The owner of the Masters snooker tournament is plotting an expansion trail across Asia after the pandemic exposed the company’s reliance on China, its chair has revealed.
Steve Dawson, the chief executive of World Snooker Ltd, told the Guardian it was considering staging tournaments in India, Pakistan, Malaysia and Thailand, after its business was held back by three years of Beijing-imposed Covid lockdowns.
He also hopes young players in the sport can take inspiration from 16-year-old Luke Littler’s astonishing run to the PDC World Darts Championship final, which is also run by World Snooker’s owner Matchroom. The sports promotion firm was founded by veteran Barry Hearn and is now led by his son, Eddie, and spans boxing, darts, snooker, basketball and gymnastics.
Dawson said the run of Chinese lockdowns, where the company hosts snooker world tour events, “was a real eye opener for us that we need to look at spreading our risk a bit” and “have a broader spread of international events across Asia and Europe, with less reliance on any single territory”.
Dawson said World Snooker, which also runs tournaments in Turkey and Germany, plans “cautious expansion” into new markets. The company hosts the UK Championship and the World Snooker Championship, as well as the Masters, which is staged at Alexandra Palace in London and begins on Sunday.
More than 30,000 tickets have been sold for the event, far outstripping the 7,000 sold in 2011, when it was staged at Wembley before moving to north London.
Dawson said Littler could offer inspiration to a clutch of young players, including the British teenager Stan Moody.
“All we need to do is give them opportunities,” he said. “We’ve got three or four very good [young] players. But snooker is slightly more difficult – it’s more of an elitist platform, you can’t just go to the local pub to play snooker because there aren’t enough tables around and it takes a long time to be very good.”
The audience for the darts final peaked at 3.7 million, while the World Snooker Championship final viewing reached a high of 4.5 million last year. “We need to work like crazy to have a conveyor belt of new, quality players coming through as there’s a difference between people playing the sport and watching it.”
Asked whether snooker needed to bring in a younger audience, Dawson said: “The image has to modernise but everyone is always very critical about the age of audiences. If we know that our audience is [aged] 50, 55 plus – that’s an audience that’s got money and economic power, and we’d be happy to work to deliver an audience.”
In its last published accounts for the year to 30 June 2022, World Snooker posted operating profits of £2m, with revenues of £26.6m – then a record, despite the Chinese lockdowns.
Dawson revealed that turnover had reached a new high-water mark, at £29.1m, but operating profits dipped to £1.7m in the following financial year. The company paid out a £1.5m dividend, which the Hearn family shared in. More than £300,000 was spent on a new website, app and a rebrand.
World Snooker has set a target of distributing prize money of £20m in the 2025-26 financial year, up from an expected £14m this year.
Dawson said directors at Matchroom were “still considering our options” after talks with private equity firm CVC to take a minority stake fell through last year.
