Every April, the British city of Sheffield, with a population of less than 600,000, attracts the attention of fans around the world because of snooker. Despite the concept of "global", it is now increasingly concentrated in the British Isles and China.
Yan Bingtao, a post-00s player from China, made a bright eye at this World Championship. In the round of 16, he eliminated world number one Mark Selby, which once brought fans a sense of freshness and anticipation that had not been seen in many years. But as he reached the quarter-finals early this morning, the semi-finals once again turned into a showdown between the old guns: Mark Williams, Trump, John Higgins, O'Sullivan... Or these familiar names, who together are 171 years old.
Fixed areas of participation, fewer and fewer new fans, and a single sponsor composition, these old issues that have been discussed for many years still hinder the development of this traditional "gentleman's sport" today.
Judging from the portraits of the participants, of the 32 players who advanced to the main tournament of the 2022 World Championships, only half of them were post-90s, while there were only 10 non-British players (including England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), only from 5 different countries, of which China contributed 4, which is the second largest market for players.
Two young Chinese players Yan Bingtao (right) and Zhao Xintong (left)
In an interview with former Olympic champion Xu Lijia, Ding Junhui said that there are currently about 20 Chinese players who train professionally in the UK for many years, and the average daily training time is basically more than 4 hours. He founded the "Ding Junhui Snooker Academy" in Sheffield in 2019, providing a venue for Chinese players to practice and live together: "It gets dark early in the UK, and it often gets dark after playing. Everyone practiced together not so lonely. ”
However, loneliness is clearly just a small matter in the growth path of a professional player. Financial expenses, huge academic and training conflicts are the more important reasons that prevent more international players (except for the United Kingdom) from entering the professional snooker field.
In fact, whether it is Ding Junhui after the 80s, or Zhao Xintong and Yan Bingtao after the 90s and 00s, they all began the journey of "learning from teachers" in the country at a very young age. This usually means that one of the parents needs to give up work in their hometown and start the "accompanying reading" mode of taking care of the young players while earning money. After showing his talent, landing in the United Kingdom for perennial training and competition to earn points has become an important upward passage for landing on the professional field.
Snooker is not a "money-burning sport" in the strict sense of the word, compared to go-karts and low-level formula sports that often cost more than a million pounds a year, snookers spend relatively "people". Zhou Yuelong, a professional snooker born in 1998, said in a 2014 interview with Guangzhou Daily that the cost of practicing in the UK in a year is around 300,000 yuan – slightly higher than the average British student's annual expenditure.
Such expenses generally begin when they enter the UK at the age of 16 for professional training and competition. Players rely on sponsors and tournament prize money for their main income. Among them, the former can subsidize some daily expenses, and the larger proportion of the prize money is highly dependent on the competitive performance of the competition.
Taking this season as an example, before the World Championships, Zhao Xintong, who won the British Championship and the German Masters ranking competition, received more than 300,000 pounds in prize money, the largest of all Chinese golfers; Yan Bingtao, who also reached the final of the German Masters, also had more than 100,000 pounds in prize income.
Another problem is the contradiction in academic training. Young golfers who aspire to enter the professional arena often need to travel to the UK after the age of 16, and high-intensity full-time training is doomed to give up normal high school study life.
At the same time, the Chinese billiards competitions that have emerged in China in recent years have also been upgraded at the level of prize money. According to China News Network, the championship prize money of the 2022 Chinese Billiards Global Finals is 5 million yuan, which has exceeded the 500,000 pounds (4.1 million yuan contract) of the snooker World Championship. Perhaps, this will cause some resistance for the snooker tournament to further attract Chinese players.
From the perspective of the development of the entire project, snooker events have not found a new revenue increase in these years.
We can briefly analyze the income of snooker by analogous to the matchday (live) income, commercial sponsorship and broadcast revenue of the three major revenues of professional football matches.
In terms of matchday revenue, the Snooker World Championships have been played at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield since 1977. Although this has given the event more cultural precipitation, the only 980 seats obviously cannot bring in excessive ticket revenue.
In the past 10 years, both players and tournament organizers have repeatedly proposed to host competitions off-site or build new venues (expanded to more than 2,000 seats) on different occasions. However, as things stand, the contract between Crucible and the World Championships will continue until at least 2027.
In the early days of Ding Junhui's entry into professional snooker, the World Taiwan Federation and related events also hoped to use China as an incremental market overseas. In 2012, 5 of the 10 snooker World Standings were held in China. However, with the control of the epidemic and the development of Chinese billiards, the world snooker competition in the past two years has also been suspended in China.
The same dilemma is reflected in the broadcast revenue level. Although Snooker was once the third most broadcast event on CCTV (with an average of 2 hours of broadcast time per day), it is still difficult to talk about the head event from the perspective of copyright value. In 2017, Beijing Ruigai Culture Media Co., Ltd. announced that it had won the new media rights of World Snooker Chinese mainland 2017-2027, but the total value of the ten-year contract was only 10 million yuan.
The biggest problem is at the sponsor level. On the background wall of the interview at this World Championship, only the names of 5 sponsors appeared. But aramis, Xingpai and Strachan provide billiards, tables and clay for the tournament, which are more similar to the role of "equipment suppliers"; the remaining two are Nongfu Spring from China and the bookmaker BETFRED.
▲ Crucible Theatre
In fact, for 36 years from 1969 to 2005, the Snooker World Championships were sponsored by tobacco companies; after 2006, bookmakers became the new financiers due to the suspension of tobacco sponsorship. The relatively monolithic category of sponsorship is another problem.
Both tobacco as an addictive substance and the new gambling industry seem to have made it difficult for the sport to establish a healthy enough image for a long time. In 2010, The Scottish golfer Higgins, who was ranked first at the time, was exposed by the media to a match-fixing scandal and was willing to accept the bid of "300,000 euros and 4 match-fixing".
Obviously, in order to make such a sport re-loved by the majority of young people, it is not something that can be simply solved by just a few Chinese star players.
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