Prize money in golf has never been as high as it is now, as a consequence of LIV Golf having entered the marketplace sloshing dosh all over the place. (Admittedly the prize money scenario with LIV Golf may not be all that it seemed at first. Apparently those huge signing-on fees have to be worked off before the player earns any actual prize money – much in the same way author’s book advances have to be worked off before the writer receives any royalties – but lets skate over that.)
The regular season on the PGA Tour now offers about $450m in prize money even before you get to the largess on offer at the Tour Championship. The eight Signature events on the PGA Tour each have a purse of $20m in prize money. LIV Golf events also offer $20m purses for the individual competition contained within then, but also another $5m one for the team element. It also has an end-of-season bonanza where the cash is flashed. In its case it's the Team Championship where even the team finishing last wins $1.25m of the total $50m purse.
But what could you buy with this PGA Tour $450m or LIV Golf $350m?
Well, with the former you could have bought the most expensive painting even sold; but not with the latter. Perhaps that is why Mohamed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, decided to set up LIV Golf – it was cheaper than buying the Salvator Mundi painting had been for him in 2017. That work, painted in the 1500s and attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, had cost him $450.3m.
The painting, which depicts Jesus Christ, has been described by some as the ‘male Mona Lisa’; by others, as a fake. What the crown prince has done with it is unclear, as it has not be put on public display. Some have suggested that he has hung it in his $450m superyacht. On the subject of superyachts, only six in the world are currently estimated to cost more than the PGA Tour's total prize pool for 2024.
The total LIV Money could buy you 2.25kg of emeralds or the two most expensive private properties that sold in America in 2023. Top of that list is Paradise Cove in Malibu, purchased by Jay-Z and Beyonce last year. Both the LIV and PGA Tour purses would cover every private jet in the world bar one.
The PGA Tour money, meanwhile, could buy Ian Poulter’s extensive car collection, with change to spare. A lot of change: it could buy it about 18 times over if the valuation quoted in the press in 2022 of $24m holds true.
This after all is what Ian Poulter has spent a lot of his prize money on. He has explained: “Growing up, all I wanted was a nice car. It equated to doing well. I won the Italian Open, and I thought: ‘Right, time to buy a Ferrari.’ But once I’d paid my caddy and the tax, it didn’t leave enough for one. I won the Moroccan Open in 2001, and the cheque from that didn’t quite stretch to a Ferrari. But my third victory, the Italian Open again, I thought it was an omen, and I headed straight to Maranello concessionaires in Egham and picked up a rosso corsa Ferrari 360 Modena.”
But what if the crown prince wanted to spend his $350m on something golf-related which wasn’t a golf tour? Well he could buy up all the Masters merchandise sold by Augusta National for the past seven years. Augusta National sells about $50m of merchandise every Masters.
Or even better; in fact, far far better, he could buy 5,883,341 annual subscriptions to Golf Monthly magazine. Or, if he was looking for even better value, he could take out the two-year subscriptions, which give 26 issues and cost £111.99. So he could get 3,125,279 of those. As his kingdom has about 37 million subjects that means he could give about one in eight of his subjects a two-year subscription to Golf Monthly. Now how about that as a way to grow the game?
