Rory McIlroy believes the \u201cfalse economy\u201d created by the threat of LIV Golf may now be putting some well-established PGA Tour events at risk. The world No 2 and current Masters champion said he felt people had lost sight of how good the tour was before it too had a huge cash injection.<\/p>\n
When the Saudi breakaway started luring away some of the top talent on multimillion-dollar contracts \u00adduring the early years the PGA Tour\u2019s response was to restructure, \u00adcreating eight signature events each with smaller field and prize funds of $20m (\u00a315m), plus generating a number of associated financial benefits.<\/p>\n
The threat of LIV has now subsided with its future in doubt<\/a> after Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund \u2013 which had pumped $5bn into the venture \u2013 announced it would stop financing it at the end of the year. But further changes were already in the pipeline on the PGA Tour, including the contentious two-tier system of tournament rankings which McIlroy is not a fan of.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s funny as they\u2019ve done all this work [and] you start to realise that the way the tour was before LIV came along was actually pretty good,\u201d said the Northern Irishman ahead of the US Open<\/a> at Shinnecock Hills in Long Island, New York.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a pretty good structure, and everything sort of worked pretty well. LIV created this false economy where we had to up prize funds and had to cut fields and try to support the top players.<\/p>\n \u201c I think it needed to \u00adhappen because that was the only way to retain talent at the time, but now that LIV looks like it\u2019s less of a threat, I think, as I said, the old ways of the PGA Tour weren\u2019t actually that bad.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAn event like last week, the Canadian Open, potentially going to one of these Track 2s. Track 2 is a glorified Korn Ferry (second-tier) event. I don\u2019t think the Canadian Open should be one of those.<\/p>\n \u201cI just think there\u2019s going to be certain events that might lose their stature if a sponsor doesn\u2019t pony up $30m, so that\u2019s the tough thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Rory McIlroy will be paired with Tommy Fleetwood and Ludvig \u00c5berg for the first two rounds of the US Open. Photograph: Christian Petersen\/Getty Images<\/p>\n