Snooker Biggest Controversies Of 2024

My tombstone will not be written, this is the man who took the world championships away from the crucible. It's staying and it don't matter how much is involved. And I have never said that once in my entire life. Does the history and the nostalgia of the crucible, does that not mean something? Aren't there things in life that money cannot buy and that's the issue? No, no. Well, I think there are. Does money talk completely now or does history and heritage still have a say? No, trust me, money has the edge every time. I mean, that's this. We live in the real world. If there's deals out there... So back in October, it was announced that Liang Wenbo was going to be suspended due to alleged misconduct. Since then, last year, seven players were added to that suspension list, including the 2021 Masters champion. You can't believe it. There's a few people walking in the audience there. Look. Please be still. This is... This is the big shot. Black to yellow. It's there. Cue ball needs to slow up. Slow up. Slow up. Oh, you're kidding me. When you really think about it, every single one of Snooker's biggest problems have exactly the same root cause. Well, all except for this one. You see, for the last six months or so, somebody's been using an entire army of AI chatbots to attack WorldSnooker's social media. I don't know why this has been happening. All I could find out is people thought it was a guy called Wayne. But it's not a problem we have to worry about too much because... The WST have simply fixed this problem by disabling the comments on their YouTube channel, which now means I can't complain that they're clearly stealing my idea with this video. 67. So the only thing I can do is talk about the real problems that involve money. And don't worry, we're starting with a big one. Moving the famous Crucible World Championships in Sheffield somewhere else. Possibly even abroad. Why would you do that? Well, sports promoter Barry Hearn has a pretty simple answer. Is it all about money? Is everything about money? Yes! It doesn't mean to say it can't be a great experience to be there. It doesn't mean to say it can't be the best sports event ever. Right, that's it. It's pretty much gone. Come 2027, you're going to be watching the World Championships from somewhere like Ulaanbaatar. You don't even need me here anymore. While I'm up then, we might as well find Sermon, who's from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Congratulations, your city may have just won the World Championships for 2028 onwards. Actually, we discovered this year, things are a little bit more complicated than that. During the World Championships, Steve Davis made a video for the BBC about prize money. Interesting. In which he revealed that he earned £5,000 more for winning the title back in 1987 than Nick Faldo did the same year for winning the Open Championship Golf. But in 2023, although Luca Brassell received half a million pounds, which alongside his girlfriend's lucrative side hustle was easily enough money for him to afford a Ferrari and two other fast cars, the golf between the prize money of the golf now rose to £2.5 million, this time in favour of the golf. And to tie it in quite nicely, the other two cars that Luca bought sadly weren't golfs and were in fact a Range Rover and a Porsche. You can understand why players, especially those with families to feed, are desperate not to miss out on any prize money they could be getting. But that's not their only concern at the moment. Hossein Vafai of Iran, the Persian prince. Now here's what he said. History is very important, but nobody invests any money in this historical venue. You want to go somewhere really nice. If you walk around the crucible, it smells really bad. I'm honest. Everything is so bad. Hossein lost early on in the tournament and it would be easy to say he's just looking for excuses. But the facts are backstage, like in the practice area, things are pretty tight as well. And on top of that, these spaces haven't really been updated since the tournament first started coming to Sheffield. But it does seem that players' concerns about the conditions are being slightly ignored in favour of getting more spectators into one space. Here Steve Davis asked the question, does Snooker really need a plus-size crucible? A 3,000-seater crucible is great for maybe the final of the World Championship. What about the first rounds? And also, what about the crucible for the rest of the weeks of the year when they're trying to put small plays on? I mean, is that being selfish to Snooker? Yeah, I think it is, and I'm going to be selfish. How realistic is it for a building like the crucible to extend the capacity and make it round about 2,000? Because 2,000 is massive, right? Ali Pali is just under 2,500 for the Masters. It's not possible, in my view, to do anything at all with the crucible as it stands existing building. We've got to be looking at another building in Sheffield which we can name the crucible, built with the same type of feel, but I think we need 2,500 to 3,000 seats to stand any chance of disregarding the type of offers we're getting from around the world. Barry Hearn clearly wants Sheffield to build him a bigger crucible theatre. Even though this is unlikely to ever happen. But let's just for a second imagine... What if Barry Hearn gets exactly what he wants? Would a 3,000-seat arena actually produce the revenue he's looking for? And there's a belief that limiting spectators to these 980 seats is somehow holding Snooker back. And if we look at the numbers, this could well be true because if we estimate the average ticket price across the entirety of the tournament to being £100, then the tournament will make in ticket sales alone nearly £5 million before costs. And although tripling the amount of seats won't triple the revenue because some of those seats will be further away from the table and therefore probably be cheaper, you can expect it to come close. Something else you need to know is most of the tickets for the 2025 tournament have been sold already, almost an entire year in advance, which means if they were to get a 3,000-seat arena like World Snooker's looking for, the chances are they could fill it out. The World Championships makes millions for the city of Sheffield every single year, so it's well within their interests to build a Crucible 2.0. But it's unlikely that Sheffield will be able to produce a venue like this before 2027 when its contract for the Crucible runs out, so it's possibly a way of softening the blow of moving the tournament elsewhere. And at the moment it looks like there are just two options. Either the tournament moves to another venue in Sheffield or the tournament moves somewhere else entirely. Either way, come 2027, it looks like days like this are numbered. Deliberately throwing matches in order to win bets is a problem that's been around for a very, very long time. But I genuinely believe that the 2022 match-fixing scandal that seemed to be centred around former disgraced player Lang Wenbo was one that was at least exaggerated by low prize money. Especially when you consider this mostly affected overseas players, who needed to find a home in the UK, as well as making a living on the tour. By the way, this carpet is absolutely phenomenal. Sam, you've got to get a shot of this. You feel like you're going to sink about an inch and a half. But these harsh and lengthy decisions, like 14 months later, Mark King still hasn't had a resolution on his case, have seemingly solved the problem for now and allowed them to worry about this next one. After losing to Stephen Maguire at the World Championships, Sean Murphy was able to confirm that rumours about a breakaway tour, mostly centred in Asia, were more than just rumours. Which is worrying for Snooker when you consider what happened with darts and the sharp fall of the BDO. However, this problem does appear to have been well dealt with by World Snooker and seems to be going away. To start off with, because they've allowed their players to play in unsanctioned events, like this one in Hong Kong, so long as they don't clash with existing World Snooker tournaments. But unfortunately, their main way of dealing with this could give them even bigger problems in the future. That's right, to prevent a rival tour, they've gone there first. Obviously, Snooker's been criticised for even playing tournaments in Saudi Arabia and being seen to be happy to take dirty money and not really caring where it comes from. But, you could even argue, and I think I am, that working to create official tournaments in this region is helpful, if not essential, to avoid the threat of a rival tour. And if the region creates its own tournaments like it has so far, players who didn't want to play wouldn't even have to take part. And I can only see it creating minor problems. A good example of this is dress codes. If a player isn't allowed to wear colourful clothing during these tournaments, that could become universal across the entirety of the season. And in the future, I can definitely see the influence of money giving people power over the game that cause a lot bigger tensions than that. But they're unlikely to cause long-term problems to the game. Whereas moving a tournament to somewhere like Saudi Arabia or somewhere else in the world could have more serious long-term consequences. And there is definitely a lot to worry about, even if you completely ignore the people who can't watch the game without a drink. And trust me, no one would that be more of a problem for than this guy. But the fact is, you can't buy and simply move the prestige and nostalgia that comes with these tournaments. What if Snooker's limited but significant popularity around the entire world is in part or mostly because of how much investors think Snooker's popular in the UK? And what if Snooker's popular in the UK because of how easy it is to watch? I've noticed with this very YouTube channel that Snooker isn't necessarily something people choose to watch but is something people can't stop watching once they start. Something we definitely shouldn't overlook is that there's a lot of fans of Snooker and Snooker players in Saudi Arabia. Although how many of these could afford tickets to go and watch the Snooker is a completely different question. But I think the main question is What if there's more to a tournament's popularity than its name? What if location and ease of viewing make a huge difference? And what if somebody takes the tournament halfway around the world and discovers they've only bought the name and not the phenomena? History just is getting rewritten every day really. I think if Eddie and Barry and World Snooker decide that it's right for Snooker to take it to Saudi Arabia, why not? And finally we come to the biggest problem that I think's being completely overlooked. The fact in the UK at least, and if you live in the UK you'll be aware of this, there are a lot of places where you simply can't get on a table at all. What's interesting with Snooker at the moment is the age of players at the top of the game to the point where we still think of Judd Trump as being a youngster. Alongside the demise of Snooker clubs in the country are we also looking at a reduction in numbers coming through? As somebody who lives in the UK I genuinely hope this isn't as big a problem as I fear because it could mean that our time of having players at the top of the sport is coming to an end. So after all that, what do we learn? Well, harsh sentences seem to have put an end to match fixing, at least for now alongside higher prize money which has been obtained in part by going to the places a rival tour would have gone and taking the money first. But is there a better way to earn this money? Now, ever since Kazoo decided it wasn't going to be doing so well almost every single Snooker tournament has a gambling sponsor and in the past things weren't exactly any better. Is it possible that these associations are the very thing that's putting off more legitimate and safe forms of investment? Or maybe Olympic or government style support for Snooker is just something that was never going to happen and the sport had no choice but to look for sponsors anywhere it could find them. Which means we're now in the happy position where it looks like Snooker and its entire history are in the process of being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Well, this video's been a little bit depressing, hasn't it? So if you want to see something that's a little bit more exciting have a look at these two featuring the best shots from the World Championships and the season as a whole. And remember, don't just watch play and make the commitment to becoming a better player by subscribing to the channel and visit the website. See you later!