Brooks Koepka. Patrick Reed. The dominoes keep falling for LIV Golf. While that is very obvious, Harris English candidly worded it out loud. Speaking at Torrey Pines, as he prepares to defend his Farmers Insurance Open title, in contention with Koepka, who is playing his first PGA Tour event after 4 years, English offered his two cents.

“I knew the Brooks thing was coming by some of his comments. I didn’t know it was going to happen this quickly,” said English. “The dominoes are starting to fall. Maybe those guys on the LIV Tour are not that happy out there.”

In his view, Reed’s exit was not an anomaly. Rather, it is part of a growing pattern that suggests dissatisfaction within LIV Golf. Maybe the “leak in the dam” has been there for a while, but now it’s becoming harder to conceal.

“The grass is not greener on the other side,” says English.

After Brooks Koepka became the first player to utilize the PGA Tour’s Returning Member Program, the cracks had become visible. They got more prominent when the 2023 PGA Championship winner gave up his million-dollar contract and agreed to pay an estimated $85 million to the Tour to have him back. Reed’s decision was then followed swiftly.

Although he cannot utilise the Program due to his ineligibility (he last won a major in 2018), he has expressed his desire to play as a non-member on the Tour starting in August. What possibly prompted Patrick Reed‘s exit was his recent dominant win at the DP World Tour’s Hero Dubai Desert Classic. With a 12-shot victory, Reed emerged victorious among a field seeing golfers like Rory McIlroy. He took a cheque of $1.53 million home, significantly less than his $4 million win in Dallas last year.

“Money’s not the end-all, be-all,” Harris English comments. “That doesn’t fulfill them. It doesn’t fulfill me.” Notably, English too had been offered to join the Saudi-backed league several times, but he firmly denied.

But what he is alluding to here is something else. LIV Golf’s financial structure has increasingly come under scrutiny. Through 2024, Saudi Arabia’s PIF has injected approxiamately $4.89 billion into the league. Yet, LIV’s UK-based arm shows that it suffered a massive loss of £461.8 million (USD 637), which totals to £1.1 billion in three-and-a-half years.

With a decreasing profit and more losses, LIV would inevitably cut off some of these golfers’ contracts. At the same time, there’s another truth too. Once financial security is achieved, fulfillment is defined elsewhere. Koepka’s return validates this theory. He was willing to absorb massive losses, if in turn he gets to spend more time with his family, especially after Jena Sims miscarriage.

On the other hand, the PGA Tour offers what LIV can not: a competitive ecosystem.

“They’re still competitors,” says English. “They love playing in the biggest events against the best players in the world.”

For English, such events and such players are on the PGA Tour. And he thinks the same is being realized by the rest, too.

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A ‘Stronger’ PGA Tour is more lucrative, as per Harris English

A member of the PGA Tour’s 2026 Player Advisory Council (PAC), Harris has a close watch on the Tour’s structure and dominance. And that’s why he is easily making such assertions.

Throughout last year, the PGA Tour saw a dramatic resurgence of viewership. The same viewership, which had declined 17-19% in 2024, reached a maximum of 22% with a year-over-year increase. In tangible numbers, the PGA Tour averaged around 2.27 M to 2.63 M viewers across its broadcasters.

This recovery has largely to do with the major performances of its players. Rory McIlroy’s Masters win saw 13 million viewers, and the PGA Championship drew in 4 million viewers.76 million viewers. Justin Thomas’s RBC Heritage win pulled in 4.63 million.

The 2026 season opened with even more dramatic momentum. The American Express saw a 125% increase in total viewership compared to 2025. Saturday’s R3 garnered a 284% increase. It was the event’s highest-rated R3 since the 2006 broadcast on ABC.

Hence, Harris English was merely echoing what had already been there on the paper for the world to see. While Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, and Cam Smith remain as the top-tier players on the Saudi-backed league, the exits of Koepka and Reed signal an uncertain future.