Rick Shiels is the biggest golf YouTuber in the world, boasting over 2.9 million subscribers on his main channel.
This year he shocked the YouTube golf world when he announced that he was signing a deal with LIV Golf as an official ambassador and content creator ahead of the 2025 campaign.
Golf Monthly's Joe Ferguson recently caught up with Shiels at the LIV Golf Singapore event for our latest 'Monthly Meets' episode to find out how the announcement went down, how he's dealt with negative comments and how long the move has been in the pipeline.
"It's been a wild adventure if I'm honest with you," Shiels said.
"It's been really really fun. The time I've had with the players has been incredible. When I was flicking through my phone the other day, the players that I've already filmed with, it's crazy like Brooks Koepka, Jon Rahm, Joaquin Niemann, Sergio Garcia, the list is astonishing already and we're only three months in and it's going to continue to get better."
While Shiels is one of the most popular figures in the game, his move to LIV Golf did come with some backlash - like we've seen with many big names making the switch over to the 54-hole circuit.
Shiels lost a number of subscribers on his main channel and also received negative comments from fans, although he had a unique method to make sure he was prepared for whatever came his way.
"I thought everybody in the world was going to absolutely love the announcement," he joked.
"Yeah, listen, I went into it knowing full well there was going to be some kickback and some negativity around it, and I did a really good exercise actually just before I announced it.
"The day before, I spent an afternoon writing down every negative comment someone could ever leave, literally pages and pages of negative comments, and I thought to myself if somebody writes something worse than that tomorrow, fair play, right? I'll give them a round of applause.
"I’d seen it when players had signed for LIV I knew what it was going to be like."
And while the majority of the reaction was expected, one specific angle was not.
"I think probably the one that maybe caught me off guard or surprised me a little bit is that so many people thought I was really really anti-LIV," he said.
"And it's not the fact I've been anti-LIV - don’t get me wrong, I don't think it's a perfect product yet - but I think every single event is getting better and better."
Deleting social media from his phone and working with a sports psychologist-come-life coach has helped him ignore the 'haters' and see his new venture from a different perspective.
"I have a psychologist so I've been working with one for a while," he said.
"He used to work with Tommy Fleetwood, he’s called Tom Young and he's actually a sports psychologist but I've kind of been using him not as a sports psychologist really, almost like a life coach because again I don't think we're programmed for this negativity so he's definitely helped me.
"It was his idea to write the ideas down before the announcement video went live. I think it might have been my wife's idea about deleting all social media off my phone, but I suppose that's been my discipline to some degree.
"I stopped drinking eight months ago, so not drinking and trying to exercise a little bit more, trying to, look after my mental health has been a real kind of game changer for me.
"I feel happier and I feel, at the end of the day, we're playing golf and we're making golf videos for a living. It's not bad, it's not that important in the grand scheme of things.
"When you look at the world and all the trouble that's happening in the world, you think, how am I getting negativity for making some fun YouTube videos? Like it's crazy really!"
Shiels, who says unlocking personalities, bridging the gap between fans and teams and generally working on fan engagement are improvements LIV Golf can make to its product, revealed that his move to the circuit has been in the works ever since the first event.
"It's been in the pipeline for a long time and that’s genuinely ever since it first came out," he said.
"It’s not something I've ever really said before but one of the conversations that happened really early doors when LIV first came out is they didn't have anywhere to host the first event - as in the actual broadcast - and one of the very first conversations was they came to me to push it out on my channel. They wanted to put it on my YouTube channel.
"This is the first-ever event at Centurion and I was like, 'I don't know how this is going to pan out,' so I didn't go with that.
"So I've always had dialogue with LIV over the years and then in February, almost the same time last year, conversations took place about what involvement I could have and I saw an opportunity to put a content plan together.
"They wanted more exposure for their players, events, etc. I felt like having time with players and traveling the world to these amazing places was going to benefit our content and the viewers were going to love it.
"It was like, why don't we work together? And this kind of works quite nicely."
