Minecraft CEO Is Looking To Turn His New LIV Golf Team Into A Yankees-Like Brand As Golf In 2025 Stays Bizarre

Whether you think professional golf is in a good spot, bad spot, or couldn't care less about the current status of the game, one thing everyone can agree on is that the sport is in a unique situation. 

We have the PGA Tour operating over here, LIV Golf doing its thing over there, and the Tour holding meetings with the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) and President Trump to try and strike a deal. There is also the simulator TGL league tied to the PGA Tour that just paid the winning four-man team $9 million for being the best at hitting golf balls into a movie screen.

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Weird, bizarre, fascinating, and exhausting are all words that come to mind when looking at professional golf at the moment.

If it were 10 years ago, the following headline would make absolutely no sense whatsoever, but when we see ‘Minecraft CEO Seeks To Make LIV’s Cleeks Into Yankees-Like Brand,' well, we just chalk it up to being another day that ends in the letter ‘y’ in 2025.

Two-time major champion Martin Kaymer headlines LIV Golf's Cleeks. (Photo by Sarah Reed/Getty Images)

For anyone unaware, which included me before digging into the story, Jonas Mårtensson took over as the general manager of the Cleeks, one of the 13 LIV Golf teams, this past summer. 

He took on the role after spending 11 years as a leader and builder of the video game Minecraft, which has sold more than 300 millions copies and is, without question, one of the most-played video games of all time.

Mårtensson also spent time as an advisor at the Microsoft-owned publisher Mojang before diving head first into the LIV Golf world, and by head first we mean it, as he has ginormous expectations for the Cleeks.

"It’s about building communities. We managed to build a fairly big community with Minecraft," Mårtensson told Sportico. "This is a completely different beast, and we’ll have to do it very differently. … You want to build something people can identify with, I think that’s the correlation.

Brand—and consumption—is about identity, really. You consume to be part of something or to get to where you want to be," he continued. Though Cleeks Golf Club is his first time working on a sports team, he has a specific inspiration in the field for what he envisions with Cleeks. "In Europe there are a lot of people running around with New York Yankees caps. They don’t really know it’s a baseball team, but they like the brand and the lifestyle vibe that they have built into that brand."

While Mårtensson is well aware that the Cleeks have quite the hill to climb to become a global brand like the Yankees are, he certainly has the track record of building brands and communities in the past. His largest had to do with video games and not a still very new league in a niche sport, but you can't fault the guy for aiming for the stars.