Rory McIlroy makes damning claim about what LIV officials were saying at Augusta

Rory McIlroy threw his support behind the DP World Tour’s ultimatum to LIV Golf players on Wednesday, and in doing so leveled a damning accusation about what LIV officials were saying on the grounds of Augusta National this spring.

The ultimatum came last month from DP World Tour CEO Guy Kinnings, who said LIV players will no longer be permitted in DP World Tour events and must choose a side. For European players who remain with LIV, the cost extends beyond a schedule as they would forfeit their Ryder Cup eligibility. LIV answered in its New Jersey bankruptcy case, where its lawyers accused Kinnings of interfering with the proceedings. It was the latest volley in a feud that has been escalating for months. In August, LIV CEO Scott O’Neil said the league wanted to “complete, not compete” with the golf ecosystem, a line that landed poorly with DP World Tour officials after LIV had tried to poach several of the tour’s events and sponsors. O’Neil also accused a DP World Tour executive of contacting LIV players to discuss their options; subsequent reporting indicated the calls ran the other direction, with player agents reaching out to the DP World Tour.

McIlroy, in the field at this week’s Abu Dhabi Aldar Championship, the penultimate DP World Tour event for the 2026 season, left no doubt where he stands.

“I agree with everything that Guy said,” McIlroy said. “They took players, they took sponsors, they turned professional golf into an arms race. They were going around Augusta this year saying they wanted to destroy the European Tour. It’s ironic that a week later, now they are talking about ‘completing and not competing.’ That’s different from what they were saying at the start of the year. I think everything that’s transpired, a lot of the guys wanted to come back and play the DP World Tour. It puts this tour in a really strong position.”

The 2026 Masters marked a painful inflection point for LIV. Bryson DeChambeau missed the cut, Jon Rahm’s major struggles deepened and Sergio Garcia had an unbecoming outburst on a tee box. Days later, reports surfaced that Saudi Arabia was pulling its financial backing from the league, bringing an end to its soft-power experiment in professional golf. As LIV now attempts to relaunch, only four players have publicly committed to “LIV 2.0.”

For his part, McIlroy defended his green jacket, beating Scottie Scheffler by one to win his sixth major championship.

Though McIlroy plays most of his golf on the PGA Tour, he remains closely tied to his home tour, where he's looking to win the Race to Dubai season-long points title for a record tying eighth time. McIlroy has become something of a bridge between the two tours as they work toward a new arrangement between them. Their Strategic Alliance, under which the PGA Tour provides financial stability to its European counterpart, expires next year. What replaces it in a post-LIV world remains an open question.

“It was always going to be good for a few years until something like this happened, or they realized they weren’t going to get any return on investment, or they were going to leave the golf space and go invest in something else and invest in something that would actually make them money,” McIlroy said of LIV's launch into the golf ecosystem. “I think for long-term sustainability for men’s professional golf, I think we are in a much better spot.”

Before the surprise Framework Agreement between the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, McIlroy served as the establishment’s de facto frontman against LIV. Calling golf’s schism “a very strange time,” he said balance must be restored after a stretch in which players held too much leverage.

“There has to be a bit of give and take. I’ve said this from the start, there’s never been a better time to be a professional golfer,” McIlroy said. “Talk to Jack Nicklaus or any of these older guys, they would have loved LIV to come around in their day, they would have made more money, and we are all making more money because of it.

“But I do think there has to be a bit of a reset. I’ve talked about this. They created a false economy within men’s professional golf, and I think that there is going to be a bit of a reset here, which ... just for things to be a little bit more sustainable. You know, there’s not as much of an arms race as there was maybe a couple of years ago, and some players will argue that that’s not good for players, but I think that’s very short-term thinking. If you want sustainable tours, and we want these tours to be around in 50 years’ time, there has to be sustainable business practices in place to make sure they are around.”