Guy Kinnings put a number on a suspicion that had hung over his sport for four years. Days before his season ended, the DP World Tour chief executive alleged that more than $7 billion had been spent against his circuit with the destruction of it among the aims, a claim he supported through testimony rather than documents.
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Kinnings made the claim in an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with The Scotsman. “We also have to protect the Tour against an entity who spent, so we are told, over $7 billion, with one of their aims being to ‘destroy the DP World Tour,'” he said. Kinnings added that he had heard from trusted sources that LIV aimed to destroy the tour, citing a $7 billion spend figure he described as secondhand.
That sourcing made the claim an allegation rather than a finding. “I have heard that from so many different people they talked to, who I have known for over 30 years within the game and who I trust implicitly,” he said, offering no filing, no accounts, and no public statement from LIV Golf. LIV gave no response in the interview, so the allegation of intent stands unverified and unanswered.
What the spending bought was where his case became concrete. The tour held more than $1 billion in current contracted value, roughly a seventh of the figure he cited, and it had kept that position through a pandemic, regional conflicts, and a media rights collapse. On those numbers, destroying the DP World Tour did not require beating it on a Sunday.
It required pricing it out of the player market, which was the mechanism he set out when he said LIV “took prize funds to an artificially high level” on “an entirely unsustainable economic model,” echoing Paul McGinley’s “false economy.” That was the ambition behind the allegation: not a rival circuit trying to win, but a funder trying to make the incumbent uneconomic.
His urgency had a date attached to it. Kinnings argued the model had shown its limits, that the uncertainty around LIV was “almost the time for a reset, a bit of a recalibration for the game, so to speak,” and that the tour had to settle its rules before rivals settled them for it.
The 2027 invite policy was the live test. Asked why players such as Marc Warren and Joost Luiten felt bruised by it, he answered with the threat rather than the policy: “Clearly when you are faced with statements like that, and then people then ask why we are doing what we are doing with our membership and invite policy for 2027, then I think the answer becomes pretty obvious.” He then cited “a slight misconception,” saying the tour created no new exemption category, sent no invites to Rolex Series events, and targeted smaller national opens from February to August where fields needed strengthening, for players who “bring genuine value.”
Eligibility raised the same stakes. On Sergio Garcia‘s talk of “coming home,” Kinnings accepted the sensitivity but held that “regardless of who the players are, they’ve got to prove themselves in the system.” He drew a firmer line on Ryder Cup captaincy, noting that the tour had required continuous membership since 2017, when “nobody even knew what LIV was then,” and that the Tournament Committee was “very firm” it should stay that way.
He rejected the idea that the tour was merely surviving the spending he described. Critics, he said, “can take a figure here or a figure there and make it sound like it’s something different,” and he countered with sponsorship “over 100 percent up from 2019 to 2025,” viewership up 7 percent that year and commercial revenue up 30 percent. With the PGA Tour running January to August, he saw the September to January window as a chance to “truly shine a light on international golf as golf’s global Tour,” and he said Brian Rolapp wanted to extend the Strategic Alliance, with talks ongoing.
The allegation remained the story, and it would stay alleged until someone produced the accounting behind the $7 billion or LIV answered it. He said the aim was to leave his tour unable to compete and pointed to contracted revenue and a schedule it believed it could own. Whether that was survival or a permanent repricing was a question his own numbers invited, and one the other side had yet to address.