The return of Brooks Koepka this week coupled with the announcement that Patrick Reed is also aiming to re-join the PGA Tour by year-end has signaled one key point — no amount of money is enough for some of the best golfers on the planet to want to play around the world on a glorified exhibition circuit.
Let alone one that’s barely being watched or followed.
What must be said, of course, is that the rebel circuit’s launch fundamentally changed the way men’s professional golf now operates. Whether it was the increased globalization of the game, the structure of the schedule, or the money-on-offer, having a competing tour forced the long-standing owner of the game to pivot, not just once. The rumoured changes to the PGA Tour coming in 2027 are wholesale and aggressive.
And it does seem unfathomable for literally any sport, right? Imagine a new hockey league starting up after the Olympic break in February with 10 new teams playing two periods of four-on-four. And those teams feature talent akin to Leon Draisaitl, Brad Marchand, and Alex Ovechkin (appropriate hockey comps to Koepka, Dustin Johnson, and Phil Mickelson). That is, however, what happened in golf in June 2022 when LIV first started.
Now it seems more likely than unlikely that LIV won’t last.
Even the Public Investment Fund — the financial arm of the Saudi Arabian government — is starting to see they can’t continue to dump money into this thing. In October, The Athletic reported the U.K.-based LIV Golf Ltd. lost more than half-a-billion dollars (U.S.) in 2024, bringing the total losses for only that entity of the tour to $1.4 billion in less than three years. Recent international reports have also claimed pressure is mounting on the PIF and its portfolio of companies to “generate better returns in the near term,” per Reuters.
The PGA Tour is now under new leadership, with CEO Brian Rollapp taking the reins last June. One of his first acts of business was to install the new Returning Member Program, which pointed the crosshairs at the lone four golfers that the PGA Tour would like to see come back: Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, and Cameron Smith. Smith, who won The Open Championship in 2022, was never going to return. Koepka has (and is in the field this week at the Farmers Insurance Open and next week at the WM Phoenix Open). It appears DeChambeau and Rahm will not take up the offer by its expiring deadline on Feb. 2, although you could make a case that both were thinking about it.
Rahm, who reportedly went to LIV on a contract worth upwards of $300 million, likely believed he was the man who was going to tip everything into a merger. He may very well be the last man still stuck there — given his contract started a year later than the aforementioned trio. DeChambeau has made it clear that his negotiations are ongoing. It’s even been floated he may not play golf on a professional tour — but instead just make videos on YouTube (where his channel has more than 2.5 million subscribers) and play the majors.
Reed, meanwhile, announced he was coming back via a unique set of guidelines due to the fact he resigned his TOUR membership prior to competing in any unauthorized tournaments (and does not have any outstanding violations of the Tour’s regulations). He has won nine times on the PGA Tour and just last week captured the Hero Dubai Desert Classic on the DP World Tour. The guidelines state that Reed will be eligible to return to PGA Tour-sanctioned competition as a non-member in late August and, if he plays a full season on the DP World Tour and finishes in the top 10 in its order of merit, he will re-earn full PGA Tour status that way.
Reed, the No. 29-ranked golfer in the world, has also long been well documented as a villain (Kevin Kisner once told Golf Digest that Reed’s former teammates at the University of Georgia hated him. “I don’t know that they’d piss on him if he was on fire,” Kisner said) and the PGA Tour — as an entertainment product — could use people like him. According to The Telegraph, Reed, who won the Masters in 2018, passed on a new deal with LIV Golf despite the league meeting his contract demands.
“I’m a traditionalist at heart, and I was born to play on the PGA Tour,” Reed said, in part, in a statement when it was announced he would not be playing LIV Golf in 2026.
As long as the PIF continues to fund LIV it will not be going anywhere (of note, there is a Canadian who is a full-time member of the circuit for the first time this year as Richard T. Lee earned one of three spots via the tour’s promotions qualifier a few weeks ago), but Koepka’s return to the PGA Tour Thursday got him emotional. For the first time in a while, he said from California, he cared about golf again.
“I think I’ve fallen back in love with the game,” Koepka said.
“Honestly (now) watching my son play a little bit and wanting to be able to see him watch me, or I guess want him to watch me play well and realize how much this game’s given me, how fun it is and how cool it is to just be out here.”
One has arrived, one is on his way, and more are set to come — as Kevin Na, Hudson Swafford and Pat Perez have also reinstated their memberships with hopes of returning to the PGA Tour.
“As you’re seeing, kind of the dominoes are starting to fall of maybe those guys on the LIV Tour are not that happy out there, and the grass is not greener on the other side,” said Harris English, who played one season of university golf with Reed and is the defending champion at this week’s Farmers Insurance Open.
While Koepka’s return — and to a lesser extent, Reed’s — can firmly be seen as having cake and eating it too, Canadian Corey Conners has no qualms.
Conners, who holds a degree in actuary mathematics from Kent State University and is likely one of the smartest players on the PGA Tour, was just re-appointed to the PGA Tour’s Player Advisory Council — a collection of a 16 golfers that meets with and recommends changes to the Tour’s policy board — and said he “fully supports” the PGA Tour’s recent reinstatement decisions.
“Having (Koepka) back on the PGA Tour makes the PGA Tour better,” Conners told Sportsnet.ca. “(And Reed is) a guy who has had success on the PGA Tour and success in golf and it speaks to the direction the PGA Tour is going, that people are wanting to come back — and it’s good to have those guys back.”
The PGA Tour has its first set of signature events in February at Pebble Beach and the Tiger Woods-hosted Genesis Invitational at Riviera (where the 2028 Olympic competition will be held) before heading to Florida for its annual sunshine state swing and, soon after, the Masters.
But unlike the last three years, it’s not the first place where the best in the game are going to be gathering together again.
Brooks Koepka is back on the PGA Tour. More are following.
“It seems like some of those guys are maybe starting to realize that they’re not getting everything that they wanted out of going over there,” Rory McIlroy said at TGL earlier in the week. “And that’s obviously a great thing for the PGA Tour.”
