Grant Horvat and the Bryan brothers are done waiting for the PGA Tour and LIV to make room. Their new league is YouTube golf’s loudest statement yet.
It’s easy to paint the battle in golf as a two-horse race between the PGA Tour and LIV. While much of the sport feeds through the rivalry between the behemoth and its perpetual little sibling, both leagues have spent serious capital and man-hours on trying to court a third competitor: the world of golf on YouTube.
For those unfamiliar, YouTube golf has become the main connection to the sport for a surprising number of young people, people who don’t connect to the game in traditional ways. It’s a marketer’s dream, and it’s the main reason why the PGA Tour and LIV have so desperately tried to attract the audience of these streamers to their offerings. Now, though, the YouTube golf hierarchy is betting on itself. Three of its biggest names — Grant Horvat and brothers Wesley and George Bryan — have announced their own tour.
Your Golf Tour (YGT), according to an official press release from March 25, will consist of 16 YouTube golfers participating in a four-event swing. The run will begin at Pursell Farms, the symbolic home of YouTube golf. It will wrap up with a three-day stroke play championship at Wynn Las Vegas with a $1 million prize.
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The Bryan Bros and Horvat will each captain a team, alongside a fourth who has yet to be named. The league is reportedly gearing up for a multi-year series, with this first simply serving as a starting point instead of a one-off declaration of YouTube golf’s staying power.
“Competitive golf is where we started. YouTube golf is where we’ve evolved. We believe there’s a place for both,” reads the statement. “Our vision is to create a structure for top players to perform under real pressure with significant stakes while remaining authentic to the YouTube format that we know and love.”
It will be fascinating to see how this decision impacts the two major golf tours and these creators themselves. YouTube golf has already been integrating into the mainstream circuits. One of the chief reasons Bryson DeChambeau moved from the PGA Tour to LIV (aside from the reported $125 million he received to defect) was the potential he saw in owning his own YouTube channel. The Tour was far stricter with its intellectual property and Bryson as a member of its product, not vice versa. For LIV, attracting a golfer with a built-in platform became a no-brainer. Unfortunately, Bryson can only do so much as the league continues to hemorrhage money.
The PGA Tour, for the most part, has kept its distance from YouTube golf, preferring instead to take the concept and apply it to its own handpicked participants. Grant Horvat declined a sponsor’s exemption to the 2025 PGA Tour Barracuda Championship after the Tour said he wouldn’t be able to film his participation and post it to YouTube. Again, those pesky IP rights. Wesley Bryan, who is a member of the PGA Tour, was indefinitely suspended by the organization in April 2025 for participating in a “LIV Golf Duels” YouTube event. The problem was less the YouTube of it all than the LIV of it all, but its decision to keep Bryan suspended while Brooks Koepka has received a red carpet return to the Tour speaks volumes of where their priorities lie.
Outside of the occasional Creator Classic event and the Good Good Championship coming to Austin in 2026, the PGA Tour has bet big on its stars (even the latter is merely sponsored by the popular channel). The draw, they’ve calculated, is Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler, not a YouTuber with a million and a half subscribers. Plus, as people like Horvat, DeChambeau, and the Bryan brothers have shown the appetite for golf on YouTube, many of the PGA Tour’s biggest stars have invested in their own channels. It’s not as if members of the Tour are ignoring this market share, but they’re participating in it within the guidelines provided by the organization.
The PGA Tour’s recent release of the NFL Films-style Chasing Sunday series on YouTube has displayed that its leadership is paying attention. On the one hand, airing the program on the platform instead of a more traditional network shows the profitability of a powerful channel. On the other, the investment by the Tour in this very in-the-weeds, behind-the-scenes, golf nerd series shows that Brian Rolapp’s administration is perhaps more interested in pleasing their golf-sicko core fanbase than in trying to “grow the game.” It’s a shrewd move, and one that I believe will benefit the Tour in the long run. As such, there doesn’t seem to be much reason for the PGA Tour to be threatened by YGT, and LIV was already facing an existential crisis before the trio announced their league. Golf, for the time being, is still a one-horse town.
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