SAN DIEGO — As a potential deal between the PGA Tour and the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia continues to loom over professional golf, Rory McIlroy said he believed it was time for all players to “get over it” and do whatever needs to be done to reunify the game.
“Whether you stayed on the PGA Tour or left [for LIV Golf], we’ve all benefited from all of this,” McIlroy said Wednesday ahead of the Genesis Invitational, highlighting the $20 million purse for the event. “If people are butt-hurt or have their feelings hurt because guys went and whatever, who cares? Let’s move forward together and let’s just try to get this thing going again and do what’s best for the game.”
McIlroy at one point was one of the most outspoken critics of LIV. He admitted Wednesday he was initially not a fan of the fracturing of the sport that LIV caused, or its format. But the four-time major winner says he believes now that the current setup — with both tours operating separately and the top players meeting only at the four major championships — is unsustainable.
“We all have to say, ‘OK, this is the starting point, and we move forward. We don’t look behind us, we don’t look to the past,'” McIlroy said of bringing players back into the fold. “Having Bryson DeChambeau come back and play on this tour is good.”
Last week, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and Adam Scott met with President Donald Trump to try to speed up the process of facilitating a deal. Sources previously told ESPN that the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division is reviewing the potential PIF investment into PGA Tour Enterprises, the circuit’s for-profit entity.
On Wednesday, Monahan said the goal of such talks wasn’t solely on the financial investment between PIF and the PGA Tour Enterprises, but rather about “the reunification of the professional game on one tour, with all the best players on it” more than only four times a year.
“Everything is moving forward with pace, and I think there’s a general — when you look at all the parties involved — there’s a general enthusiasm for getting this done.” Monahan told reporters Wednesday. “I think the meeting [with Trump] ultimately gets us one step closer to a deal being done, but there’s a lot more work to do.”
Though neither Trump nor the White House has released a statement on the meeting, both Monahan and McIlroy said they believed the president was in favor of reunifying the sport and bringing the two tours together under the PGA Tour umbrella.
McIlroy said he met and played a round of golf with Trump before his inauguration last month and said they discussed LIV, which holds events at the president’s golf properties.
“I learned that he’s not a fan of the LIV format,” McIlroy said, referring to its 54-hole events with shotgun starts. “I was like, ‘But you’ve hosted their events.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t mean that I like it.’ So I think he’s on the tour’s side.”
What makes Trump potentially helpful in the negotiations, said McIlroy, is that he has direct access to prime minister of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, the boss of PIF chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan.
“Not many people can say [to Yasir], ‘I want you to get this deal done and by the way, I’m speaking to your boss, I’m going to tell him the same thing,'” said McIlroy, who played with Trump’s granddaughter, Kai, and was seen walking and talking with Donald Trump Jr. during Wednesday’s pro-am at the Genesis. “There’s a few things that he can do. He can be influential.”
Though Monahan reiterated that the process of figuring out a deal, let alone how to reunite the game, was complicated, McIlroy said he believed it could be simple. In his mind, players who went to LIV and want to come back on the PGA Tour should be able to if they have status. And as far as equity through the player equity program, McIlroy said players who do return should not get it automatically but should have the opportunity to earn it in some form.
“The players on the PGA Tour had more leverage than they ever had to go to the tour to say we want this, we want that,” McIlroy said. “But at the same time I regret some of those decisions, too, because it put the tour in a place where they were stretched financially and they sort of had to look at taking money from elsewhere to try to compete.”
A year ago, the Strategic Sports Group announced an investment of up to $3 billion in PGA Tour Enterprises (including $1.5 billion for the player equity program), a move that McIlroy said Wednesday he’d like to know more about.
“What are we going to do with the [other] one and a half billion? What are we going to invest in? How are we going to get this thing to grow?” McIlroy said when asked what questions he had for Monahan. “I’ve got equity in this company, I want the company to grow. I’m basically like a [limited partner] in a fund, so what are we doing?”
In response to McIlroy’s inquiry, Monahan said that while the tour has not yet spent the money, it has established an investment committee and is looking into various options for utilizing the funding to improve.
“We’re currently in discussions with some opportunities where we will deploy capital,” Monahan said. “We’re actively looking at deals that are going to make the PGA Tour stronger and deals that are complementary to our business.”
But any other deals the tour might strike are not as crucial as the one with PIF. And while any complications of the partnership are still being ironed out, McIlroy said he was optimistic about the potential for more tournaments featuring the world’s best players sooner rather than later.
“I absolutely think in 2026 you could get to a point where we play together more often,” he said. “I think there’s an opportunity here where in ’26, I don’t think it will get all the way there, but I think you’ll start to hopefully see a move towards where it could go.”