Monahan defended the need to keep the number of people who knew about the merger to a trusted few, and also accepted that he would be considered a hypocrite for getting into bed with a group he had previously vowed never to work with.

The PGA Tour chief – who has railed against LIV since its inception while simultaneously lobbying star tour players to resist huge paydays to join the circuit – attended a tense meeting with players at the Canadian Open in Toronto on Tuesday.

McIlroy, arguably the most vocal opponent of LIV among the PGA Tour’s players, is playing at the Canadian Open this week.

In a media conference call later, Monahan acknowledged that criticism directed at him was inevitable.

“I recognise everything that I’ve said in the past and my prior positions,” said Monahan, who will be the chief executive of the new tour. “I recognise that people are going to call me a hypocrite.”

The PGA Tour chief insisted his staunch defence of the tour over the past year was in good faith, but that “circumstances do change”.

“Anytime I said anything, I said it with the information that I had at that moment, and I said it based on someone that’s trying to compete for the PGA Tour and our players,” Monahan said.

“I accept those criticisms, but circumstances do change. I think that in looking at the big picture and looking at it this way, that’s what got us to this point.”

Since its launch, LIV players have competed alongside their former colleagues only at the majors, because those four blue-riband events on the golf calendar are not run by either the PGA Tour or DP World Tour but by independent institutions.

Many of those who accepted lucrative signing bonuses to join LIV Golf cited as their reason for making the leap a desire to play fewer events and spend more time with their families.

Advocacy groups 9/11 Families United and Democracy for the Arab World Now were among the organisations that denounced the deal.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on September 11 were from Saudi Arabia. However, the kingdom has long denied a role in the attacks on the World Trade Centre’s twin towers, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

“Jay Monahan co-opted the 9/11 community last year in the PGA [Tour’s] unequivocal agreement that the Saudi LIV project was nothing more than sportswashing of Saudi Arabia’s reputation,” 9/11 Families United said in a statement.

Saudis’ sporting splurge, from CR7 and Newcastle to LIV golf and F1

“Now the PGA and Monahan appear to have become just more paid Saudi shills, taking billions of dollars to cleanse the Saudi reputation so that Americans and the world will forget how the kingdom spent their billions of dollars before 9/11 to fund terrorism, spread their vitriolic hatred, and finance al-Qaeda and the murder of our loved ones.”

Monahan meanwhile defended the cloak-and-dagger nature of the merger talks with LIV that led to Tuesday’s announcement.

“Given the complexity of what we were dealing with, it’s not uncommon that the circle of information is very tight,” Monahan said.

“In our case, we kept that information very tight … we were not in a position to share or explain, as we normally would, and that was really a result of the commitment we had made to maintaining confidentiality through the end.”