How Does the PGA Tour Actually Make Money?
The strangest business model in sport — and the man who built it (and why LIV couldn’t compete)
Warning - this is a slightly longer piece than normal so if you’re keen, grab a coffee and buckle up.
Last year, Scottie Scheffler earned $54.6 million on the course.
That’s more than LeBron James.
More than Super Bowl-winning quarterback Sam Darnold.
And only slightly behind Patrick Mahomes (highest paid QB in the NFL).
Which raised a question in my head:
How can a golfer make NFL-quarterback money when golf attracts a fraction of the audience?
Scheffler’s Open Championship win in 2025 averaged around 4.1 million American viewers.
The Super Bowl averaged 127 million.
That’s not a small gap.
That’s an entirely different universe of attention.
And yet professional golf continues to generate enormous wealth for its players.
The answer is that the PGA Tour operates one of the strangest - and smartest -business models in sport.
A model built not primarily on fans…
but on sponsors, tax structures, corporate hospitality, and one extraordinarily influential man named Deane Beman.
You might have seen in the last week that the PGA Tour is making some big changes to how it will do things going forward but I’m a big believer that context is everything, how can we have an opinion on something when we don’t know the full story?
So here’s everything you need to know.
The Puzzle at the Heart of Professional Golf
At first glance, golf shouldn’t work economically. At least nowhere near as well as it does (as LIV have found out).
Yes, golf performs well with affluent audiences. Yes, corporate hospitality is valuable. And yes, major championships still attract huge crowds in person.
The Open Championship at Portrush drew around 278,000 spectators across the week last year — far more than could ever fit inside a stadium like the Super Bowl.
But live attendance is not what drives revenue in modern sport.
Television is.
The Premier League, for example, earns roughly £6.7 billion annually from broadcast deals alone. Matchday revenue is important, but comparatively small (about £1 billion).
In most sports, TV ratings are oxygen.
Which is why golf’s economics are so strange.
Because despite relatively modest television audiences, the PGA Tour generates somewhere between $1.8 and $1.9 billion in annual revenue.
So how?
To understand that, you have to go back around fifty years.
The Problem the PGA Tour Faced
Deane Beman was head of the PGA Tour In the 1970s and he knew professional golf faced two enormous problems.
The first was television.
Football, basketball and tennis happen in contained environments. You point cameras at a pitch or court and the sport naturally translates to television.
Golf was different.
A tournament sprawled across 150 acres. Players were scattered all over the course. Live broadcasting was expensive, complicated and technically difficult.
Deane Beman understood that golf would probably never compete with the NFL or NBA as a pure television product.
The second problem was even more important.
The Tour was a travelling circus. Every Sunday night it packed up and moved to another city. That only works if thousands of local volunteers are willing to help run the event.
But why would they?
Why would communities repeatedly give up their weekends to help millionaire athletes pass through town for four days before disappearing again?
Beman realised the Tour needed something bigger than golf itself.
He needed a system where everybody benefited when the Tour arrived.
And that insight changed everything.
Beman’s Solution
Beman’s idea was deceptively simple:
Whatever money remained after a tournament would leave the city it just whipped through went to local charities.
That’s nice but the brilliance was in the structure underneath it.
The PGA Tour itself was organised as a tax-exempt trade association — essentially a governing body representing professional golfers (kind of like a chamber of commerce).
But individual tournaments were structured differently.
Most events were set up as local non-profit organisations, with surplus revenues flowing directly back into the community through charitable donations.
That single structural decision solved multiple problems at once.
Volunteers suddenly weren’t just helping rich golfers play a sport.
They were helping raise money for hospitals, schools and local causes.
Cities stopped viewing Tour events as temporary invasions and started treating them as civic institutions worth protecting.
And corporations gained something extremely valuable:
a prestigious marketing platform wrapped inside a charitable contribution.
In practice, that meant companies like FedEx, John Deere and BMW weren’t simply funding prize money. Their sponsorships were also tied to charitable organisations, creating significant tax advantages while generating positive PR. It made sponsoring PGA Tour events easier to justify in the boardroom.
The alignment was almost perfect.
Most sports leagues extract value from cities (like FIFA are doing right now at the World Cup which you can read here)
Beman designed a system where cities felt they benefited from hosting the Tour.
That distinction became the foundation of modern professional golf.
Why the PGA Tour Doesn’t Depend on TV Like Other Sports
Here’s the really important consequence of Beman’s model:
The PGA Tour never became fully dependent on television ratings in the same way as other major sports.
That doesn’t mean TV money isn’t important — it absolutely is. Media rights remain the Tour’s single largest revenue stream.
But unlike the NFL or Premier League, the entire economic structure doesn’t collapse if ratings soften slightly.
Because sponsorships are such a huge part of the business.
And golf sponsorship works differently from almost every other sport.
In football, sponsors interrupt the product.
In golf, sponsors become part of the product itself.
You cannot talk about the Honda Classic, the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, or the Zurich Classic without saying the sponsor’s name out loud.
Every leaderboard becomes branded content.
Every highlight package doubles as advertising.
Every historic victory keeps paying dividends years later.
Tiger Woods won the Bridgestone Invitational eight times.
And here I am, decades later, still saying the word “Bridgestone.”
That kind of long-tail brand exposure is almost impossible to buy elsewhere in sport.
According to Adam Schupak, Deane Beman’s biographer, companies spending around $7–8 million sponsoring PGA Tour events could receive many multiples of that value in media exposure and brand association.
And because many tournaments were tied to charitable structures, sponsorship carried additional financial advantages too.
It was an extraordinarily efficient system.
The Five Ways the PGA Tour Makes Money
Today, the PGA Tour’s revenues broadly fall into five categories:
Revenue Streams
Media Rights $750m
Sponsorships $422m
Royalties & Licensing $302m
Tournament Management Fees $200m
Investment Income $130m
The important thing isn’t the exact numbers.
It’s the balance.
In most major sports, media rights dominate everything.
In golf, sponsorships, licensing, hospitality and corporate relationships collectively matter just as much.
That’s why the Tour has historically been able to pay players extraordinary sums despite attracting significantly smaller audiences than football or basketball.
At its core, the PGA Tour has always operated less like a traditional sports league and more like a massive corporate partnership ecosystem.
Membership at Roam Golf Club gets you access to our golf events across Ireland at places like Rosapenna plus access to articles like this one.
What were LIV actually trying to do?
For decades, the system in professional golf worked almost perfectly.
Sponsors stayed happy.
Prize money kept increasing.
Players became wealthier every year.
Then LIV Golf arrived with a new business model.
They weren’t trying to play the same game as the PGA Tour.
It’s easy to look at LIV’s enormous losses and conclude it was simply an exercise in sportswashing. That may have been part of the story, but it’s also an oversimplification. LIV’s backers weren’t acting like reckless billionaires burning cash for fun - they believed they were investing in assets that could eventually appreciate in value.
They just placed a bet that lost.
The problem the PGA Tour has always faced is that their players are essentially independent contractors and the top stars can pick and choose when and where they play.
LIV’s leadership wasn’t really trying to build another PGA Tour.
They were trying to build something much closer to a franchise sports league.
The PGA Tour’s value has always flowed through tournaments, sponsors and media rights. Players are independent contractors competing for prize money.
LIV wanted value to live somewhere else entirely:
The teams.
The theory was straightforward.
Spend heavily to acquire star players, place them inside permanent franchises, build fan loyalty around those franchises, and eventually create assets that could be bought, sold and invested in.
The PGA Tour saw a rival paying players far more than the underlying business could justify. Jon Rahm reportedly received around $300 million. Bryson DeChambeau around $125 million. Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson and others received similarly eye-watering guarantees.
From a traditional sports-business perspective, none of it made sense.
But LIV wasn’t trying to build another PGA Tour. It was trying to build golf’s version of the NFL.
LIV wasn’t spending $100 million-plus on players just to improve television ratings.
It was attempting to create sports franchises worth billions.
Take Bryson DeChambeau’s Crushers GC.
Viewed through the PGA Tour lens, paying enormous sums to sign DeChambeau looked irrational.
Viewed through a franchise lens, the logic becomes clearer.
If DeChambeau could become the face of a team that eventually attracted sponsors, media rights, merchandise sales and outside investors, the team itself might one day become worth far more than the initial player investment.
This is essentially the same playbook being pursued by TGL.
The indoor golf league founded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy has already demonstrated that investors are willing to place significant values on golf teams themselves. Recent transactions reportedly valued Los Angeles Golf Club and Atlantic Drive GC at roughly $90 million and $100 million respectively.
LIV was trying to graft a team model onto a sport where fans have historically supported individual players rather than franchises. The strategy looks like it was inspired by the Ryder Cup - the one event where golf fans genuinely rally behind teams rather than individuals.
LIV attempted to recreate that atmosphere every week.
It just didn’t resonate with golf fans.
Golf fans care about Rory McIlroy.
They care about Scottie Scheffler.
They care about Bryson DeChambeau.
They don’t naturally care whether Crushers GC beats Smash GC.
That distinction may sound small, but commercially it’s big.
Because franchise valuations only work if fans develop emotional attachments to the teams themselves.
And that is where LIV struggled.
The league could buy star players.
It could guarantee enormous purses.
But it couldn’t manufacture decades of tribal loyalty overnight.
When I think of the team the football team I support (Manchester United) I have a deep connection that goes back to when they won the Treble in 1999, I was six years old and my dad was jumping around the living room. Or the Munich air disaster in 1958 and the rebuilding of a squad that went on to become champions of Europe 10 years later.
Liverpool fans will have their own version of an emotional connection to their club.
It started with emotion, the wealth that followed actually detracts from the love for our club, it doesn’t enhance it.
Which is why LIV’s business challenge was never simply attracting viewers.
It was proving that golf teams could become valuable standalone assets which I believe could actually happen, but it needs to start with emotion and the money will follow, not the other way around.
So while critics often describe LIV as a failed business experiment, that’s not quite accurate.
The real question is whether its central bet was wrong:
Can professional golf create team franchises that people care about enough to support, invest in and ultimately value like teams in other sports?
So far, the evidence is mixed.
TGL has shown there is investor appetite for golf franchises.
But LIV has yet to demonstrate that those franchises can develop the kind of fan attachment required to justify the valuations its model depends upon.
And that may explain why the pressure from LIV ultimately pushed the PGA Tour toward a very different solution.
Rather than trying to create value through teams, the Tour chose to create value through ownership.
In early 2024, the organisation launched PGA Tour Enterprises — a new for-profit entity backed by Strategic Sports Group, a consortium of billionaire sports owners led by Fenway Sports Group.
The deal committed up to $3 billion in investment.
For the first time in modern PGA Tour history, elite players would effectively become equity holders in a for-profit sports business.
That would have been almost unthinkable under the old structure.
But professional golf had entered a completely different era.
The Big Changes Coming to the Tour
That pressure is also driving the Tour’s latest proposed changes.
From 2028 onwards, the PGA Tour appears set to move towards a more streamlined two-tier structure.
A smaller elite “Championship Tier” would feature the biggest stars competing in limited-field events with elevated purses, while a secondary “Challenger Tier” would operate with promotion and relegation.
The FedEx Cup format may disappear entirely.
The Tour Championship is expected to rotate venues instead of remaining permanently at East Lake.
And for serious golf fans, there’s even the possibility of iconic venues like Cypress Point, Pine Valley and Seminole entering the rotation.
On the surface, these changes can feel confusing.
But they actually follow the exact same logic Beman introduced decades ago:
Concentrate star power.
Increase the value of the product.
Protect sponsor interest.
Keep broadcasters paying premium prices.
The model is evolving.
But the underlying philosophy remains remarkably similar.
So, Back to Scottie
So yes, Scottie Scheffler can make NFL-quarterback money despite playing in front of a fraction of the audience.
Because the PGA Tour was never built like the NFL.
Deane Beman created a machine powered by sponsors, corporate relationships, charitable structures and local communities who all benefited when the Tour succeeded.
For fifty years, it became one of the most economically efficient systems in sport.
But LIV changed the equation.
Beman’s model was built on alignment — on the idea that everybody should win together.
Saudi-backed golf introduced something entirely different:
a competitor willing to lose billions in pursuit of relevance, influence and a new business model.
And now the question hanging over professional golf is no longer whether Beman’s structure was brilliant.
It clearly was.
The question is whether a system designed for cooperation can survive in an era defined by economic warfare.
Membership at Roam Golf Club gets you access to our golf events across Ireland at places like Rosapenna plus access to articles like this one.
Excellent. Don’t agree with everything, but excellent !
Fantastic article. Broader implications on the refinement of Predatory, Vulture Venture Capitalism. To "ENTRAP" an audience & then suck on it's face like a vampire squid (Matt Taibi quote,) is the new business model. Last year's Word of the Year encapsulates this: The Enshittification of Everything (i must glance at the book 🤔).
More importantly, is there a Cass Porter fan club? 😍🤔 ¡Go Aussie babe!