This week, Bryson DeChambeau is in Saudi Arabia, beginning his fourth year with LIV Golf. It is not surprising to see him 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 complex. Monday marked a deadline for him (and Jon Rahm and Cam Smith) to return to the PGA Tour along with Brooks Koepka. That deadline has now passed.
What now? DeChambeau will indeed honor the final year of his original LIV deal. But he clearly also gave some serious thought to how life could be different in the future. His recent comments took me back to a conversation we had in England six months ago 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 chat toward the media in general, both in its creation and in the way the powers that be (LIV And the PGA Tour) could model a greater share of media rights to players. Players getting a bigger piece of the pie is obviously a move that would benefit DeChambeau. But he is also an expert in this field; you could argue that no player in the history of the game has ever leaned on golf’s alternative viewing options as much as DeChambeau.
At least not a player since Arnold Palmer.
Palmer’s name came up several times in our conversation, enough for us to realize that The King in DeChambeau’s consciousness owns some serious real estate. Instead of discussing how YouTube had changed DeChambeau’s marketability, he chose to discuss it in terms of value he added to the ecosystem, just as Palmer did decades ago.
“From my perspective [marketability] is a side effect of providing value to the game,” DeChambeau told me. ‘What Arnold Palmer did? He created a golf channel! Like, he was so much more than just playing golf and winning golf tournaments, which in some ways was probably more meaningful in his career, his legacy and his footprint than him actually winning tournaments. Right? You could argue that.
“Did golf help him? One hundred percent. But I looked at it and thought: Man, why doesn’t everyone do something like that? It takes a unique individual, but from a marketability and value perspective, I try to offer just as much value possible.”
DeChambeau’s path to new-age value is well known. It is YouTube, which he considers the fairest platform to work with, as the revenue split with the creators is about 50-50, and sometimes even greater. He is worth an endless amount of money, but had to go “in the red” for a few years, he said, to make his account profitable. Now he has a staff of ten people working on his content business. The YouTube account has 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 expired, rather than signing over his rights to a specific tour. On the one hand, this could easily be a negotiating tactic – DeChambeau is in extension negotiations with LIV – but he admitted as much to me during that conversation in July.
DeChambeau says he will spend one to two days during each off week making YouTube videos. His “Break 50” videos – which he has made with the likes of Donald Trump and Steph Curry – each take about the same amount of time as his tournament rounds. His original dream for that series was “a podcast on steroids,” and whether or not he achieves that result, a schedule devoted entirely to YouTube is making his thoughts race.
“Here’s the deal,” he began. “If I didn’t play tournament golf, I could make three times as many YouTube videos. I could make a video almost every week. And come up with all these different series and ideas – what do you think those numbers could be if I went ahead and went all in on it? That’s where I saw Mr. Beast and Dude Perfect and what they did. I said: I want to create as much value as possible.”
He’s clearly not alone. LIV Golf also wants to create as much value as It can. Also the PGA Tour. But for a long time, the media rights of professional golfers — who in most cases operate as contractors offering their skills to a TV broadcast as they try to move up the rankings — have been lumped together to retain maximum value. The PGA Tour’s annual revenue from the sale (and strict protection) of TV media rights is approximately $1 billion. LIV Golf’s existence hurt those numbers, and the Tour has since taken steps to reshape its product for maximum profit. The Tour has long considered any professional golfer who plays a golf match on camera as part of its media package. But times are changing… slightly.
Last summer, the PGA Tour relaxed the rules for players creating golf content during practice rounds. For example, any member who wanted to make a video of themselves playing on the front nine at TPC Sawgrass during tournament week could now do so with no problem. In the past, Tour professionals had to request and receive special permission on a case-by-case basis. The doorway has only been cracked a little – for example, live video or videos involving more than one player still require approval – but things are moving in a positive direction. Away with 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 this – and for LIV to change too – DeChambeau simply wants his phone to ring.
“I wish more people would just call me, you know?” he said. “Just talk to me.”
He admitted that in the past he has been quite black and white in his approach to complex issues, and said that these days he tries to approach things more neutrally and operates more in the gray. But he would like “individuals who make decisions” to look at what he has done – for example by posting his entire message final round of the 2024 US Open at Pinehurst to his channel – and work with him to find a path for other professional golfers to follow.
By individuals who make decisions, he quite literally means Brian Rolapp, but also someone like Fred Ridley, chairman of Augusta National, or Sellers Shy, the head of CBS golf coverage. DeChambeau will tell you that he wasn’t nearly knowledgeable enough during his time on the PGA Tour (2016-2022) to really have an opinion on pushing the boundaries of media rights, but he’s learned a lot over the past four years. He considers himself fluent in LIV’s TV deal with FOX and the PGA Tour’s deal with NBC. Now he’s eager to sit down at a table to figure out how to push legacy systems, as he put it, “into the future.”
“I wish I was better able to make decisions about limits and tours,” DeChambeau said. “I know what value can be created if it is set up correctly in the media structure… I mean, I wish they would look at me and say: Okay, Bryson, how can we invest that into a small part of what we’re trying to accomplish? How can we implement that in a small way to test it? Instead of normal No, we know what we are doing.”
With the calendar showing February 2026, it still remains fascinating to predict where DeChambeau will appear next. Golf’s still embattled tours will fight for its allegiance. Gulf rulers will try to make him part of their plans. It’s hard to know what DeChambeau wants, how he’ll decide what’s next, where we’ll see him and where we won’t. His LIV golf season starts this week. The mystery of what’s next is already underway.
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