21 February 2024 , 12:23
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LIV Golf rebel Sergio Garcia tried to pay his way back into Ryder Cup contention last year but won't have to in 2025 following Rory McIlroy's plea.
After joining the Saudi Arabia-backed breakaway league in 2022, Garcia effectively gave up his DP World Tour membership, which is a requirement for any player to represent Europe in the Ryder Cup.
The 44-year-old, the 2017 Masters champion and Ryder Cup legend, tried to make a last-ditch solution to allow him to play by offering to rejoin the DP World Tour and pay up his £700,000 fines for joining LIV.
"I called and asked him about the possibility of me being a member of the Tour again,” Garcia told i. “I knew I had to be a member to have any possibility of being a part of the European team in Rome. That’s what I wanted, if I paid all my fines and played the minimum number of tournaments required. I was willing to do both, though it would not be ideal because I would have had to play 10 out of 11 or 12 weeks (before the end of the season).
“The answer was there was no chance. When he told me that there was no point going forward with anything else. I’m not going to make the extra effort if I’m not going to get any love back from them. Pelley said hopefully next year everything will be more favourable for all of us but he did not encourage me to become a member.
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"That is a decision I will make with my family and will try to see what is the best thing we can do. At the moment, the feeling is not amazing. We will see where we end up when the new year starts. It is what it is.”
Team Europe went on to beat Team USA in Italy but the former will be handed a major boost in 2025 at the Bethpage Ryder Cup with Garcia and other LIV Golf rebels eligible to play, such as Jon Rahm. "Jon is going to be in Bethpage in 2025," McIlroy said. "Because of this decision, the European Tour is going to have rewrite the rules for Ryder Cup eligibility. Absolutely. There's no question about that."
Sergio Garcia is the Ryder Cup's top points scorer (Getty)McIlroy has softened his stance on LIV Golf in 2024 as the major golf tours seek cooperation and a united sport following years of bitter divide. McIlroy says golf should work toward a World Tour. "I think you would just create a tour for the top 80 players in the world," McIlroy said.
"I think everything sort of feeds up into that one. You know, the way I look at it, it would be like Champions League in European football. It sort of sits above the rest of the leagues and then all those leagues sort of feed up into that and the best of the best play against each other in the Champions League is the way I would think about it. I said this at the back end of last year, everyone's got their own interests in this game and that's what happens when you've got quite a fractured landscape at this point.
"So trying to align everyone's interests and trying to convince everyone that this is the right thing to do for the game of golf as a whole, and if you can convince everyone of that, then it would be pretty simple. But right now it's just trying to get everyone singing off the same hymn sheet."