Nobody Can Confirm What This LIV Purse Is

One outlet has it at $30 million, four of that to the winner. Front Office Sports has reported around $30 million too. The Associated Press, covering the same league in the same week, gave $20 million for the individual competition and $5 million for the team, which comes to $25 million. Those might be measuring different things — individual only, individual plus team, total spend on the event — and if LIV has published a figure that reconciles them, I couldn't find it.

So the sentence I actually get to write is that fifty-seven players teed off on Thursday afternoon competing for somewhere between twenty-five and thirty million dollars, and that from 2027 it'll be about ten. Which is a strange thing to have to say about a professional sporting event in its fourth year, and it's stuck with me more than the golf has.

Four years. Five billion dollars, give or take, most of it lent rather than invested. And the prize fund is a matter of opinion.

What's actually going on out there

The rest of it is more solid. Fifty-seven players, which is thirteen teams of four plus five wildcards. Four rounds and 72 holes, which is new this year — LIV played 54 until 2026, hence the name. Shotgun starts, so everyone finishes at roughly the same time. FOX has it from Friday, with Thursday on the app.

It's LIV's third go at Bedminster and its first since 2023, when Cameron Smith won the individual title and his Ripper GC side took the team. Henrik Stenson and the 4Aces had it the year before that. Thirty-three players from the 2023 field are back.

Jon Rahm is chasing a third straight individual championship, which would be a genuinely notable thing if anyone were talking about the golf. Lucas Herbert arrives having won LIV UK by six, wire to wire, at thirty under — his second wire-to-wire in four starts.

Small thing on that last number, and I mention it only because it keeps happening. One report I read described Herbert as shooting "an extraordinary 30-under 62." He didn't. He couldn't have. Thirty under was his four-round total and the 62 was a round, and somewhere in the retyping the two got welded together. That's the third impossible number I've had to unpick covering this story in a week, and I've started to think the error rate is itself part of what's going on.

The President plans to attend. A White House official confirmed that to USA TODAY without saying which days. It's his golf course. I don't have anything to add to those two sentences and I'm not going to pretend I do.

Somebody should write about the golf course

Everyone covers who owns Bedminster. Almost nobody covers what it is.

Tom Fazio designed it and it opened in 2004. It runs to 7,651 yards, which makes it the second-longest course LIV has played all season. Golf magazine has had it in the American top 100 more than once. Golf Digest called it one of the five best new private courses in both 2009 and 2010. And in 2017 it hosted the U.S. Women's Open, which Sung Hyun Park won.

Cameron Smith, asked what he remembered about winning here, said the course was very good and very hard.

I've spent the past fortnight writing about a club in Detroit that spent sixteen million dollars trying to make itself harder and then watched three players shoot 61, and about Royal Lytham, which has had nothing done to it and held the best field in women's golf to five under. So I don't say this lightly: a 7,651-yard Fazio course with water down the closing stretch is a real test, and that's true regardless of how you feel about the name on the gate. You're allowed to find the ownership uncomfortable and the golf good. Refusing to is how sportswriting gets stupid.

The state of things around the tournament

This week doesn't sit in isolation, and some of what's happened around it is odd enough to be worth setting down in order.

On Wednesday, at this same event, LIV's chief executive announced that the league has a lead investor. Term sheet signed, board approved, transaction targeted for September, players to become majority equity holders — which he called a first for a major global sports league. He didn't name the investor. He didn't give a figure. And later that day he told reporters that for the players who came to LIV to make money, this second bite is equity instead of cash. Instead of. Not on top of. LIV reportedly still owes some of those players nine figures.

The version of the league that emerges, if it emerges, is ten events across five continents at around ten million a time. Two tournaments remain in this season after Bedminster: Indianapolis on the 20th, and the team championship in Michigan at the end of the month, which one of LIV's own team captains publicly put at about a five per cent chance of happening. Nothing had been built at the Michigan venue as of last week.

There's also a lawsuit I hadn't come across until today. Mobii Systems Group, a Canadian technology firm that supplied the league's "Any Shot, Any Time" broadcast features, is suing for more than a million dollars. That's separate from the claim by World Golf Group and Premier Golf League, which is somewhere between $210 million and $630 million depending on how it lands.

None of which the players can do anything about. They still had to hit the shots on Thursday afternoon.

The bit I keep coming back to

Prize money has been the headline of every LIV story since 2022. The sums were the point, the argument and the scandal all at once, and the one thing everybody on both sides agreed on was that the money was effectively bottomless.

It wasn't, and now nobody can tell you what a single tournament pays.

I don't think that's a gotcha. I think it's genuinely informative. When three outlets give you three numbers for the same event, the disagreement is the data — it tells you how much anyone outside the building actually knows, which is less than the confident tone of most of the coverage would suggest.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago, five under par won a major championship at a links course in Lancashire that has never needed rescuing and never asked anyone for anything.

Golf's fine. The people trying to own it are having a rough year.