Paul McGinley has never argued that leaving was the offence. The Irishman who captained Europe at Gleneagles in 2014 says he understood why his players took the Saudi money, and might have done the same. His complaint, per GolfMagic, is about how they left.
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“Half of the team I captained in the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles went to LIV. Half of them. Not one of them showed any graciousness to the Tour they were leaving. That broke my heart,” he said.
Six of the twelve-man side, including Sergio Garcia, Lee Westwood, Ian Poulter, and Graeme McDowell, signed with LIV when it launched in June 2022. The charge is not that they enriched themselves. It is that men the DP World Tour had paid and promoted treated it as an inconvenience on the way out, and said so aloud.
Where the offence lay
“I understand why they went to LIV and I think if I’d been in their position, I might have done the same,” he said. “In my view, going was not the biggest mistake. Their short-sightedness, in being critical of the DP World Tour as they departed, this was the problem. They burned their bridges as they crossed to the other side and a lot of people were offended by that.”
The anger was never about the destination. It was about the noise made while leaving, which turned a private financial decision into a public verdict on the tour that built them. McGinley resists widening the charge into a character trial. “I don’t want this to be a hatchet job on the boys, I have relationships with them, but they made mistakes. We all make mistakes. Their view was so short-term. Their advisers needed to say, ‘Hey, remember where you came from. You’ve been given a golden ticket at this point in your career, don’t rub it in anyone’s face, and don’t think you can continue to play wherever you please after this.'”
The relationships survive, which is why the tone reads as disappointment. He has since spent an hour with Westwood at Chart Hills, fifteen minutes with Poulter at the Walker Cup, and caught Garcia at Doonbeg, per GolfMagic. “I don’t criticize them for the decision they made, but feel they just didn’t do it in the right way.”
The goodbye he wanted
What makes the judgment more than nostalgia is what followed. LIV filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States in September, its Saudi funding withdrawn and new investors courted for a 2027 revival, while Garcia, McDowell and Poulter have distanced themselves from that next phase.
The bridges burned on the way out are now the bridges they need to cross back. Garcia, Europe’s record points scorer, wants to rejoin the DP World Tour in 2027 to chase a Ryder Cup place, saying he is “proud to call it home again.” The route is not clean: a £100,000 fine over LIV’s inaugural event at Centurion, an alleged range outburst in Germany in which he is said to have told players they should have “taken the Saudi money,” and a resignation of membership barring him from Ryder Cup leadership roles.
Hence the refrain about the advice nobody gave. “They’re now trying to be more conciliatory. ‘Coming back to my home’ is what Sergio wrote recently, but people remember what was said four years ago,” McGinley said. “Back then, if these guys had been getting good advice, they would have been told, ‘You’ve got to leave it in the right way’, because LIV might be here today, gone tomorrow. You may want to come back to the PGA Tour or the DP World Tour, so let’s do this in a classy way, expressing some appreciation as you exit. They didn’t do this.”
One of them did. “That was Louis Oosthuizen. He wrote a letter to Keith Pelley, then the CEO, that was read out to the board. He talked about where he came from in South Africa, the opportunities he’d been given on the European Tour, and how he was able to move on to the PGA Tour from there. He said he was at a point in his career where he’s getting more injuries and how this was a huge amount of money that he couldn’t turn down, but that he would leave the European Tour with a heavy heart. That letter was appreciated.”
Oosthuizen took the same money and admitted the same temptation, yet left with a compliment instead of a complaint, and by McGinley’s reckoning that one act outweighed every explanation offered since. Four years on, with the breakaway tour in bankruptcy protection and its alumni seeking a way home, the difference between a letter and a parting shot looks less like etiquette than foresight.