HONOLULU — Brooks Koepka is expecting a nervous energy when he returns to a regular PGA Tour event for the first time in four years at the Farmers Insurance Open.

Only some of that pertains to his golf.

How he is received — inside and outside the ropes — remains to be seen as the first player to be invited back to the PGA Tour after taking Saudi riches to defect to the LIV Golf League in 2022.

“I’ve got a lot of work to do with some of the players,” Koepka said in a telephone interview Monday. “There’s definitely guys who are happy, and definitely guys who will be angry. It’s a harsh punishment financially. I understand exactly why the tour did that — it’s meant to hurt. But it [his departure] hurt a lot of people.

“If anyone is upset, I need to rebuild those relationships.”

Koepka was allowed back under a one-time Returning Member Program that the PGA Tour board developed and approved last week. It applies only to players who have won a major or the Players Championship since 2022.

The penalty is a $5 million contribution to a charity the tour will help decide, no access to FedEx Cup bonus money in 2026, no sponsor exemptions to the $20 million signature events and, most importantly, no equity grants in the PGA Tour for the next five years.

The PGA Tour estimates, based on Koepka performing at the level allowed to win five majors, that the financial repercussions could be worth anywhere from $50 million to $85 million.

“There was no negotiating,” Koepka said about his conversation last week with Brian Rolapp, the CEO of PGA Tour Enterprises. “It’s meant to hurt — it does hurt — but I understand. It’s not supposed to be an easy path. There’s a lot of people that were hurt by it when I left, and I understand that’s part of coming back.”

For those not happy to see him return, Koepka said he looks forward to having private conversations outside the media.

“The first week I’ll be a little bit nervous,” Koepka said. “There’s a lot going on than just golf. I’ll be glad to put the first week behind me — dealing with the media, dealing with the players, and then getting some of those tougher conversations. But I’m looking forward to it.

“Am I nervous? Yes. Am I excited? Yes. In a weird way, I want to have those conversations.”

Jordan Spieth said Koepka just needed to be the same person who left.

“You’re not going to ask somebody to change to please other people,” Spieth said. “I don’t think he needs to play Monday pro-ams or walk along the range and shake everyone’s and say, ‘I’m sorry.’ He just comes back and plays really good golf. That’s good for everybody.”

The board, led by a majority of players, signed off on the plan. Koepka talked with Rolapp by phone Thursday evening, and he was at PGA Tour headquarters the next morning unaccompanied. He came in through a side entrance.

The 35-year-old Koepka, who is exempt the next three years from his 2023 victory in the PGA Championship at Oak Hill, will return at Torrey Pines on Jan. 29. He also said he would play the WM Phoenix Open, where he won his first PGA Tour title in 2015 and won again in 2021.

That might provide the first real test of how the public feels — a Saturday afternoon on the 16th hole of the TPC Scottsdale, the rowdiest in golf even for players the fans don’t really know.

“I can handle it,” Koepka said. “I enjoy the crowd, and hopefully everybody is happy to see me. They can’t be mad at me forever.”

So why the change?

Word first began to circulate in November that negotiations between Koepka and LIV Golf — he had one year left on his contract — were not going well. He had publicly complained last summer that LIV was not as far along as he would have liked.

And then Dec. 23 came the announcement from LIV of an “amicable” split, and Koepka reapplied for PGA Tour membership.

Koepka cited a knee injury that has taken a toll on his body and the desire to spend more time with his family as the reasons to join LIV. He cited the need to spend more time at home when he left LIV, particularly after his wife had a miscarriage last fall.

“I needed to be there with my family over the last few months. I needed to be closer to home,” Koepka said. “I was able to get out of the LIV contract, everything lined up perfectly and I was able to get back on tour.

“I’m happy and grateful it was able to come to this.”

Koepka has not spoken publicly about how much he was offered to play for LIV, except for saying it was nine figures on a 2023 podcast with boxer Jake Paul. Also unclear was how much he had to pay back by leaving one year early.

Now it’s about playing again on familiar turf with players he saw only four times a year at the majors. He is close with several players who live in South Florida. Others he will see for the first time in the locker room, on the range, on the first tee.

“There’s probably a mixed bag of ‘We’re happy you’re back, welcome home’ to ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ I understand everybody’s point of view,” Koepka said. “I was going to be sitting out possibly a year, and I’m extremely thankful the tour gave me this opportunity.”

The College Sports Commission has rejected nearly $15 million in name, image and likeness agreements since it started evaluating them over the summer, representing more than 10% of the value of all the deals it has analyzed and closed.

The CSC released its latest statistics Monday, saying it did not clear 524 deals worth $14.94 million, while clearing 17,321 worth $127.21 million. All the data was current as of Jan. 1.

The numbers came against the backdrop of a “reminder” memo the commission sent to athletic directors last week, citing “serious concerns” about contracts being offered to athletes before they had been cleared through the commission’s NIL Go platform.

The CSC is in charge of evaluating all deals worth more than $600 that are offered by third-party businesses that are often affiliated with the schools recruiting the players.

“Without prejudging any particular deal, the CSC has serious concerns about some of the deal terms being contemplated and the consequences of those deals for the parties involved,” the Friday night memo said.

The CSC said primary reasons for deals not being cleared were that they lacked a valid business purpose; they didn’t directly activate a player’s NIL rights, instead “warehousing” them for future use; and that players were being paid at levels that weren’t “commensurate with similarly situated individuals.”

The memo reminded ADs that signing players to deals that hadn’t been cleared by the CSC left the players “vulnerable to deals not being cleared, promises not being able to be kept, and eligibility being placed at risk.”

Other statistics from the latest report:

There were 10 deals in arbitration as of Dec. 31, eight of which have since been withdrawn. All involved a resolved administrative issue at one school not named by the CSC.

• 52% of deals submitted to NIL Go were resolved within 24 hours.

• 73% of deals reached resolution within seven days following submission of all required information.

• 56% of the 10,848 athletes who have at least one cleared deal play football or men’s basketball.

So, Xabi Alonso becomes the tenth permanent Real Madrid manager of Florentino Pérez’s 21-plus-year presidential reign to be sacked without even completing a year in charge.

Just when the 44-year-old Madrid playing legend seemed to have calmed the stormy waters that had threatened to overwhelm him since autumn, the biggest sin in the entire dictionary of Must Not Commit for Bernabéu managers, losing to Barcelona when a trophy is at stake, has cost him his job. Those around Alonso — who leaves with Madrid only four points off the top of LaLiga, safely in the UEFA Champions League top eight and with a nervy Copa del Rey tie at Albacete on Wednesday — will look back at the final moments of Sunday’s Supercopa final and think about Álvaro Carreras and Raúl Asencio, who each had point-blank chances to score and take the final to penalties.

Alonso, in retrospect, stands condemned, at least in the eyes of Pérez — the only person whose opinion matters when a coach’s fate is concerned — of several offenses.

First: The damage done to Alonso’s public reputation and club credibility when, on substituting Vinícius Júnior in the victorious Clásico last October, the Brazil international erupted in anger while showing disrespect for his manager. Even in victory, the player’s actions hogged the headlines because he screamed into the night air, “This is why I’m going to leave this team. This is why I’m leaving!”

Pérez wants Vinícius to renew his contract, at all costs. So although Alonso palpably repaired much of the damage with his 24-year-old star, and on Sunday helped him produce his best goal and best performance since Carlo Ancelotti left, it’s now clear that irreparable damage was done to Pérez’s view of his coach.

Second: Losing to Barcelona in a big final remains, it seems, a capital offense. Just as a reminder, it has been about five weeks since I wrote in this very space, “If the 44-year-old coach, who won all there is to win in his playing career and then made history by making Bayer Leverkusen Bundesliga champions for the first time, can beat Atlético Madrid in the Supercopa semifinal and either Barcelona or Athletic Club in the final, then he’ll finally be left alone to do his job until the end of the season. But to come home without a trophy? Alonso will almost certainly be sacked.”

Third: When Madrid played anodyne, point-dropping football against Rayo Vallecano, Elche and Girona, and then lost consecutively at home to Manchester City and Celta Vigo, there was a massive manhunt mounted, by the club and by the media, to find someone to blame. Correctly or not, and I think the answer is firmly “not,” it has been the coach — rather than the president or the players — who has been found guilty.

Fourth: Alonso, it must be said, hasn’t “played the game.” Managing upward is an increasingly key skill when you’re coaching at a big club — that’s true anywhere in the world, but particularly when your direct boss is the unaccountable Pérez.

Throughout his life, either as the son of the excellent player Periko Alonso; or while coming through the ranks at Real Sociedad; playing brilliantly for Liverpool, Madrid, Bayern Munich and Spain; or making history by taking Bayer Leverkusen to their best-ever trophy season; Xabi Alonso has been the man. Venerated, respected, ultra talented, backed, fêted, desired, rewarded and awarded deity status. Don’t take my word for it, just think how he’s regarded by Spain (European and world champion), at Liverpool (hero of the greatest match in their entire history), local boy made good at Real Sociedad, José Mourinho’s lieutenant at Madrid and Pep Guardiola’s chosen linchpin while winning trophy after trophy at Bayern. He simply didn’t need to kowtow to anyone. Ever.

It’s different at Madrid and, so, when his friend and mentor, Guardiola, used a vulgar expression in support of Alonso before City won at the Bernabéu in December, it went down very badly indeed when Alonso’s postmatch response, teased out by a journalist, seemed to be sympathetic to what City’s Catalan coach was suggesting about Alonso’s relationship with Pérez.

Until very recently, Alonso, never rude, was standoffish and cool with the assembled, hard-nosed, some would say Pérez-aligned media who turned up to news conferences six times a week at the Madrid training ground. He changed his stance when he knew he was fighting for his continued employment: He began to expand on answers, share a joke, become a bit more touchy-feely, and it was working. But he played that game a little too late.

It was extremely telling when Alonso suggested to his players on Sunday in Jeddah that they form a guard of honor for Barcelona’s victorious players (as Hansi Flick’s men had done for them while they walked up to get their losers’ medals), but Kylian Mbappé usurped him and fiercely gestured to the squad that he, not Alonso, had the final word and that no way would they be forming two lines and letting the Supercopa winners feel honored. Very, very damaging imagery.

What’s a little bit shocking is that the Spanish football media, having set the table for an Alonso sacking over and over again in November and December, were utterly caught by surprise. Even playing pretty moderately, in victory against Sevilla, Real Betis and Atlético, Madrid’s players were clearly pulling for their coach, they were building results — admittedly from a low base — and they were looking very like steering Los Blancos into the extremely valuable top eight of the Champions League with two winnable matches in their sights this month. Marca’s headlines this morning included “Xabi revives the Mourinho style” and “What a miss from Carreras in the 95th minute.” No blame thrown at the coach. Their famous columnist, Alfredo Relaño, stated, “Xabi Alonso lost the final but saved his situation.” The much more hawkish, Pérez-oriented Diario AS used “Only Raphinha was better than Madrid” as their match headline, and the self-confessed ultra-Madridista columnist Tomás Roncero’s column read “Nothing to reproach you over.”

One of the biggest signs, in my opinion, as to the general mood of this singular, polemic, but highly successful, billionaire president, and something that Alonso could have paid more attention to, is the name of the stadium.

For the longest time, it’s been called the Santiago Bernabéu in honor of the man previously regarded as the greatest leader in Real Madrid’s history. More and more, and often in formal terms, it’s being called “the Bernabéu” — a change that, in my view, will preface a gradual, strategic and corporate-driven moving of Pérez toward the top of the podium of all-time presidents. This 78-year-old has, gradually but consistently, aimed at moving beyond his “Primus inter pares” (“first among equals”) status to be regarded as the all-time greatest. His costly and, so far, not wholly successful redevelopment of the stadium was supposed to be the jewel in the crown but, for a host of reasons, hasn’t hit home with the power he expected it to. I think, a couple of months away from his 79th birthday, he feels that time is flying, and he has none to waste.

He needs, desires, more league wins, more Champions Leagues, fewer sights of Barcelona lifting trophies, less whistling and jeering when Madrid play at their imperious HQ. He craves the formation of a European Super League. Right now, he’s being thwarted in too many of those desires.

Those previous nine coaches he sacked only a few months into their reigns usually, it must be pointed out, made way for more successful, more glorious periods for the club as European and domestic trophies were stacked up and the best players actively chose to move to Real Madrid. This fact is incontestable.

President Pérez, in my opinion, has blamed the wrong man, has ignored the real problems and, now that he has passed the baton to Álvaro Arbeloa, he has perpetuated the real flaws rather than cured them in sacking Alonso. But he won’t care about that opinion and, in the past, his irresistible force has defeated any apparently immovable object. This time? I’m unconvinced.

Bad luck, Xabi. You only partially contributed to this situation. But, as you always said yourself, Real Madrid is different. Real Madrid is unique. Good luck with what comes next.