Murphy Has World Number One in His Sights — And the Numbers Back Him Up
The Magician Sets His Sights on Snooker's Summit
Shaun Murphy has never been short of ambition, and in a candid conversation with seven-time world champion Stephen Hendry on the Snooker Club podcast, the 42-year-old has laid his cards firmly on the table. The Magician wants to become world number one — and he genuinely believes it is within his grasp over the next twelve months.
It is a goal that has eluded him throughout an extraordinary career. Murphy has won the World Championship, the Masters, and the UK Championship, completing snooker's prestigious Triple Crown. He has spent more than two decades among the sport's very best. Yet despite all of that, the Englishman has never climbed higher than third in the world rankings. That particular box remains stubbornly unticked — and he is acutely aware of it.
"I have never made it to the top of the rankings," Murphy told Hendry, who knows more than most what that particular perch feels like. "I feel it's in reach for a few of us, because Judd Trump has come back to the pack a bit. Someone is going to have to win a lot of tournaments to catch him and I am going to try, hopefully, for that person to be me. I think it's possible that I could be sat here this time next year as world number one. It's definitely one of my goals, it's on my list."
Why This Is More Than Just Talk
On the surface, the gap between Murphy and Trump looks formidable. Murphy began the new season ranked sixth in the world, sitting roughly £700,000 behind the world number one on the official two-year rolling prize money list. In raw terms, that is a significant mountain to climb.
But dig into the structure of the rankings and the picture shifts considerably in Murphy's favour — and against Trump's.
The defending world number one had a remarkable 2024/25 campaign, but that brilliance now becomes a liability. The two-year rolling list means Trump must defend every penny he earned last season, and the single biggest chunk is eye-watering: his £500,000 payday for winning the inaugural Saudi Arabia Masters in 2024. Here is the critical detail — that tournament has since been removed from the calendar entirely. That £500,000 will drop off Trump's tally with no opportunity to replace it. When you factor in the broader prize money Trump will need to defend across the season, the world number one's position is considerably more vulnerable than his ranking suggests.
Murphy's situation is almost the mirror image. His 2025 Masters triumph — one of the most celebrated moments of his recent career — delivered prestige and a trophy, but crucially no ranking points. The Masters remains an invitational event outside the ranking system, meaning that victory contributes nothing to his two-year prize money total. His ranking-event returns last season were relatively modest, which sounds like a negative until you realise what it actually means: there is very little for Murphy to defend going into the new campaign. He is starting from a low base with the ability to accumulate freely.
The result? Murphy already sits fourth on the provisional end-of-season rankings. Only reigning world champion Wu Yize, Neil Robertson, and Zhao Xintong currently sit ahead of him on that early projection — and with a full season ahead, the arithmetic is very much alive.
The Wider Context: Is This the Most Open Race in Years?
Murphy's point about Trump "coming back to the pack" is worth examining. For much of the past five years, Trump's dominance of the ranking list felt almost unassailable — racking up titles and prize money at a rate that kept everyone else at a respectful distance. That stranglehold has loosened. Wu Yize's world title win at the Crucible this year announced a new force at the top of the game, Robertson remains perennially dangerous, and the likes of Zhao Xintong have added further unpredictability to what was once a more settled hierarchy.
Murphy speaking about his ambitions to Hendry — a man who spent the best part of a decade as an almost untouchable world number one throughout the 1990s — gives the conversation an added layer. Hendry understands precisely what consistent excellence at the top of the rankings requires. If Murphy has outlined that target to someone with that frame of reference, it suggests this is not idle dreaming. The Magician is planning.
At 42, Murphy is playing some of the most focused and driven snooker of his career. Whether he can ultimately reel in Trump and whoever else stands between him and the summit remains to be seen, but for the first time in a long while, the mathematics genuinely support the ambition. Keep a close eye on Murphy's ranking-event performances this season — they could matter enormously come the end-of-year tally.
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