Rory McIlroy faces tricky LIV Golf question after receiving Tiger Woods boost

Rory McIlroy will no doubt be keen to showcase his and Tiger Woods’ innovative golf league, ‘TGL,’ is different to that of their rivals over at LIV Golf.

McIlroy and Woods formed TGL back in 2022, in reaction to the birth of the LIV setup. It was expected that the simulator-based league would launch at the beginning of 2024, but a whole host of issues with the league’s venue in Florida ensured season one was delayed until 2025.

The indoor circuit will see a number of the PGA Tour’s compete at the state-of-the-art facility across six teams, with both McIlroy and Woods taking part and leading a four-man roster of their own.

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The team element of the league has seen it draw comparisons to that of LIV, who pride themselves on their team competition running alongside the individual leaderboard. As well as this, McIlroy and Woods’ efforts to innovate the game with a never-seen-before league again appeared to align them with the plan of LIV.

This however was something McIlroy had been quick to quash. Asked about the comparisons of the two leagues following the launch of the Northern Irishman’s Boston Common team last November, he outlined that TGL’s plans were to work in sync with the PGA Tour rather than ‘disrupt’ it.

“I think this is meant to be complementary. It’s not meant to be disruptive in any way,” McIlroy said. “So whenever Mike McCarley brought this idea to Tiger and I, I think one of the first things we said, well, ‘If you’re going to do this, we’re going to have to try to partner with the PGA Tour in some way and really try to make this complementary.’

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“So I think that was the first thing. This wasn’t adversarial at all. It was trying to, ‘How can we be additive to the entire system?’” Further adding to his point, the four-time major winner went on: ” I think when you look at — we’re pretending to be competitive and it’s a different type of golf, but it’s not the traditional golf you see week in and week out.

“So, I don’t want to sit here and talk about LIV, but I think you can make an argument that they haven’t innovated enough away from what traditional golf is . Or they’ve innovated too much that they’re not traditional golf. They’re sort of caught in no-man’s land. Where [TGL] is so far removed from what we know golf to be.”

Despite the launch delay in January, McIlroy and Woods’ setup were handed a huge boost earlier this week, after it was revealed that TGL’s parent company TMRW Sports had been valued at just short of £400 million ($500m) according to Bloomberg. A whole host of huge names have invested in the venture, including Fenway Sports Group, Lewis Hamilton, Gareth Bale and even Justin Bieber.

TGL boasts an impressive playing roster too, with Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, Xander Schauffele and Collin Morikawa among the 24-man roster alongside McIlroy and Woods. The pair saw both Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton depart, who have since joined the LIV setup, before Hideki Matsuyama finally completed the TGL player list last week.