Nick Faldo calls for LIV players to be banned from Ryder Cup

Six-time major champion and former broadcaster Nick Faldo said that players who jumped to the upstart LIV Golf series should not be allowed to play in the Ryder Cup, saying “you’ve got to move on.”

“They’re done,” Faldo told Sky Sports News. “It’s a rival tour. If you work for a company for 20 years and you then leave to go to a rival company, I can promise you your picture won’t still be on the wall. You’ve moved on. Fine, off you go.

“They made that decision and I’m sure they knew it was going to cost them,” he added.

“They were playing the maths game. They were getting a huge chunk of money up front, and they knew it was going to lose them sponsors, but they thought, ‘I still win.'”

Faldo played in 11 Ryder Cups in total between 1977 and 1997. A pivotal figure in Europe’s rise in the competition in the 1980s and 1990s, Faldo has a less happy experience as captain, presiding over a defeat in Valhalla in 2008.

Faldo branded the LIV tour as “meaningless”, arguing it does nothing to grow the game and instead carries out an agenda that’s “antagonistic” to the PGA Tour and DP World Tour.

“It’s a closed shop: 48 guys given loads of money,” Faldo said. “What gripes me is it’s not growing the game of golf. That really gets me when they fly across the world to a country that’s been playing golf for 100-plus years and say, ‘We’re growing the game of golf.’

“If they keep saying they want to grow the game of golf, go and take it to new regions. Countries in the early days of being interested in golf now.

“Try that rather than just trying to antagonize everybody.”