Well, did you watch any of LIV Golf’s 2024 season-opener in Mexico? If the idea of tuning in tickled your fancy, or at least lightly brushed something close to your fancy, then you could stream all the action on YouTube.

Now, I appreciate that some of you, whose idea of a technologically advanced media outlet is Ceefax, may have just read that sentence and are perhaps now muttering, ‘what the Dickens is YouTube?’

In a nutshell, it’s a worldwide online video sharing and social media platform that primarily uses the VP9 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video codecs and the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP protocol. I bet that’s what you were going to say once you’d had a little think about it, eh? Now that we’ve clarified all that, let’s crack on.

Out of curiosity more than giddy enthusiasm, I stuck my head through LIV’s YouTube window for the odd gander over the weekend and, to be honest, I’m still not sure what to make of it all. That probably sums up my general feeling about much of what is going on in men’s golf at the moment too. Shrugging, wearied befuddlement.

As we’ve said before about LIV’s broadcast offering, the one thing it benefits from, at least, is the lack of adverts. By and large, it’s just golf shot after golf shot. And for folk who just want to watch golf shot after golf shot – you know, the reason people tune in to watch golf – then it’s almost bordering on revolutionary.

Let’s face it, nothing generates more harrumphing and grumbling among avid golf viewers than the relentless interruptions of the commercial break.

There are times, for instance, when it feels like the PGA Tour coverage manages to shoehorn in an advert in the brief swoosh of time that elapses between a player getting his club to the top of the backswing and coming down again to clatter the ruddy ba’. No wonder baffies occasionally get flung at the idiot box.

In the end, Chile’s Joaquin Niemann edged out Sergio Garcia at the fourth play-off that was concluded under the beaming light of the 18th green’s electronic leaderboard as darkness descended. It was quite the finish.

Jon Rahm, making his debut on the LIV circui, was right in the thick of it until he bogeyed his last two holes during an entertaining finale while the top-10 also featured such luminaries as Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Tyrrell Hatton, Cameron Smith and Louis Oosthuizen. It was a hardly a diddy leaderboard, was it?

But the whole thing still has a gimmicky air about it and the team element, the part of the format that LIV champions so strongly, still feels as if it has no wider resonance.

Rahm’s own four-man Legion XIII won the team event but he was so cheesed off about missing out on the individual title, the broadcasters had to do a bit of coaxing to get him to acknowledge that team success. The Ryder Cup it is not.

The music, meanwhile, that gets pumped around the venue doesn’t help its credibility, particularly when things are heating up at the sharp end. The sight of major winners and some of the best players in the world mulling over a 7-iron while the ‘doof-doof’ of various clap-and-shoogle tunes drift along in the background only adds to the slightly surreal spectacle. It all still feels like an exhibition. Albeit one with a first prize of $4 million.

Music, of course, is another of LIV’s things. It’s ‘Golf But Louder’ and all that eye-rolling marketing jazz. Whenever talk of music and golf crops up, I’m always reminded of good old Colin Montgomerie’s seething response when he was distracted by some disco hits blaring from a hospitality tent during a Spanish Open. “Is this a f***ing party or is it a golf tournament?” he hissed through clenched teeth.

After three-putting, you half expected Monty to be accompanied by his own soundtrack with, perhaps, the tumultuous strains of the Ride of Valkyries building to a crescendo as he thundered through the assembled golf writers like a wrecking ball ploughing into a condemned building.

But I digress. LIV’s 2024 campaign is off and running. A £3 billion deal, meanwhile, involving the PGA Tour and a posse of private equity investors known as the Strategic Sports Group (SSG) has been signed and sealed.

Negotiations involving the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour and the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) that bankrolls LIV are still on-going. Are you keeping up? Of course you’re not. You’re all scunnered by it.

Jordan Spieth said bluntly last week that the PGA Tour doesn’t need the PIF money, now that the SSG war chest has been secured.

Rory McIlroy countered Spieth’s flippant dismissal of the PIF, however, and insisted it’s best to keep the Saudis on side and work towards finalising a deal with them too. Keep your enemies close and all that.

Amid the on-going, complex negotiations, the guarantees of personal enrichment and the slog towards some kind of unification that would get all the best players competing against each other again, Adam Scott, the former Masters champion, made a pertinent point.

“Ultimately, no one will benefit if the fans aren’t excited to keep watching the best tournaments in the world,” he said.

Forget rummaging around on YouTube. If this fractured mess goes on much longer, we may all just switch off.