Rick Shiels and Legends Tour boss embroiled in war of words

The chairman of the Legends Tour has responded to Rick Shiels casting doubt on the way the circuit has become the most subscribed-to golf tour on YouTube.

It was reported last month that the former European Seniors Tour has overtaken the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and LIV Golf to become the No.1 golf tour on the video sharing platform.

The circuit has 1.75 million subscribers, putting it ahead of the PGA Tour on 1.44 million, the DP World on 471,000 and LIV on 368,000.

At the time, Ryan Howsam said: “The Legends Tour is truly global, with a cast-list of some of the most successful golfers to have played the sport in the past 40 years.

“We now go to Vietnam, India, Zambia, across Europe as well as the UK and USA. We’re a global business and that’s why we are appealing to golf fans and sponsors internationally.

“We’ve got so many players on this tour who are household names. Many of our fans grew up watching and supporting these great players. Now they continue to follow their progress and want to see more interviews and action from them via our social media and digital channels.”

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However, the news was met with skepticism in some quarters, prompting Shiels – who has a subscriber base of 2.9 million on YouTube – to discuss it on a recent episode of his podcast.

He and co-host Guy Charnock pored over the growth of the Legends Tour on YouTube, noting that, not only does it have more subscribers than the PGA Tour and LIV Golf put together, but that it has gained more subscribers than Shiels’ own channel, despite accumulating significantly less video views: four million this calendar year, versus 76 million views for Shiels.

Describing the increase in subscribers as “a bit fishy”, Charnock said: “Something is very, very, very, very strange there.”

“If there’s something dodgy going on,” added Shiels, “we need to call it out, because that is dodgy as. Dodgy as you like.”

You can watch the full video here.

In response, Howsam and Keith Mitchell, the Legends Tour’s chief marketing officer, have released a video of their own, in which they address several of the points raised by Shiels and Charnock.

“They haven’t asked us any questions about how we’ve done it,” says Howsam. “I think I heard the word ‘cheat’. Interesting.

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“I think what these guys are confusing is an organic strategy with an organic plus paid strategy. It’s clear that they’re getting very, very confused about what you can do with some of the simple tools that are available to anybody that wants to utilise the channels.

“What we’ve done is take, in this particular case, YouTube’s tools and optimised that and pushed it out to an audience that is very, very simple to do.”

He added: “What they’re insinuating, somehow, is that we’ve gone out and found a load of spam bots or whatever it is.

“But let’s just be clear, didn’t YouTube give us a plaque when we got to one million [subscribers]? I would think that YouTube, when they do that, do a certain amount of due diligence to know that what they’re offering, when they put this out there, when they give that award, they’re making sure that this award stands for something.

“They’re comparing apples and pears. These are completely different businesses. They are building an organic audience with their organic strategy. We’ve got some organic but we’ve got a media budget to go and acquire customers. Completely different.”

A visibly annoyed Howsam concluded: “The worst thing is people not talking about you. They’ve asked to reply. We’ve reached out to them to reply. I mean, they’re actually doing our job for us. They’re completely wrong with what they’re saying, and if they’d just reached out to us, like they should have done, we could have talked them through.”

Watch the full Legends Tour response here.

Michael McEwan is the Deputy Editor of bunkered and has been part of the team since 2004. In that time, he has interviewed almost every major figure within the sport, from Jack Nicklaus, to Rory McIlroy, to Donald Trump. The host of the multi award-winning bunkered Podcast and a member of Balfron Golfing Society, Michael is the author of three books and is the 2023 PPA Scotland 'Writer of the Year' and 'Columnist of the Year'. Dislikes white belts, yellow balls and iron headcovers. Likes being drawn out of the media ballot to play Augusta National.

Deputy Editor