Snooker Is Thriving at the Top — So Why Are Its Grassroots Still Struggling?
A sport pulling in two directions
The roar that greeted Wu Yize's run to the World Championship semi-finals said everything about where snooker stands right now. The Crucible was electric — that particular Sheffield electricity that crackles differently to anywhere else in sport — and a new generation of players, from Stan Moody to Liam Pullen to Antoni Kowalski, announced themselves on snooker's biggest stage with a confidence that suggested the sport's future is in very good hands indeed. Even John Higgins, one of that fabled Class of 92 that has dominated the sport for three decades, found himself in the last four, proof that the old guard are far from finished. Prize money is climbing. Global audiences are swelling. By almost every measure available, snooker is booming.
And yet. Step away from the theatre and the television deals and the spreadsheets of success, and a rather different picture begins to emerge. Type the words 'snooker club closed down' into a search engine and brace yourself for what comes back. Across the UK's cities and towns, the clubs that once formed the heartbeat of the game — the smoky, amber-lit rooms where generations of players first fell in love with the sound of a perfectly struck cue ball — have been disappearing at an alarming rate for the best part of two decades.
The numbers that tell a difficult story
The Rileys chain is perhaps the starkest illustration of what has happened at grassroots level. Once a name as synonymous with snooker as the Crucible itself, Rileys operated 165 clubs at its peak. Today, that number stands at just 15. It is a contraction so severe it borders on the extraordinary, and it is far from an isolated case. Sport England figures recorded the number of over-16s playing snooker at least once a week falling from 112,600 in 2005 to just 47,700 by 2014 — a decline of more than half in less than a decade.
Among the casualties is the Willie Thorne Snooker Centre in Leicester, a club with genuine heritage. It was there that a young Mark Selby — three-time world champion and one of the sport's most decorated modern players — first honed the skills that would take him to the very summit of the game. That a venue with that kind of lineage could not survive says something uncomfortable about the structural pressures bearing down on the grassroots game.
Those pressures are well-documented, if no less painful for it. Soaring rents and operating costs in town and city centres. The long tail of the smoking ban, which changed the social atmosphere of clubs overnight. Government legislation capping jackpots on the gambling machines that many venues relied upon for revenue. Reduced junior participation. And then, just as the industry was beginning to find its footing again, the coronavirus pandemic arrived and shuttered venues for months on end. For many clubs, the doors never reopened.
'There was a club on every street corner'
Jason Ferguson, chairman of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA), is candid about the structural realities that made this contraction, in some respects, inevitable. "If you turn the clock back to the 1980s, it was boom time in snooker in the UK and there was a club on every street corner," he told BBC Sport. "But actually it reached a huge saturation point where it had to contract. There was no question of it. You need large buildings, you need huge amounts of space to get around tables and there's a limited amount of money you can charge for use of a snooker table. So we're getting pushed out of the towns and city centre prime locations and we're pushed into industrial units."
It is a measured and honest assessment — but it also raises a question that will concern anyone who cares about the long-term health of the sport. Snooker's current golden period at the elite level has been built on talent nurtured in clubs that no longer exist, or are disappearing fast. Where does the next Mark Selby, the next Ronnie O'Sullivan, the next Judd Trump learn their craft if there is nowhere to pick up a cue?
Reasons for cautious optimism
The picture is not entirely bleak. There is genuine effort being directed at reversing the decline, with community snooker initiatives, investment in school programmes and a growing recognition within governing bodies that the pipeline from junior player to professional cannot be taken for granted. The global surge in the sport's popularity — driven in no small part by the extraordinary rise of Chinese talent and the sustained television interest that follows it — creates both funding opportunities and a cultural moment that advocates are keen to harness.
But the gap between the gleaming world of the Crucible and the shuttered clubs of Leicester or Liverpool remains wide. Snooker is undeniably in a golden period. Whether that gold ever filters down to the community halls and industrial estates where the next generation of champions are supposed to be learning their trade remains, for now, the sport's most pressing and unresolved question.
