This week Bryson DeChambeau is in Saudi Arabia, starting his fourth year with LIV Golf. It is not surprising to see it in the Middle East. But when, a few weeks ago, the PGA Tour opened the door for recent major winners to make an easy return, DeChambeau’s continued commitment to LIV became a little more complicated. Monday marked a deadline by which he (and Jon Rahm and Cam Smith) could join Brooks Koepka returns to the PGA Tour. That deadline has now passed.
now what? DeChambeau will indeed honor the final year of his original LIV deal. But he’s also given serious thought to how life might be different moving forward. His last comments took me back to a conversation we had six months ago in England during a practice round.
At the time, my goal was to write about DeChambeau’s wildly successful foray into YouTube, so that’s where our conversation began. But DeChambeau is a big thinker, so he steered our conversation toward media in general, both creating it and the powers that be (LIV AND the PGA Tour) can model a larger share of media rights for players. Players getting a bigger piece of the pie is, of course, a move that would benefit DeChambeau. But he is also an expert in space; one could argue that no player in the history of the game has ever leaned into alternative ways of looking at golf like DeChambeau.
At least no player since then Arnold Palmer.
Palmer’s name came up many times in our conversation, enough to realize that King owns serious real estate in DeChambeau’s consciousness. Instead of discussing how YouTube had changed DeChambeau’s marketability, he chose to discuss it in terms of value vessel he was adding to the ecosystem, just as Palmer had done decades earlier.
“From my point of view, (marketability) is an ancillary thing to delivery value vessel in the game,” DeChambeau told me. “What did Arnold Palmer do? He created a golf channel! For example, he was much more outside the game of golf and winning golf tournaments, which was probably more meaningful, in a sense, in his career and his legacy and his footprint, than winning tournaments. Right? You can argue that.
“Now, did golf help? One hundred percent. But I saw it and I’m like Man, why doesn’t everyone do something like this? It takes a unique individual, but from a marketability perspective to evaluate – I try to provide as much as possible value vessel as much as possible.”
DeChambeau’s path to new-age value is familiar. It is YouTube, which he considers the fairest platform to work with, given that the revenue split with creators is about 50-50, and sometimes even more. He has an infinite amount of money, but he had to go “in the red” for several years, he said, to make his account profitable. Now he has a staff of 10 people working on his content business. The YouTube account boasts more than 2.5 million subscribers, more than the PGA Tour and LIV Golf combined.
Golf fans may have scoffed in January when DeChambeau first announced that he would consider simply playing golf on YouTube after his LIV deal ends, rather than signing away his rights to any particular tournament. On the one hand, this could easily be a negotiating tactic – DeChambeau is in extension negotiations with LIV — but he admitted the same thing to me during that conversation in July.
DeChambeau says he will spend one to two days during each week off to create YouTube videos. His “Break 50” videos — which he’s done with the likes of Donald Trump and Steph Curry — each take roughly the same amount of time as his tour rounds. His original dream for that series was “a podcast on steroids,” and whether or not he achieved that result, a schedule devoted entirely to YouTube keeps his mind racing.
“Here’s the deal,” he began. “If I wasn’t playing tournament golf, I could make 3 times the amount of videos on YouTube. I could make a video almost every week. And coming up with all these different series and ideas – what do you think those numbers could be if I went ahead and went all in? Here’s what I saw God the beast AND The Perfect Friend and what they did I said, I want to create as much value as I can.“
He is definitely not alone. LIV Golf also wants to create as much value as possible IT can. The PGA Tour, too. But for a long time the media rights of professional players – who operate in most cases as contractors offering their skills on a telecast while trying to climb the leaderboard – have been bundled together to preserve maximum value. The PGA Tour’s annual revenue from the sale (and strict protection) of television media rights is about $1 billion. The existence of LIV Golf hurt those numbers, and the Tour has since made moves to reshape its product for maximum profits. The Tour has long considered any professional golfer who plays a golf tournament on camera as part of its media package. But times are changing… a little.
Last summer, the PGA Tour loosened its regulations on players creating golf content during practice rounds. Any member who wanted to, say, create a video of themselves playing the front nine at TPC Sawgrass during tournament week would now be allowed to do so without issue. In the past, Tour pros would have to request and receive special permits on a case-by-case basis. The gateway has been cracked just a little – for example, live video or videos involving more than one player still require approval – but it’s a move in a positive direction. The move away from a model that DeChambeau called “monopolistic.”
And just because he sees it that way doesn’t mean he isn’t fascinated by the PGA Tour’s rights model. “It’s impressive,” DeChambeau said, adding that the Tour’s once completely nonprofit status made it doubly effective. To change that—and for LIV to change, too—DeChambeau just wants his phone to ring.
“I wish more people would call me, you know?” he said. “Just talk to me.”
He admitted he was pretty black and white in his approach to complex issues in the past and said he’s trying to approach things more neutrally these days, operating more in the gray. But he would like “individuals making decisions” to look at what he has done – for example, by posting all the final round of the 2024 US Open at Pinehurst on his channel – and work with him to find a path that other pro players can follow.
By individuals making decisions, he literally means Brian Rolapp, but also someone like Fred Ridley, chairman of Augusta National, or Sellers Shy, head of CBS golf coverage. DeChambeau will tell you he didn’t have enough knowledge during his time on the PGA Tour (2016-2022) to really think about pushing the boundaries of media rights, but he’s learned a lot in the past four years. He considers himself fluent in LIV’s television deal with FOX and the PGA Tour’s deal with NBC. Now, he desperately wants a seat at some sort of table to figure out how outdated systems can be pushed, as he put it, “into the future.”
“I wish I had better ability to make decisions about boundaries and tournaments,” DeChambeau said. “I know the value that can be created if it’s placed correctly in the media structure… I mean, I’d like them to look at me and be like, Okay, Bryson, how do we invest this into a small part of what we’re trying to accomplish? How can we implement it in a small way to test it? Instead of just No, we know what we’re doing.“
Now, as the calendar turns to February 2026, it remains as fascinating as ever to predict where DeChambeau will appear next. Still warring golf tournaments will fight for his loyalty. The Gulf powers will try to make it part of their plans. It’s hard to know what DeChambeau wants, how he’ll decide what happens next, where we’ll see him and where we won’t. His LIV Golf season begins this week. The mystery of what happens next is already underway.
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