“I don’t think we need to blow everything up, but there definitely needs to be some tweaks, I think.”

In short, he’s dreaming of a Champions League for golf. 

“I think you would just create a tour for the top 80 players in the world,” he said. 

Players would play just one tour and “everything sort of feeds up into that one”, he ventured.

“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.”

As for Spieth, who took four at the fourth on Friday but inadvertently signed for a three and was disqualified, McIlroy could “see both sides” of the rules debate that appears to be raging on social media.

“You know, if we’re really trying to keep this game like unbifurcated and trying to — you know, the pros play by the same rules as the amateurs, then we all need to keep our playing partners’ scorecards and we’re responsible for that,” he said.

“But I also see the other side of the coin where there’s thousands of people watching us, every shot’s tracked on Shot Tracker and on the PGA TOUR app, so if it — is it really needed at this point?

“So I can see both sides of it, both sides of the argument. I probably am more of a traditionalist than anything else, so I fall into the camp of it’s worked for so long, I don’t think you really need to change it.”