The Scotsman<\/a> this week that LIV \u201cwanted to destroy us\u201d with its financial muscle by targeting events and sponsors. He claims LIV officials made their intentions clear about plans to demolish the circuit at this year\u2019s Masters.<\/p>\n\u00a0\u201cI agree with everything that Guy said,\u201d McIlroy told reporters here at the Abu Dhabi Aldar Championship. \u201cThey 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. Yeah, I agree with everything.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people that don\u2019t agree are probably very shortsighted. Look, there was some of the money that they used the right way, created the International Series on The Asian Tour, great for a couple years, but where did that leave the Asian Tour? They left them high and dry. Asian Tour came back into the fold and did a partnership with the PGA Tour and The European Tour. Again, this was always going to be the case. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt was always going to be good for a few years until something like this happened, or they realised they weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think for long-term sustainability for men\u2019s professional golf, I think we are in a much better spot.\u201d<\/p>\n
McIlroy believes the golf world will look back at LIV\u2019s insurgence as a \u201cvery strange time\u201d.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cIt gave players a lot of leverage over the tours, and I don\u2019t necessarily think that\u2019s a good thing for the overall health of the professional game.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there has to be a balance there. There has to be a bit of give and take. I\u2019ve said this from the start, there\u2019s never been a better time to be a professional golfer. 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I do think there has to be a bit of a reset. I\u2019ve talked about this it. They created a false economy within men\u2019s professional golf, and I think that there is going to be a bit of a reset here, which \u2014 just for things to be a little bit more sustainable. You know, there\u2019s not as much of an arms race as there was maybe a couple of years ago, and some players will argue that that\u2019s not good for players \u2013 but I think that\u2019s very short-term thinking.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you want sustainable tours, and we want these tours object around in 50 years\u2019 time, there has to be sustainable business practises in place to make sure they are around in 50 years\u2019 time.\u201d<\/p>\n
More to follow<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rory McIlroy argues LIV Golf turned the game into an arms race and made a revelation about this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":952146,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-952145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=952145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/952146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=952145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=952145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=952145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}