Rory McIlroy may no longer be on the PGA Tour policy board or in on the negotiations with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund to combine commercial operations, but he is letting his voice be heard anyways. Participating in the DP World Tour’s two-week stretch in Dubai, the 34-year-old has laid out his vision for the future of the professional game. Ahead of his title defense at the Dubai Desert Classic, McIlroy expanded on the idea of a world golf tour featuring the best players with other tours acting as feeders.
“The way I view it is a bit like [the] Champions League in football,” said McIlroy. “It’s like the best of the best in Europe, and then all of the other leagues feed up into it. There’s lots of different tours getting interest and a lot of great players, but if you want to create something that is real value for the game of golf, I think it’s this top-level tour and then all the other tours feed into it.”
McIlroy’s idea of a world tour is not exactly a new one. Various iterations have been floated for decades by numerous parties (McIlroy included), but his recent softening on LIV Golf and the acceptance of the Saudi-backed team circuit more than likely coming together with the PGA Tour has sparked renewed interest in the global effort.
While still in its infancy, LIV Golf has made it clear international markets are a scheduling priority. Events such as LIV Golf Adelaide made waves both down under and in the United States, while international tournaments like LIV Golf Singapore and LIV Golf Andalucia were seen as successes by the league. While LIV Golf has tapped these markets, the PGA Tour has ignored them —something which can no longer happen from both a growing the game and economic perspective.
“If this global tour somehow comes to fruition in the next few years, could you imagine bringing the best 70 or 80 golfers in the world to India for a tournament?” said McIlroy. “I think [it] would change the game and the perception of the game in a country like that. So again, there’s so much opportunity out there to go global with it.
“I’ve said this for the last few months, but golf is at an inflection point, and if golf doesn’t do it now, I fear that it will never do it and we’ll sort of have this fractured landscape forever,” he continued.
The idea of a global tour is well-founded but it still has some hoops to jump through, mainly the desire of professional golfers. Most of the elites on the PGA Tour and LIV Golf aim to play around 20 times during the calendar year with an emphasis on preparation and recovery around the major championships in the summer. Would these events only be in the fall in order to avoid scheduling conflict? Would large prize purses be enough to lure United States-based players to unfamiliar parts of the world? Would it make sense for broadcast partners to air golf at 2 a.m. on the East Coast of the U.S.? How would fans respond?
McIlroy understands there will be many mouths to feed and many questions to answer for this global tour to materialize. Getting everyone on the same page will be vital and may be more difficult said than done especially in a sport that has been worlds apart the last few years.
“I think just different interests,” McIlroy said. “There’s a lot of different interests in the game, and I think what we need to do first is align interests, align interests of the players and the business and the fans and the media and try to get everyone’s interests aligned. And then once you do that, then you can move forward. So it’s the aligning of interests, which is the big key to trying to get to that dream scenario.”