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# Post 12 — Three Years. Nine Figures. No Deal.
- URL: https://behavior-follows-rewards.ghost.io/post-12-three-years-nine-figures-no-deal/
- Published: 2026-08-15T10:26:36.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-27T04:09:14.000Z
- Description: Three years, a reported nine-figure signature, and a golf league most people said could not be built. Everything the 2021 announcement described as the work, Greg Norman delivered. The league still needed something nobody had asked him for in public.
- Author: Wayne Repich
- Tags: Incentive Architecture, Leadership, Strategy

*Every week I take one real case — a company, a government program, a league — and show how the reward shaped the behavior. Welcome to Behavior Follows Rewards.*

**Greg Norman built exactly what he was hired to build. Then the job he was measured on changed underneath him.**

*The job was the one he had been given in public.*

Greg Norman spent three years as chief executive of LIV Golf Investments and then LIV Golf. He recruited Cameron Smith and a roster of major winners. Norman created spectacle. He generated headlines. He established the credibility of a rival circuit where most said none could exist.

He was very good at his job.

The problem was the job. What Norman was measured on — by the announcement that hired him, by the release that replaced him, and by his own account of the work — was building. Recruit players. Stage events. Establish the thing. Those were the terms he was given in public, and he met them.

What none of those terms mentioned was whether the thing could pay for itself. In 2021 that question was not asked in public, and it did not need to be. The money was already committed and someone else was paying it.

Behavior follows rewards. LIV Golf got exactly what it paid for.

**The Architect’s Incentive**

Norman was named CEO of LIV Golf Investments in October 2021\. The announcement was not the launch of a rival tour. It was a commitment of more than $200 million over ten years to stage events on the Asian Tour, and the new company’s stated remit was “to holistically improve the health of professional golf on a truly global scale and support existing stakeholders.” Norman’s own words that day: “We will be a cooperative and respectful supporter of the game at every level,” and, of the Asian Tour, “we share ambition to grow the series,” and the aim was “creating a new platform, rich with playing opportunities that create valuable player pathways.” Read the verbs. Support. Grow. Create. It read like a brief for building something, because that is what it was.

From 2021 to 2023, Norman signed marquee players, staged events across Asia, Europe and the United States, and made the league impossible to ignore. By the building verbs in the 2021 announcement, he was succeeding.

Then the commercial sustainability question arrived. In 2023, the PIF began negotiating directly with the PGA Tour — bypassing the CEO of the league it owned. The two sides announced a framework agreement that June; a side letter to it, at the PGA Tour’s insistence, specifically called for Norman’s removal. They set themselves a deadline of 31 December 2023 to turn that framework into a definitive agreement. The deadline passed without one, and there is still no signed deal.

When the question the league actually needed to answer reached the table, the man who built the league wasn’t in the room. He had been asked, in public, to build. He had built. And what he had built was the thing the 2021 language described.

Norman was replaced as CEO in January 2025 by Scott O’Neil — eight years inside the NBA league office, four running Madison Square Garden Sports, eight running the 76ers and the Devils, and, immediately before LIV, two years as chief executive of Merlin Entertainments, a global attractions business with paying customers and a P&L. The official LIV Golf press release described Norman’s tenure with institutional precision: he had established the league’s “team and competition format, roster of the world’s top golfers and connections to many of the best courses in the world.” LIV Golf board chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan thanked him for having worked to “establish, launch and grow” the league. Construction verbs, every one. O’Neil, in the same announcement, said there had never been a better time to “unlock real financial investment.” Read the two halves of that announcement together. What PIF chose to credit Norman for, and what the same release says the league is now for, are not the same thing.

Norman formally left in September 2025, calling what he had built “a movement.” He addressed his tenure in an October 2025 interview and called it “mission accomplished.” His own account of the work: “It was just one of those things where you had to stay focused on what purpose you were going after and execute on that purpose. I think, from my perspective, I did that.” Asked what LIV had achieved, he named bringing private equity “into the game of golf for the first time in 53 years.” He did not say he had built a profitable business, and he did not say he had hit his commercial targets. A purpose, and its execution. That was the job. He did it.

LIV Golf Limited, the UK entity that files LIV’s public accounts, took in $64.9 million in 2024 and lost $461.8 million.

The mandate O’Neil was given came with a pressure of its own. In February 2026 he told the Financial Times that profitability was “less than 10 and greater than five” years away. On 30 April PIF confirmed it would fund the league only for the remainder of the 2026 season. By June, on CNBC, the timeline was three years — if he could replace PIF’s money with new investment. The person hired to solve the reward problem is himself selling a timeline.

---

> *Step back and take a practice swing here. Norman wasn’t replaced for failing at what he had been asked to do. He was replaced after the ask changed. That is a harder lesson than incompetence — competence aimed at a target that has moved still produces a very competent failure.*

**The Players Followed Their Reward Too**

The players behaved exactly as their contracts rewarded them to.

Cameron Smith signed for a reported $140 million, a figure a golf industry insider has since disputed. Whatever the true number, it was agreed long before anyone put an end date on the money.

Then the ground moved. In January 2026, Smith was offered a one-time window to return to the PGA Tour, and he declined: “I’ve made my bed and I’m going to sleep in it.” Fifteen weeks later came the 30 April funding decision.

Five weeks later Smith was telling Mirror Sports U.S. that golf’s prize money had gone too far: “It was obviously not working, and it’s pretty far-fetched, realistically. So we’ll see what happens. I’m sure there are going to be a lot of changes, particularly with prize money next year.” The prize structure, he said, needed to come back to the way it was.

The contract made the LIV deal rational. The end date made the argument for smaller purses rational. Same person. Different horizon. Behavior follows rewards.

**What the Unwinding Actually Tells You**

LIV Golf did not go wrong because the reward structure was wrong from the start. In 2021 that structure matched what was announced. PIF’s money bought playing opportunities, player pathways and a new platform, and that is what got built. What changed was the ask. By May 2023 PIF was negotiating to fold the whole thing into the PGA Tour. By April 2026 it had put an end date on the money. And in July the Asian Tour — the partner the whole 2021 commitment had been written for — left for the other side of golf’s divide. The objective moved. The structure did not move with it.

There is a simpler reading of all this, and it deserves an answer. By early 2026 the Saudi Pro League’s spending had turned toward financial sustainability and the 2029 Asian Winter Games had been postponed indefinitely, so a PIF executive could say with some justice that nothing about LIV’s ask had changed and that the fund’s balance sheet had, across every asset it owns. That reading explains the end date. It explains neither the January 2025 hire of a man whose career had been spent running commercial sports businesses, nor the language of the release that announced him.

Across its filed periods to the end of 2024, LIV Golf Limited’s losses come to roughly $1.1 billion — and that is one entity. That is not a surprising number. It is the output of what the job was set up to produce. You get what you measure and reward.

PIF’s 2026 end date removes the one condition that made the old design survivable — someone else was always paying. Whatever LIV becomes from here has to answer a question the 2021 brief never contained. The board answered it first: Al-Rumayyan stepped down from LIV’s board and the league seated an independent one, bringing in a turnaround specialist. The owner’s man gave way to someone whose business is rescuing businesses that lose money. That is the same ask changing again — this time in the composition of the room. On 5 August the answer became more specific still: the league said it had an agreement with a lead investor, and that its players would become the majority equity holders. That would hand the enterprise to a group the old structure never asked to care whether it worked.

A LIV player was paid to show up and compete. What almost nobody at LIV has been paid on is whether the enterprise works. A player could win every event on the schedule and it would not touch the accounts: in 2024 they showed seven dollars of loss for every dollar of revenue.

The structural lesson is already clear. When PIF wanted a business it hired one man to go and get it, in January 2025 — and by October 2025 O’Neil was saying he had signed half a billion dollars of new commercial business. Selling sponsorships is not the same as changing what an organization is paid to do.

The phase that built your initiative may not be the phase you are in. The person rewarded to launch is not always the person who can make it last. If you have never explicitly measured commercial viability — or sustainability, or retention, or margin — you have not built for it. You have built for the thing you measured.

LIV Golf was built to recruit. It recruited. The game it was trying to build came to require something else.

*A note on timing: the news around this league moves week to week, and by the time you read this some of it will have moved again. The mechanism does not move with it. A structure that paid for building produced building, and went on producing it long after the reason for building was gone.*

> Behavior Follows Rewards. The pattern shows up wherever people are measured and rewarded.

*Ask yourself: Who in your organization is being rewarded for the phase you were in — not the phase you are in? What does the reward structure in your current initiative actually fund?*

*If you are working through an incentive design challenge in your organization — trying to understand why a policy, initiative, or team isn’t doing what you designed it to do — that is the work.* [*Advisory Services →*](https://behavior-follows-rewards.ghost.io/advisory-services/)

[*Subscribe for free*](https://behavior-follows-rewards.ghost.io/#/portal/signup)*. Share it with someone who needs to read it.*

*—Wayne*

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## Going Deeper

*If you had been handed the 2021 announcement as your job description — support an existing tour, stage the events, fill the fields, with the money already committed and no public question about when it would come back — what would you have optimized for? Norman optimized for exactly what that language described. What nobody did when the ask changed was go back and change what the rest of the organization was rewarded on.*

[Leave a comment →](https://behavior-follows-rewards.ghost.io/post-12-three-years-nine-figures-no-deal/#comments)

*Last time: The NBA introduced a draft lottery in 1985 so that losing would no longer buy the best shot at the top pick. Four decades and repeated redesigns later, teams were still losing on purpose. Each redesign changed the mechanics of the reward. None of them removed it.*

*Next: A government set a target for its emergency rooms — ninety-eight percent of patients admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. The clock did not start until the patient came through the door.*

*In development — a university where the highest grade became the average one; a company that ranked its own people against each other until they stopped helping each other; a streaming service that replaced a standard performance review with a single, uncomfortable question. More on the way.*

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## Sources

LIV Golf Investments. “Greg Norman Named CEO Of LIV Golf Investments.” Press release, October 29, 2021.

“PGA Tour–PIF framework agreement side letter.” May 24, 2023, as reported by Golf Channel, Golf.com, Sports Illustrated and Golf Monthly, and referenced in U.S. Senate investigation documents.

“PGA Tour, Saudi PIF provide negotiation update at deadline.” GOLF.com, December 31, 2023; “PGA Tour, PIF Partnership Deadline Passes With No Resolution.” Front Office Sports, January 1, 2024.

“Scott O’Neil replaces Greg Norman as LIV Golf CEO.” Golf Monthly and CBS Sports, January 2025.

“LIV Golf Lost $461M in Non-U.S. Operations in 2024.” Front Office Sports, October 3, 2025, reporting the UK Companies House filing.

Cameron Smith, interview with Mirror Sports U.S., reported June 3–5, 2026 by Golf Digest, Yahoo Sports, Golfmagic, Fox Sports Australia, GOLF.com, Golf Monthly and Irish Golfer.

Cameron Smith, interview with SEN.com.au, January 13, 2026.

Scott O’Neil, interview on CNBC, June 9, 2026.

“LIV Golf chief: We’ve secured half a billion dollars in sponsorship over the past 10 months.” Golfmagic, October 20, 2025.

“Cam Smith’s reported $140M LIV contract misunderstood, claims golf insider.” Sportskeeda, July 20, 2025, reporting golf commentator Andrew Kirby.

LIV Golf Limited, annual accounts filed at UK Companies House for 2024 and 2023, as reported by Front Office Sports, October 3, 2025.

LIV Golf. “LIV Golf Announces Scott O’Neil as New CEO of the Global Golf League.” Press release, January 15, 2025; as reported by Golfweek and SportsPro.

Clifton, Brad. “‘Don’t Judge Me’: Greg Norman breaks silence on LIV Golf exit.” Australian Golf Digest, October 4, 2025.

Greg Norman, departure statement, Instagram, September 11, 2025; reported by Golf Monthly, Yahoo Sports, GOLF.com and Sports Illustrated.

Orr, Robert. “LIV Golf to be lossmaking for rest of the decade, CEO says.” Financial Times, February 3, 2026.

Scott O’Neil, professional history, LinkedIn. Accessed August 3, 2026.

Herzig, Gabby. “Bryson DeChambeau leads LIV Golf players-only meeting at Trump Bedminster.” The Athletic (The New York Times), August 4, 2026.

Mehta, Amar, and Ed Carruthers. “LIV Golf reaches agreement with ‘new lead investor’ after Saudi PIF withdrew funding from breakaway league.” Sky Sports, August 5, 2026.

“LIV’s team event on brink of cancellation, per captain Martin Kaymer.” Irish Golfer, July 23, 2026.

Murray, Ewan. “LIV Golf races against time for investment with confirmation Saudi funding will end in 2026.” The Guardian, April 30, 2026.

*BFR is written to be accessible, welcomed, and celebrated by every reader — not simplified, not elevated. Just clear.*