Why The LIV Golf Adelaide Champion Earns Half Of The Usual $4m

LIV Golf is heading to Australia for the third time in its short history with its Adelaide event, and it has already firmly established itself as arguably the biggest tournament of the regular season.

Sell-out crowds greeted the inaugural edition two years ago, and it was a similar story in 2024 as fans flocked to see some of the world’s best players in an area of the world regularly overlooked in recent years.

On the face of it, it offers the same lucrative prize money as the other LIV Golf events in the schedule before the season-closing Team Championship – a $25m purse with an incredible $4m to the winner.

It’s not quite that simple though. Sadly for the 54 players teeing it up at The Grange Golf Club, their earnings will come with a sizeable tax hit – something 2023 victor Talor Gooch was surprised to find when he checked his bank account after winning the event by three.

Following his victory – the first of three Gooch claimed that year – he told the Fore The People podcast: “I was checking my phone on Monday because I was like I want to see that thing hit. It was a little bit disheartening seeing 47-and-a-half percent because Australian taxes [do] not enter the account.

“It comes, you know, sometimes it’s like 48 hours, but it’s usually 24 hours after the direct deposit hits. It was a big one this last week, but yeah, it sucked that 47-and-a-half percent was withheld for Australian taxes, unfortunately.

“I am by no means complaining, but the four [million dollars], once you cut it all up, let’s just say that it’s a lot less than four.”

A quick calculation tells us that 47.5% of $4m is $1.9m, leaving earnings of $2.1m. That means that, for one event only, the winner will have to make do with the significantly smaller number appearing in their bank account a day or two after lifting the trophy.

In the end, Gooch is unlikely to have fretted too much about that shock to the system when he looked back on his year, having earned around $36m in total after going on to win the Individual Championship.

It would have had a greater effect on 2024 winner Brendan Steele, though. The American would surely have been left with a bittersweet feeling after his victory given it was his first in the league, while he’s not got close to winning again.

It meant that, even though it helped him officially take overall earnings for the 2024 season of over $6.3m, in reality, his total prize money for the year was something nearer the one-off figure he would have received had he won any other event.

Of course, $2.1m is still a hefty amount and an identical sum to the player finishing runner-up at this week’s signature event on the PGA Tour, the Genesis Invitational. It’s also over five times more than Haotong Li banked for his win in last week’s Qatar Masters on the DP World Tour.

Therefore, it's safe to say that even with the tax hit, this week’s winner will still be doing very well for himself compared to most other men's elite players, regardless of which circuit they appear on.