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Casual sports fans may not know that LIV Golf has 13 teams, and may be even more surprised to learn every team has a GM. What does the GM role look like in a still-nascent league about to begin its fifth season next month?
“We’re set up as our own business entities,” Chris Rosaasen, GM of Dustin Johnson’s 4Aces team, told Front Office Sports at LIV’s Teams Week in South Florida earlier this month.
“It’s my responsibility to generate revenue for the team, negotiate the contracts with our players, manage our budget as far as where we spend money, how we spend money, and how we make the business profitable.”
Rosaasen, who was CEO of apparel company TravisMathew from 2008 to 2017, labels the league’s 13 teams as “LIV adjacent” since team captains, like Johnson, own 25% of each franchise’s equity and LIV owns the other 75%.
This offseason, Rosaasen oversaw a multiyear LIV extension for Johnson and the 4Aces, which finished seventh in the 2025 team standings, signing Thomas Detry, the 58th-ranked player in the world, away from the PGA Tour to join Johnson, Patrick Reed, and Thomas Pieters. Financial terms of player contracts are not public, and there is no official league salary cap.
Beyond the Prize Money
LIV tournaments include a team purse ($5 million in 2025, increasing to $8 million in 2026). Last year, the 4Aces won $4.5 million in team prize money, which mostly goes toward team operations like travel and other parts of the budget.
The 4Aces has also been busy adding new revenue streams, like an apparel deal with Under Armour and a golf bag deal with Celsius, which was announced Friday as the team’s official energy drink sponsor. Those deals increased the 4Aces team’s partner list for 2026 to seven, with a couple more still to be announced.
“I wear a lot of hats,” says Rosaasen, who has a support staff of six other team employees across marketing, sponsorships, social media, operations, and training.
Rosaasen said there are 3 to 4 LIV GMs whom he talks to almost every day, and that he speaks with all 12 others on a regular basis. They talk shop, brainstorm new ideas, and even congratulate one another on small off-course wins like new team deals.
“I’ll tell you, it has gotten a lot easier from when I started two years ago,” Rosaasen says. “It was a lot of phone calls, and sometimes no return calls, or ‘we’re not sure.’”
Other Revenue Streams
The newest deal, which will see players use Celsius-branded golf bags and water bottles during tournaments, was actually an inbound idea from the energy drink company. “They contacted us wanting to do something,” Rosaasen says. “So, that’s been fantastic.”
Any and every new revenue deal is key for LIV teams, given the league’s goal of creating 13 billion-dollar franchises. While Rosaasen believes the efforts for franchises to eventually sell minority ownership stakes are “in its infancy right now,” it’s still something he’s following closely.
“We’re trying to be the sexy, cool team that’s out there, and I feel like we’ve got a foot in the right direction,” Rosaasen says. The 4Aces also has deals with private jet company FlyHouse, Daou Vineyards, apparel brand Santo Studio, Ghost Golf, and men’s jeweler Jaxxon.
Heading into the new year, Rosaasen feels like the vibes—on and off the golf course—are good for the 4Aces and LIV, despite the upheaval around Brooks Koepka’s PGA Tour reinstatement.
“It’s funny with the Brooks news this week—in talking with all the players, one of the things is: Everybody made a conscious decision to come over here and do it,” Rosaasen says. “It’s not like they are being held hostage over here. Everybody’s happy, and they want to be here. And they genuinely love the team aspect of it.”
The 2026 LIV season starts Feb. 4–7 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
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