Barry Hearn once said that he didn’t want his tombstone to read: ‘This is the man who took the World Snooker Championship away from the Crucible’. After today’s news, he can rest easy that won’t be the case.
Snooker’s most prestigious tournament is staying in Sheffield for the foreseeable future after a deal was struck to keep the event at the iconic Crucible Theatre until at least 2045, with an option to extend that to 2050. Even the seemingly ageless and endlessly dynamic Hearn won’t still be pulling snooker’s strings as he approaches his 100th birthday. Although if anyone can...
The old agreement was set to expire in 2027, on the 50th anniversary of the tournament’s first trip to the Crucible in 1977, and the drumbeat of questions surrounding its future was growing ever louder the closer that deadline came, threatening to overshadow the tournament itself. A sentiment not helped, it must be said, by Hearn himself repeatedly making vague threats about taking the World Championship to Saudi Arabia or China or anywhere else unless Sheffield City Council stumped up more cash, redeveloped the theatre or offered any other variety of sweeteners.
And the 77-year-old’s words carried weight. Although he ostensibly stepped aside as chairman of the World Snooker Tour (WST) in 2021, his replacement Steve Dawson has neither the same charisma nor desire to engage with the media, meaning that Hearn, in his role as president of Matchroom Sport – the organisation that effectively runs the WST – remains the face of snooker from an administrative perspective and ultimately still holds the power.
“I thought we didn’t have a home at one stage – I can’t tell you how pleased I am,” said Hearn of the new deal. “Snooker’s dream was to stay at the Crucible. This is the lifeblood of our sport and we cannot build something with the IP value of what the Crucible brings our sport.
“Without the Crucible, snooker just doesn’t look the same for me, an old man at the end of his career. I am so delighted that the rest of my life will be watching snooker at the Crucible.”
He would undoubtedly argue that his 2024 comments saying money “has the edge over history and heritage every time” or his ultimatum last year that Sheffield “has to come up with a way of showing us that they’re going to treat us with respect and give us the type of facilities we require”, otherwise the World Championship would be taken away, were simply good business.
And perhaps he is right. The gambit appears to have paid off. The World Championship’s future is now secure in Sheffield, and Hearn has got his wish for the Crucible to be transformed and redeveloped, with a £45m upgrade and expansion project scheduled to begin in 2028.
It’s a win-win for the sport. Staying at the Crucible and basking in the near half-century of snooker history baked into its very walls was always the right call. Hearn can extol the importance of money all he likes, but you can’t buy the echoes of the past that ooze from the venue.
This is the arena where Alex Higgins wept to be united with his young daughter after his emotional 1982 World Championship triumph; where underdog Dennis Taylor snatched the unlikeliest of victories over the unbeatable Steve Davis on the final black in 1985 as 18.5 million people around the UK watched on TV; where people’s champion Jimmy White had his heart broken in the final on six occasions; where Mark Selby claimed one of his four world titles on the same day his beloved Leicester City clinched the Premier League crown; where snooker’s greatest genius Ronnie O’Sullivan has racked up a record-equalling seven world crowns; and where just last year, Zhao Xintong finally became China’s first snooker world champion 20 years after the sport’s boom in the country began in earnest.
You can feel the weight of those moments when you visit the venue. It’s a snooker mecca that thousands make the pilgrimage to every year and offers a connection to history that nowhere else can. Other venues would be bigger, flashier and probably more lucrative, given the 980-capacity theatre sells out pretty much every session across the fortnight, but that is not the sole factor.
Fiscal reality is important for any entertainment venture, but sport has never been a purely financial proposition; to claim it is fundamentally misses the point. Millions of people are emotionally invested in sport because of the history, narrative and meaning we attach to it. We care. Football clubs are meaningful to their local community; history-soaked venues connect people to the heart of their chosen sport.
To attach importance to objects, moments, events and memories separates humans from animals. Without emotional investment, sport becomes the meaningless playing of silly games. And it is never meaningless. Just ask the millions enraptured every day.
To take the World Championship away from the Crucible would have been sacrilege, taking a sledgehammer to history for the sake of a few pounds. But now the future is secure, it is time to optimise the venue because the Crucible critics aren’t completely wrong. When O’Sullivan describes it as “not fit for purpose”, or Hossein Vafaei more starkly calls it “smelly” and compares it to a car garage, there is (some) validity to those claims.
It is not a world-class sports venue in 2026. The theatre is cramped, the spectator and player facilities are sub-par, there is almost no room to capitalise on the huge corporate interest around the event, and it means that snooker is forced to sell itself short. That makes the proposed redevelopment absolutely crucial to the long-term health of the sport. Snooker’s flagship annual event needs to be as prestigious as it can.
The £45m investment to transform the Crucible is said to be made up of £35m from the UK government and local government, plus £10m coming from the private sector and philanthropic partners. If it works, everyone benefits.
The capacity will be increased by around 500 seats from the current 980, which will be a huge boon to WST and Sheffield’s coffers, and spectator facilities will be improved. On paper, this is the ideal solution. The works are expected to take around 18 months to complete, starting in the summer of 2028, meaning the World Championship will move to an alternative temporary venue for one or perhaps two years.
When the threat of taking the tournament away from Sheffield was being bandied about, one of the major problems was that no concrete, viable alternative was ever put forward. Nebulous suggestions of Saudi Arabia, China, Berlin or Alexandra Palace in London were floated but with no firm plan. This temporary move is a golden opportunity to make one of these visions a reality – for a year or two.
Whatever way you dress it up, this is a hugely positive day for snooker, with the best outcome for all concerned. That should rightly be celebrated. But now the challenge is to ensure that the Crucible redevelopment is a success – and big British infrastructure projects don’t exactly have a flawless record in that area.
But for the true long-term health of snooker, this one simply has to work.
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