Rory McIlroy: I’d love LIV to become the IPL of golf

Rory McIlroy admits LIV Golf has a future in a new unified golfing ecosystem. 

McIlroy has softened his stance on LIV in recent months after claiming he felt like a “sacrificial lamb” following last summer’s shock framework agreement between the PGA Tour and Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) bankrolling the breakaway series.

The two parties remain locked in talks over a merger that would unite the factions as one commercial entity, after missing a self-imposed deadline to finalise a deal before the end of 2023.

And McIlroy, LIV’s most vocal critic over the past 18 months, resigned from the PGA Tour’s Policy Board in November with the sport still in a state of flux.

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The Northern Irishman said after the merger announcement in June that he still ‘hates’ LIV’s controversial 54-hole format – but now he feels the Greg Norman-fronted enterprise can have a place on the golfing calendar.

He wants LIV to morph into golf’s version of the Indian Premier League in cricket, which attracts some of the sport’s biggest stars for a specific window in the year.

“To me, what I would LIV love to turn into is almost the IPL of golf,” told the Stick to Football podcast.

“IPL in cricket – they take two months off the calendar. You’ve got four weeks in May and four weeks in November and you do this team stuff and it’s a bit different, a different format.

“If they were to do something like that, I’d be like ‘yeah, that sounds like fun’ because at least you’re working within the ecosystem. It’s not like the Saudis in football are trying to take over the entire sport, where the Saudis exposed some of the flaws in the structure of professional golf.

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“They’ve been able to completely disrupt our game with that money so it exposed some of those flaws so hopefully we can put our heads together and think about what is best for the game going forward.”

McIlroy, who has described Jon Rahm’s big-money switch from the PGA Tour to LIV as a “smart business move”, wants players and officials to ‘put egos aside’ for the sake of harmony in the game.

“I hope everyone comes back together,” he stressed. “You’ve got guys on both sides who don’t want it to happen for certain reasons. The LIV guys don’t want to come back and play the PGA Tour because they don’t feel they’ve been treated very well.

“Some of the PGA Tour guys don’t want things to come back together because they don’t want to see those other guys. People need to put their egos and their feelings aside and we all move forward because that would be the best thing for golf.”

Ben Parsons joined bunkered as a Content Producer in 2023 and is the man to come to for all of the latest news, across both the professional and amateur games. Formerly of The Mirror and Press Association, he is a member at Halifax Golf Club and is a long-suffering fan of both Manchester United and the Wales rugby team.