For some players, moving to LIV made perfect sense. Veteran Englishman Richard Bland cashed in on the romance of his one DP World Tour victory, the 2021 British Masters, which effectively earned him an invitation to play LIV tournaments.
He did not receive a signing-on fee, but in 55 tournaments has netted nearly $20m (£14.8m).
In all, 105 players have so far competed on the LIV circuit. The lowest earners have been Englishman Oliver Fisher and Thailand’s Ratchanon Chantananuwat, who each picked up $136,000 (£100,000) from their lone appearances.
When LIV began in 2022, it attracted some of golf’s biggest names with huge signing-on fees. Phil Mickelson did not dispute reports that he was given $200m (£147m) to defect from the PGA Tour.
Smith, Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Patrick Reed (now back on the DP World Tour) and the then European Ryder Cup captain Henrik Stenson were other expensive recruits.
“If LIV takes five players a year for five years, they can gut us,” PGA Tour board member Jimmy Dunne told a senate committee in July 2023. The American circuit was rattled.
Initially, they struck a “framework agreement” with the Saudi PIF to try to heal the divide. That halted expensive and potentially, for both sides, revelatory legal proceedings.
But the faltering agreement foundered when the PGA Tour valued LIV at just $500m as Donald Trump tried to broker a peace deal in the White House at the start of his second term as US president in early 2025.
The Saudis felt the valuation was derisory and walked out of the talks. By then, the PGA Tour was much more bullish.
It was turning itself into a for-profit company with its players qualifying for potentially lucrative equity. The tour also won backing from the powerful Strategic Sports Group, which ploughed in an initial $1.5bn investment.
But with profit now the primary motive and a need to hammer down costs, the move has not been without pain. The PGA Tour is cutting 4% of its workforce with 56 job losses.
Prize money has gone through the roof, though. The Cadillac Championship, starting on Thursday, is one of several $20m Signature Events,, external with $3.6m going to the winner.
Those are LIV numbers. Such has been the inflationary effect of what seemed a bottomless pit of money coming into professional golf.
