A few months ago, Bryson DeChambeau predicted his future
This week Bryson DeChambeau is in Saudi Arabia, starting 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 newly-accomplished winners to make an easy comeback, DeChambeau’s continued commitment to LIV became even more difficult. Monday marked the deadline when he (and Jon Rahm and Cam Smith) could join Brooks Koepka in returning to the PGA Tour. That deadline has passed.
Now what? DeChambeau will certainly honor the final year of his original LIV deal. But it’s also clear that he’s been thinking deeply about how life might be different going forward. His latest comment brought me back to a conversation we had six months ago in England when we were training.
At the time, my goal was to write about DeChambeau’s YouTube entry, so that’s where our conversation began. But DeChambeau is a big-picture thinker, so he directed our conversation to the broader media side, creating it and how it can be (LIV). again the PGA Tour) can show a large share of media rights to players. Players getting a bigger piece of the pie, of course, is a move that could benefit DeChambeau. But he is also an expert in the space; one could argue that no player in the history of the game has ever relied on other ways of looking at golf like DeChambeau.
At least no player since Arnold Palmer.
Palmer’s name came up several times in our conversation, enough to see that King owns real estate at DeChambeau’s level. Instead of discussing how YouTube changed DeChambeau’s sales, he chose to talk about it value he was adding to the ecosystem, as Palmer had done decades earlier.
“In my view, [marketability] it’s a supply-side thing value in the game,” said DeChambeau.” “What did Arnold Palmer do? He created the Golf Channel! Like, he was just outside of playing golf and winning golf tournaments which was probably more meaningful, in a sense, to his career and his legacy and his career, than his winning tournaments. Right? You can argue that.
“Now, did golf help him? Man, why doesn’t everyone do something like that? It takes a different persona, but from a marketing point of view to be of value – I try to offer a lot value as possible.”
DeChambeau’s approach to the number of young people is well known. It is YouTube, which he considers to be the most convenient platform to work with, given the split of income with creators is almost 50-50, and sometimes it is huge. He is worth an infinite amount of money but had to go “in the red” for a few years, he said, to make his account profitable. He now has 10 employees 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 posting his golf on YouTube after his LIV deal ended, rather than signing away his rights to any particular tour. On the other hand, this could easily be a negotiating ploy — DeChambeau is in extended talks with LIV — but he admitted the same thing to me in that interview in July.
DeChambeau says he will spend one to two days each week creating YouTube videos. His “Break 50” videos — which he’s done 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 got that result, a program entirely dedicated to YouTube made his mind run.
“Here’s the deal,” he began. “If I wasn’t playing tournament golf, I’d be doing 3X the amount of YouTube videos. I could do a video about every one week. And I came up with all these series and different ideas — what do you think those numbers would be if I went ahead and got into them full time? That’s when I saw Mr. Beast and Dude Perfect and what they did. I said, I want to create as much value as possible.“
It is clear that he is not alone. LIV Golf also wants to build a similar value it it can be. The PGA Tour, too. But for a long time the media rights of professional golfers – who work in many cases as contractors offering their skills on TV broadcasts while trying to climb the leaderboard – have been bundled together to maintain a high price. The PGA Tour’s annual revenue from its sales (and strong defense) of TV media rights sits at about $1 billion. The presence of LIV Golf hurt those numbers, and the Tour has been making moves since then to transform its product to make it more profitable. The Tour has long considered any golfer who plays any golf tournament on camera as part of its media package. But times are changing…slightly.
Last summer, the PGA Tour relaxed its rules on players creating golf content during practice. Any member who wants to, say, make a video of themselves playing nine at TPC Sawgrass during the week of the tournament will now be allowed to do so without disqualification. In the past, travel professionals would have to seek and obtain a special permit individually. The door is only slightly cracked – for example, live video, or videos involving more than one player still need to be approved – but it’s moving in the right direction. A move away from a model that DeChambeau calls “monopolistic.”
And just because he sees it that way doesn’t mean he’s not interested in this model of PGA Tour rights. “It’s amazing,” DeChambeau said, adding that the Tour’s once-nonprofit status made it doubly effective. To change it — 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 he was black and white in his approach to complex issues in the past, and said that he tries to deal with things more neutrally these days, working more in gray. But he’d like the “decision makers” to look at what he’s done — for example, sending his entire final round from the 2024 US Open at Pinehurst to his channel — and work with him to find a path that other professional golfers can’t follow.
Speaking of people who make decisions, he means Brian Rolapp literally but also someone like Fred Ridley, the chairman of Augusta National, or Sellers Shy, the head of golf coverage for CBS. DeChambeau will tell you he didn’t have enough experience during his time on the PGA Tour (2016-2022) to choose to push the boundaries of media rights, but he’s learned a ton over the past four years. He considers himself well-versed in LIV’s TV deal with FOX and the PGA Tour’s deal with NBC. Now, he desperately wants a seat at some kind of table to see how old systems can be pushed, as he put it, “into the future.”
“I wish I had better ability to make decisions about restrictions and visits,” DeChambeau said. “I know the value that can be created if it is properly edited in the media program … I mean, I wish they would look at me like, Okay, Bryson, how do we invest that into a small part of what we’re trying to accomplish? How can we use that in a small way to test it? Rather than just being No, we know what we’re doing.“
Now, as the calendar turns to February 2026, it remains as interesting as ever to predict where DeChambeau will appear next. The golf courses that are still fighting will fight for his loyalty. The golf powers will try to make him a 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 comes next is already underway.
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