, and this latest collaboration is a significant next step for both the golf and gaming industries.”
Several of the most popularly bet PGA Tour events in DraftKings company history have occurred since the Tour’s return in June. Currently, in terms of sports betting, golf is DraftKings’ fourth most popular sport.
Following the Supreme Court’s repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018, the Tour instituted an integrity program in collaboration with Genius Sports to protect its competitions from betting-related corruption. Later that year, the Tour announced a global partnership with IMG ARENA to license its official live-scoring data to betting operators all over the world.
In July 2019 following an update to its sponsorship policies in the gaming category, the Tour partnered with DraftKings to relaunch “PGA Tour’s DraftKings Fantasy Golf” with exclusive intellectual property to differentiate DraftKings in the daily fantasy space. This past March, The Action Network and the PGA Tour announced the launch of GolfBet, a first-of-its-kind golf-focused betting-content platform.
