Golf Veteran Urges PGA Tour to Prepare ‘Financial Sanctions’ for LIV Golf Pros

With all the reports and news emerging that PIF is on the verge of pulling its financial backing from LIV Golf after 2026, the prospect of dozens of players suddenly needing a home has gotten very real, very fast. Now, the question hanging over isn’t whether LIV golfers want to come back; it’s what coming back should actually cost them.

Brian Crowell of SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio has a clear answer: “I don’t think there should be a ban for a year. I think they must be back immediately, but there need to be financial sanctions,” he says.

Crowell adds: “If that means your whole year of earning goes to charity, or there’s a specific fine that goes to charity to help decrease the weight of current sponsors of the PGA Tour, there’s a way to get that sort of payback.”

The PGA Tour has already tried something similar with a headline-grabbing price tag: when Brooks Koepka left LIV Golf in December 2025 and applied for reinstatement, the Tour didn’t just waive him through; it set a price tag that made headlines for a reason.

When Brooks Koepka left LIV Golf in December 2025 and applied for reinstatement, the Tour didn’t waive him through. He was required to make a $5 million charitable donation, forfeited all FedExCup bonus money for 2026, and was blocked from PGA Tour equity grants for five years. His losses could reach between $51 million and $85 million. Koepka accepted the financial penalties publicly, stating he understood the terms and agreed to them.

So what’s the catch? The Returning Member Program was restricted to players who had won a major or the Players Championship between 2022 and 2025 and who had been away from the PGA Tour for at least two years. That bracket is so narrow that it applies only to four LIV players: Koepka, Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, and Cam Smith.

The window, however, is now closed, as of February 2nd, with Rolapp making it clear that it was a one-time, defined window and not a precedent for future situations. Now only Koepka has walked through it, and the rest of LIV’s roster, which contains a dozen players, still has no clear path.

Crowell isn’t the only one weighing in. As the funding reports intensified this week, former Ryder Cup-winning captain Paul McGinley, one of the most respected analysts in the game, went further, and his take adds a layer that doesn’t fully align with Crowell’s.

McGinley says there’s ‘no easy way back’ for LIV golfers

Speaking in an interview, McGinley said the writing was on the wall for LIV Golf, but he was quick to point out that the collapse of the league doesn’t automatically mean a clean return for its players.

“This is not going to be an easy fix back again,” he said. “There will be suspensions, there will be fines, and all kinds of things that have been talked about for the past few years will have to remain in place to be equitable and fair to the guys who remained with the Tour over the last four years.”

Over four years, LIV Golf’s hostile competition pulled sponsors from the DP World Tour, costing the European circuit tens of millions, all while players who remained loyal watched their former colleagues cash enormous guaranteed contracts.

McGinley noted that the PGA Tour now needs to reward those who stayed loyal and that simply waving returning players through, even with a fine attached, risks doing the opposite. He was clear that LIV players shouldn’t expect to walk straight back in.

“There are a lot of roadblocks in the way,” he said, adding that a lot of negotiation would need to happen between the tours and the players if LIV folds.

That negotiation, if it comes, won’t be straightforward, especially for players who are still under contract or have had a fractious relationship with the PGA Tour. For that group, even Crowell’s financial sanctions framework would be the starting point of a much larger conversation, not the end of it.

As PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp said this week, he remains open to doing whatever makes the PGA Tour better and knows that fans want the best players competing together. For now, that bridge hasn’t been built, and if McGinley is right, the toll to cross it will be steeper than most LIV players are probably expecting.