Ahead of the 48th edition of the UK Championship (starting tomorrow), the first Triple Crown tournament of the 2024-25 season, the World Snooker Tour (WST) recently announced potential record prize money this season of £19 million ($24 million), a figure born out of the organization’s continued growth and global expansion.
The number would easily be the highest ever for the tour and represents an increase of 35% compared to last season.
The increased prize pot is part of a wider set of ambitious plans by WST to globalize the sport.
This was illustrated by the recent announcement that next year’s World Grand Prix event has been relocated from the UK to Hong Kong with ambitions to set the sport’s biggest-ever live audience for a ranking tournament.
The Grand Hall, Kai Tak Arena for the World Grand Prix will have a capacity of over 4,000 and is expected to attract a record crowd.
“There are stages where we grow in new territories,” WST chief executive Simon Brownell explains to Sportcal (GlobalData Sport). “Firstly, you need an engaged audience and Hong Kong does [have that].
“We have a 24-hour snooker channel on Now TV in Hong Kong and a huge fan base. We weren't serving that from a social media perspective well enough so we partnered with [sports marketing agency] Red Lantern and they've enabled us to engage more with our audience in Hong Kong and China and that's given us confidence to demonstrate that there is a strong audience out there.”
Hong Kong will hold its first ranking event in 35 years when it welcomes the world’s top players for the tournament from March 4 to 9, 2025.
WST will organize the event alongside F Sports Promotions and the Billiard Sports Council of Hong Kong, China.
The World Grand Prix has been held in the UK since its inception in 2015, with Leicester’s Morningside Arena the setting for this year’s event in January.
“Hong Kong for us has been a huge success story,” Brownell says. “In 2022, when we went there and hosted the Hong Kong masters, it was an eye-opener in an arena with 10,000 people and a relatively new market for us.
“We were asking ourselves, ‘Are we a global sport?’ We’re hosting events in the UK very successfully and there are parts of Europe that have hosted on several occasions and pull great crowds. China is huge for our sport, but outside of those key markets, how are we progressing on this timeline of developing snooker?
“We realized that we hadn't been thinking enough in the medium and long term. We're very good at making short-term decisions but in terms of a five-year plan, we spent a lot of time working on that and the medium and long term can be quite difficult because you don't get short-term results from doing that.”
With the backing of heavyweight multi-sport promoter Matchroom, the WST has also developed a presence in Saudi Arabia this year, a country Matchroom has forged close ties with.
The promoter has staged several boxing events in Riyadh in recent years and has used this relationship to create a fourth snooker ‘major’ to be held annually in the Saudi capital.
As a major new player in sports hosting, Saudi added snooker to its portfolio with the launch of the Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters in August, making it the fourth major on the sport’s calendar.
The new tournament in the Kingdom offers prize money of £2 million as part of a 10-year agreement with the WST.
“Saudi Arabia presents so many fantastic opportunities for us because of what they're looking to achieve with their plan for Vision 2030,” Brownell states.
“We provide them with a unique way of getting their people to be engaged in the sport and that's enabled us to jump to stage three of our traditional international strategy.
“We've been working on Saudi Arabia and the Middle East for 10 years, and it's taken a long time to get to this point, but we've been able to now host two successful events there.”
With a footing in the Middle East secured, the WST is now seeking to enter other key target markets – notably the US, Brazil, and India.
However, instead of just seeking a new territory to stage its events, the snooker body is keen to identify a market where it can also increase fan engagement levels and promote the sport with a more holistic approach.
The WST is aiming to utilize its broadcast partnerships to support this strategy.
“Rather than looking at where in the world we are ready to host an event, we're now looking at what levels of engagement we can achieve in each of these markets, and instead of using an OTT service from a streaming platform, how we can engage in a local broadcaster to take it to a wider audience,” Brownell outlines.
“Then the conversation can be about how we go from having a local broadcaster, to an event. We're focused less on just hitting that end game and more on developing these territories.
“In doing so, we'll get some of these territories to that point where we can think about putting an event on. It's more medium and long term but we've got a lot of territories that are of real interest.”
Challenges and commercial value
With global growth ambitions come challenges and like any other sports property, the WST must overcome obstacles to reach its desired end goal.
For the WST, however, some challenges are self-inflicted.
“One of our challenges is there isn’t enough time in the calendar, and that's come about from our own success because we've been able to put on new events,” Brownell admits.
“We have a huge market in both the UK and China that's very mature and could do with hosting new events and in those markets, we must reflect on how we get our events currently there to the next level.
“In China, we have lots of parts that want to have events, and so there's a competitive tension there. We're looking towards that to be the trigger to grow more but it also means that we can't as we're not always able to service the level of demand in a territory, and that could be a real challenge.
“What we need to think about for the business is what the right medium- and long-term outcomes are, and there could be opportunities that exist that we have to turn down, which is always a difficult thing to do, but we'll do that because it works towards our longer-term strategy, and that will be where we get the most growth.”
As well as growing its audience and reach, the WST is focused on commercial success and offering value to partners, who will ultimately help take the sport to the next level globally.
At present, the WST’s commercial portfolio consists largely of brands based in its biggest markets – the UK and China.
This includes principal partners Cazoo, Johnstone’s Paint and Castore, and tour partners Victorian Plumbing, All British Casino & Sports, and Nongfu Spring.
Brownell, who took over as chief executive in 2021, believes simplifying the sport will attract more international partners.
“The simpler we can make a concept, the more success we'll be able to have from it,” he explains. “International and commercial growth for our company is incredibly simple.
“If we can create the most compelling snooker, we could not only sell it to the people within that territory, we could, for example, sell it to the [UK's] BBC, the biggest broadcaster in the land, and also take it to China, Hong Kong, and North and South America, and broadcast it across Europe with Eurosport, another one of our partners.
“The more of these partners that we can bring in, the more commercial growth that we can achieve, and if we can appeal to new territories, it means that not only are we able to achieve growth from a broadcast perspective, but we can demonstrate new territories from a commercial perspective.”
He adds: “When partners are looking to partner with our sport to achieve exposure or advocacy for their brand, if we can offer them more territories for that, they're more inclined to become part of our sport.
“One of our biggest challenges is dispelling some of the myths around snooker and convincing people we aren't just a UK sport.
“We have a huge global audience and one that can be hugely successful for partners. Sell it into more territories, and with that, you create more opportunities for commercial successes as well.”
The flagship World Championships typically offer a major opportunity to generate significant revenue from a commercial and ticketing standpoint.
However, the WST has been slightly limited with the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, home to the showpiece World Championships since 1977, only holding 980 spectators.
With the organizer now seeking bigger audiences and higher prize money for its biggest events, there is a threat that snooker’s flagship event could be moved when the Crucible’s current contract expires in 2027.
The WST will have a potentially seismic decision to make in the coming years, but for now, the focus is to improve the overall quality of the World Championships from all aspects.
“This is a decision that will be hugely important for the future of our sport and we were stuck between a really fantastic opportunity and what would have to be an even better opportunity than this one [in Sheffield] that we’ve got to change our minds,” Brownell says.
“We're engaged in really positive discussions with Sheffield City Council, and we have talked about and are starting to plan some really positive change to the way that we host the event.
“We're guilty of a short-term view of hosting the World Championships as we’re usually thinking about how we can make it better than last year. That’s always been our mantra but that's not going to be what takes the event to the next level.
He continues: “We must think about what the event should look like to achieve what we want it to and those are the conversations that we're having with the council currently. We're hopeful that the 2025 World Championships will be the biggest that's ever been staged.
“We know the audience is there. We're going to try and make the event the biggest possible one we can have in Sheffield and make the decision really hard for ourselves because if something else comes in, they have to be even bigger than this incredible event that we're trying to put on.
“If that comes in down the road, that's a consideration that we can look at in time. But at the minute, we are focused on driving up that championship, making it the best it could possibly be. I know that we can improve it and make it better and that's the focus.”
Snooker is on an upward trajectory and with new markets and lucrative opportunities now in play, the WST can take off with its growth strategy.
The task for the WST leadership is to continue to compete for eyeballs and steer the ship in the right direction.
“We've got to continue this global growth,” Brownell concludes. “We use major sports like golf and tennis to open our eyes to what we can achieve and we're going to continue to strive to be a huge sport to compete with the likes of golf and tennis and football for brand partnerships.
“The focus for us is to continue to grow, but not just thinking about growth as being better than last year, but how we can get to the pinnacle and every step we want to take will be in that direction.”
