Rory McIlroy Walks Back LIV Stance, Now Criticizes PGA Tour

The PGA Tour begins its 2024 season on Thursday when The Sentry tees off with a $20 million purse in Maui, but the player making the biggest news is not competing. Rory McIlory, who is skipping this week’s tournament, made some bold statements about LIV Golf during a recent appearance on the Stick to Football podcast.

McIlroy admitted that LIV exposed the PGA Tour’s flaws and that he has been too judgmental of players that have joined the circuit. “You’re asking for millions of dollars to sponsor these events, and you’re not able to guarantee to the sponsors that the players are going to show up,” he said. “I can’t believe the PGA Tour has done so well for so long.”

The No. 2-ranked player in the world also softened his previously hardline stance against LIV, if it were confined to a shorter schedule, perhaps in the fall, rather than competing head-to-head against the PGA Tour. “You go and do this team stuff and it’s a bit different and is a different format,” McIlroy proposed. “If they were to do something like that I would say, ‘Yeah, that sounds like fun,’ because you are working within the ecosystem.”

PGA Tour Back in Sync

The 2024 campaign marks the first time in a decade that the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup season is confined to a calendar year. Since the 2013-14 season, the PGA Tour has used a wraparound schedule that sometimes began just weeks after the previous season ended.

This season, the FedEx Cup runs from January until the playoffs in August, when a season-long champion will be crowned and earn $25 million. Theoretically, in a perfect world as described by McIlroy, each year would look like this, and LIV, which begins its season in February, could hold team-focused events in the fall instead of competing with the PGA Tour’s main slate of tournaments. This year (as it did in 2023), the PGA Tour will conduct a fall series of events that don’t offer FedEx Cup points.