The World Snooker Championship debrief: China, the Crucible and cut-through with new audiences

0:03Hello and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Sport Business Podcast. the podcast about leaders in sport from leaders in sport. My name is James Emmett. I'm the editorial director here at Leaders. And with me as ever is my great good colleague, David Cushman. David, how are you? I'm very well. Thank you, James. It's just slightly menacing tone these days to your introductions. I'm trying something new with every effort, I think. And today, to keep with the theme of our podcast, I'm going for snooker commentator. Yeah, it's working. It's working. And because who do we have on the show a little later today, David?

0:41We have got Simon Brownell, who is the CEO of World Snooker Tour, WST. And we thought having, you know, banged on about snooker for the last couple of editions of the podcast, we might as well get the top man on to reflect on the world championships and generally, I guess, Snooker's growth trajectory around the world, but particularly in China, of course, after Zhao Zintang's world championship triumph. So, yeah, looking forward to having Simon on the show. Yes, indeed. And we are off to New York City, aren't we? We are. We're heading out. Separate flight, Sunday. We always travel separately. Indeed.

1:23And we've got a busy old week, actually. It's FORCE, our sports and entertainment conference that we run in partnership with our friends at Sports Business Journal. Packed programme examining, well, operating really right at the intersection of sport, fashion, culture, music, entertainment, and lots and lots of fun speakers and fun topics. I think we mentioned you're speaking to Sean White. I'm doing Sean White. Yeah. Did I say on last week's podcast that I did a prep call with him? I think you did. Yes. I mean, it stuck with me. It's a, yeah, I really want to ponder. It's going to be a blockbuster of a session, David.

2:10Yeah. So that is Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. And I think next week's podcast will be rummaging around backstage at force to bring you a little flavour of who's there and what the mood is. It's a big week for the sports industry in New York because there's also the Sports Business Awards, SBJ's big awards night happening Wednesday evening in Manhattan. And you and I, James, are going to be running the latest of our attention seekers workshops, our private club really for sports media insiders and friends on Monday afternoon. And that is always a good gang of people. Yeah, plenty of people signed up.

2:54Well, we've got precisely 40 because it is strictly limited on places. We've got the likes of NBA, Red Bull, Netflix, Wheelhouse, LA28, SailGP, NASCAR, Pinterest, FanDuel, LiveGolf, NWSL, USTA. Literally the who's who of global sport coming along to that. And do you know what? If you're not, and I'm addressing the listener here, if you're not already signed up to see us at one of these things next week and you would like to see us, do just drop us a line and we'll endeavour to coffee with you. Indeed. We are looking forward to seeing many of you in New York next week, and we will report back on that.

3:37Any other business before we get Simon Brownell in? I don't think so. Should we just get Simon in? All right. Here's Simon. Simon Brownell, it's very good to have you with us on the Leaders Sport Business podcast. we're talking what 10 days or so after the end of the another edition of the world snooker championships um what do you do in the 10 days after a world snooker championships uh it's largely recovery to be honest and um that's nothing compared to well for me it's nothing compared to what the players have gone through over 17 days but it's it's morning uh noon and night it's it's so much content so many hours of snooker and pretty much all the time there's there's something to watch on tv and that means there's something that could possibly go wrong so i'm in a state of anxiety for 17 days um and then after that 17 days completed it's just getting used to being able to watch tv in in the day and know that nothing could go wrong that needs to be resolved.

4:49I presume if you're anything like sort of events people, like us, you have all of this sort of nervous energy and, you know, adrenaline, I suppose, when you're actually running the event that you're responsible for. And then when it's finished, you have this relief and a breakdown in your immune system and you become ill straight away. Is that right? Yeah. And I'm not an events person. I'm an accountant. I trained as an auditor. I'm not built for this level of anxiety that I go through when we're at events. And so I manage that through pacing around and through trying to release the energy, but I'm still yet to perfect it.

5:30So I've got a bit more work to be done. I'm weirdly fascinated by debrief processes. Are you one for the immediate day after week after debrief? Or do you like to let a bit of time pass and then do something two or three weeks down the line? We had a debrief this morning. Okay. I mean, there's a constant noise around events from our board where there's things happen and we respond and we're reactive. But yeah, we needed to let the dust that's a little from the World Championship before we went to our debrief. We had that this morning. We've got some really strong points to come from that. So hopefully kind of focusing on bigger and better next year.

6:14Obviously, big headlines, Zhao Zintong becoming China's first world champion and a real breakthrough moment for the sport. We'll get into that historic moment for the sport. But I think by all accounts, and certainly if you look at the BBC TV streaming figures and obviously the Chinese viewership numbers as they come in, both big, reflect a little bit on this year's tournament. What went right and maybe pick out a couple of bits from the debrief that you'd be willing to share in terms of what didn't go so well or where there's room for improvement? Yeah, I think one of the biggest benefits we had this year, from someone who loves Stuka, it's the case every year the World Championships offers matches that are compelling viewing.

7:04And I think this year we started with Kyron Wilson, defending champion against Leipzig fan. And that was a 10-9. It was 6-3 to Kyron after the morning session. Went 9-0. Any time where you've got a decider on a Saturday evening to watch is great fun for us. It went from strength to strength. We had that starting off. We had Ronnie O'Sullivan versus Ali Carter, kind of rehashing the Masters match they had a couple of seasons ago. You had Mark Williams versus John Higgins, two of the greatest players ever to have picked up a queue. You had Luca Brassell, who's this incredible talent from Belgium, who seems to be able to turn off and on his talent at a whim.

7:52played against Ding Jun. It was just unbelievable watching. Then his match against Judd was the same. So throughout the tournament, you had, even before we got to the semifinals, you had this raft of incredible matches. And then semifinals, you had Ronnie versus Xiao Xin Tong, which probably, it created a lot of attention. There was a lot of people watching it. Unfortunately, kind of Ronnie had been telling us all for a while that things weren't going as to plan. And they didn't in that match. And Zhao Zingtong was fantastic in that match, played brilliantly and deservedly got through to the final.

8:32And you had Mark Williams versus Judd Trump. Great, great match. I think probably Mark was a little bit punch drunk, if anything, going into the final because of how hard Judd pushed him. but then still was able to give us a fantastic conclusion to the event with the final session. So I think the fundamentals was compelling snooker throughout. I've got to kind of make a point of the table conditions. One of the toughest things in snooker is that the team do not get a lot of time to put a snooker table in. And that takes ordinarily about six months for a snooker table to properly settle into position and be kind of perfect playing conditions.

9:22And they're expected to do that in a few days. And I thought the table conditions were fantastic. So kind of shout out to our table fitting team and Chris Barnes and his whole team did brilliantly. And then the other biggest success we had was throughout the event, we really engaged our social audience. We've got a new head of digital, a chap called Sean Fay, who's come into the sport this year and really helped us push forward, really helped us engage our social audience. We're a sport that's got a really wide net. Millions, our peaks, three, four millions for the World Championships, been the case for years now.

10:03And that's not likely to change materially, I don't think. But how many of those are we actually talking to? How many of those are passive? Well, this year, we've engaged more with our audience than ever before. And that's come through in our social numbers, in our kind of viewers through TikTok. Up from last year, 3 million views to 26 million views this year. Similar kind of increases in YouTube shorts. So I think we were better able to engage the audience. We had compelling snooker in great conditions. And that kind of blend just led to a fantastic event. I think if we were looking at what went wrong or where we could find improvements, I sat nervously many, many times throughout the event thinking, why do we have this as best of 33?

10:56Why do we have this as best of 35? Why are we kind of exposing ourselves to these potential to lose sessions of snooker? And it's part of the beauty that is the World Championship. It's a fantastic, you only get that excitement at the end of the match, when it's 12-all between Higgins and Williams, if you're looking at a multi-session match. So it enhances it, but it really kind of causes a level of stress that we don't need. So I think that's something we need to think about, how to kind of get the best from the event. and also how do we work the fan zone at the front of Tudor Square and how do we make that more engaging, attract a bigger audience, make that better?

11:45I think those are the things that we're going to look to change and develop, not necessarily to change because whenever I say change when we're talking about formats, I'll make everyone panic. So I'm not talking about change in the format, but how can we review things? how can we improve is definitely an area we need to think about. You talk there about the risk of losing sessions with the format that you have in the World Championships. And obviously that did happen in quite a high-profile way with Ronnie O'Sullivan. Obviously anything that Ronnie does makes headlines. And his defeat in the semi-final led to a missed session or nothing happening in one of the sessions.

12:27How did you deal with that in the moment? Obviously, fans are unhappy. They want refunds. I guess the TV people aren't too pleased either. How do you obviously that you'd flag that as a potential risk. Then when it happens, how do you how do you deal with it in the moment? Well, the good thing is, is not our first rodeo. We've been doing this for 48 years and this has not always had the same format for that period of time. but most people that attend snooker are aware of the nuance that is the multi-session match. And that ticket for a Saturday is kind of a golden ticket. The semifinals that I've watched over the years, just such good matches tend to be the end.

13:15The final sessions can be absolutely enthralling. And so you run a little bit, it's like any sporting event. It's a bit of a roller coaster, isn't it? You don't know quite what you're going to get. In the instance, we have an exhibition set up because another thing is that we've got people traveling from around the world to attend the World Championships. It's not exclusively people from the local area. And if you traveled hundreds, if not thousands of miles, you've paid for your travel, you pay for your accommodation, you get there on the Saturday morning and you realize, oh, by the way, that match is concluded, you left your own devices well a refund's not really quite it's not necessarily gonna make up for all of the the money that you've incurred so what we've always sought to do is provide something um provide an exhibition and in this instance we had a a great exhibition event that took place we had a q a with um hendry and doherty two of the great champions there was an opportunity for people to get autographs and photographs with their heroes and I think we were able to put on a show there were three quarters full for that people were telling us how much of a great experience it was so I think we were able to try to make good as well as we could the situation we won't have kept everyone happy and that's the bit I think we need to reflect on What's the best solution for that going forward as sport and entertainment changes and develops and builds?

14:52What's the right way of dealing with that? And that's something we're going to give some thought to. Let's talk about Zhao Zintang, the champion. And obviously, as we mentioned, a historic first, China's first world champion, a long anticipated moment for the sport. And since then, so many headlines, so many predictions about what his victory will do for snooker in China. There's been talk about the Olympics. There's been talk about more events there. There's been talking about the 300 ,000 snooker clubs that are already in place there and how that number might grow. What's the reality and what's your estimation of the true impact of his success?

15:38I think that the biggest change that we'll see from Zhao's success is the message getting across. And you referenced there the 300 ,000 snooker clubs. And our viewing figures in China have been really high for a long time. The sport is well-loved in China. We've been selling out arenas far bigger than the Crucible and as big as the biggest events outside of the Crucible. We've been selling out in China and in Hong Kong, we've sold a 10 ,000-seater arena. What we aren't always easily able to do is to demonstrate that's the case. Whenever we speak to potential sponsors and partners, we show them, we tell them what our audience is, tell them what the reach is, explain that there's 30 million people that all watch this event across Europe.

16:35and the total reach for the world championship this year will be 250 million. But it almost doesn't seem real when we're saying those numbers. It's quite hard to convey that message and for it to land with credibility. Whereas now, when those messages have already been plastered all over the biggest and most credible and reputable sports news networks, then everyone's aware of the numbers. They know the impact that the sport has, and it should enable us to kind of work with potential sponsors and better enable them to reach that audience and show them what audience they could reach. And it's going to increase demand for events in China.

17:26And we've got a selection of really fantastic events in China currently. I fully expect those events to grow significantly once they receive the benefit of the sponsorship and the attraction of the audience that this will bring. So I think it will be a massively important step for the sport. And it's important that we make the most of it. Definitely. Can you tell us a little bit more about you talk about the storytelling opportunities that you've got, particularly for partners with China? And now this story of snooker's popularity in China has a figurehead, something real for people to hook onto.

18:06What about sort of boots on the ground and real life work that you're doing in the territory? What are your plans for that? Who are you working with in China? And presumably you're sending Peter Wright, your chief commercial officer, out to China every week to try and get some new sponsors on board. And how is his Mandarin? Yeah. it needs work but i think that's the case probably for all of us um no we've got a team in china already um and they're they're fantastic uh jing who heads up our china office she's been working with the sport for um i think coming up to 20 years now um so she's seen it develop over that period of time and she's effectively been the the kind of the the leader of that development the person that's pushing the sport constantly so we're delighted with Jean we think she's fantastic and I'm hopeful that this is going to be a real opportunity for her to show kind of what she can do in driving forward the sport in China Peter obviously will will be licking his lips I'm sure at the opportunity to go back over to China I think he's heading over to Shanghai fairly soon as we have an event over there and there's there's great commercial opportunities we work already with a company called red lantern um who help us with our social content and again we've known for a while that engaging our audience in the uk and europe's been important making sure that that we haven't just got large viewership but we've also got a large engaged audience that kind of that we understand that they're addressable and that's what we're looking have been looking to do in China as well.

19:46And Red Lantern came in not so long ago and have led a fantastic charge in driving audience attendance for our events in China, driving up awareness of the fantastic talent that we have from China on the tour. And so we'll be looking to expand on that, increase it, make sure that we've got the right people in China selling the sport in the right way. And that's our challenge for the next few weeks and months. And how closely are you, will you be working with Zhao, with several other of his compatriots who are also part of the, you know, the world's top 16 in order to encourage them, maybe apply a little bit of pressure to them to be the very visible public faces of the sport, to continue to be advocates for the sport and to use their profile individually to help this.

20:42this growth strategy, this growth plan that you've got? We've already been speaking with Mr. Gower's management team. Victoria is his manager. She's been working alongside for, I don't know, five, ten years now. For as long as I can really remember, Victoria's been helping the players from China settle in the UK and play to the best of their ability, looking after their commercial interests. And I've got no doubt that Victoria will be able to push south forward and um we already have arranged a number of different points of activation with jow which he's going to be really excited about they're not just commercial kind of uh i don't know they're not just pr opportunities from for the sport they're opportunities for him to go out and do the things that he loves because he's in that position now where he can almost choose what he does he is a fantastic asset um for the sport but also as a personal brand um he will have opportunities thrust at him that you wouldn't we wouldn't believe so um i have no doubt that he will will be a name on everyone's lips for a long time and simon taking a i think there's some crime being committed where you are in uh sorry apologies i work right next to uh white ladies road in Bristol and it can get loud so apologies.

22:03Yeah no worries um yeah taking I wonder if you could sort of take a step back a little bit and look at the sport as a whole we're obviously living in this era now in the sports industry where um sport is viewed pretty much universally as an entertainment product it's a business it's entertainment um and pretty much since the IPL came on the scene you know in the in the sort of mid-2000s there have been these efforts to jazz up sports formats um in you know in an effort to reach new new younger audiences mainly and you talked about your um your tiktok figures for the world championships earlier so presumably that is an important part of the wst strategy reaching new people um and you're part of the matrim stable which has a great history and pedigree in jazzing up sports formats.

22:58I wonder what the current thinking is, what the strategy is for snooker reaching younger audiences. Snooker as a sport is traditional and the players still wear diggy bows and waistcoats and that's part of the beauty of the sport. the world championships is still played over best of 19 25 33 35 the the frame numbers are are long it's it's long form snooker and yet this year at the world championships at the most traditional at the venue we've been for 48 years we achieved a tiktok audience of 26 million compared to 3 million and despite the um the traditional nature of the sport it remains unchanged largely we were able to attract this year across all of our season a tick-tock influence with 360 million compared to 57 million last year um i think it goes to show that you don't always need to change the product.

24:09Snooker's a really exciting sport to watch. You can't always help but enjoy snooker. Quite often it's the case that you'll turn it on without any intention to watch it for any sustained period of time. And then an hour's passed without knowing that it's passed. And it draws you in. And we've been able to attract a young audience to the sport this year by showing what can happen in snooker. no two shots are the same. It's unique and really crazy things can happen with the ball. And the players are so talented that they make inexplicable things happen with the ball. And when we're able to showcase that to the world, there's a huge amount of interest.

24:52So I think we've been able to keep the traditions within the sport, keep it to the way it's always been played, and maximise the audience. Kind of almost despite those things, we've been able to reach a huge audience that we would have been thinking five years ago. How do we reach that audience? And we probably wouldn't have been able to do it because we'd have thought the only way to do it would be to follow the T20 version of cricket and make the world championships best of fives because it's the only way to keep people's attention for that period of time. I mean, one of the things that's staggering with our sport is that in China alone, we will accrue over a billion streaming views this season, for the whole season, over a billion views.

25:47Now, that's not kind of social media short clip views. The average view for that a billion viewers is 1.6 hours. so that's sustained kind of intrigue and interest in the sport in china and we find often in in europe and the uk that the average amount of time that people are watching the sport for is about an hour um and so i don't think we need to rush towards kind of um the short attention span uh audience and focus on that. I think we've got a great product. Snooker is a really interesting sport to watch. We know we've always had a fantastic audience and we're just trying to make sure that we better engage in that with that audience and deliver them what they're looking for.

26:39And this year, I think we've been able to really do that. We must talk, Simon, about something else that created a lot of headlines over the course of the tournament and a story that seems to come up every year in the last few years, which is the future of the World Championships in Sheffield at the Crucible Theatre. It's long-term home and so much history and romance attached to that, but a venue that has well under a thousand seats. What is the current state of play in terms of your thinking, the WST's thinking about future World Championship host venue? What I'm thinking is that this year, we spoke to Sheffield City Council.

27:25We've obviously been working with Sheffield for as long as I've been involved in the sport, which is 14 years. And well before I was involved in the sport, my predecessors would have been speaking to the council. And Sheffield loves snooker. That was the message that we were trying to get across through the event this year. And we know that that's the case. We've been working with them really closely over the last 12 months to try and make the 2025 event the biggest event that's ever been. And I think we largely achieved that. We have no doubt that Sheffield City Council want to keep this event and will do everything within their power to keep this event.

28:06And our perspective is that we want the event to succeed in Sheffield. It's been at home for so long. There's no reason why it shouldn't. we've also got the we need to make sure the players that are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week on the snooker table, practicing and driving kind of development and becoming more entertaining with each day that passes we need to make sure that they're rewarded as well as they can be and that comes from driving up the commercial side of the people and so that we've been quite open with saying that we need to drive up the commercial side of the world Championships, the biggest event on the tour.

28:46And I don't think it's going to be a point that Sheffield alone and the Sheffield City Council alone can address. I read a fantastic article in the Financial Times by Andy Haldane over the weekend, which talked about the fact that national government needs to look at events like the World Championships and find a way to retain them, find a way to make them successful in this country. We've created so many sports in this country. We've led the way on sport in this country. And we've got to make sure that remains the case and that we are able to retain these events. So I'm hopeful that all of government read Andy's article and he seems to know what he's talking about.

29:35So let's listen more to him. And Simon, what are some of the options that are maybe not on the table, but in your thinking, in your mind? Is it about the Crucible? Is it about if it stays in Sheffield, it has to be at a new venue? And that is something that has been talked of in previous years around some kind of bigger purpose-built venue. is there a model where potentially the tournament rotates and Sheffield becomes one of several hosts what's yeah what are what are the sort of range of options that are you know you're factoring in or you're certainly thinking about well all of those options are on the table but our priority our primary kind of thought on this is that we want to make Sheffield work and we want to work with the council to make Sheffield the permanent home for this event.

30:34I've been to Sheffield every year for the World Championships and there's something about the city that screams snooker to me and it's through association largely, but I don't want to take it away nor do any of the people I work with want to take it away from Sheffield. I think there are challenges with rotating, with alternative venues. We will obviously consider those challenges and how they're overcome if that's the case, if we need to go down that road. But the primary thought and the objective and target is to work with the council to try and make Sheffield work, try and make the Crucible work and see how that goes.

31:13Thinking outside of the World Championships specifically then, what are the other markets around the world and thinking outside of China, I guess, given what we talked about earlier? What are the other markets that are exciting for you and for snooker at the moment? I mean, it wasn't too long ago. I remember David and I spent a few weeks talking about golden balls and Saudi. We don't speak about that that much anymore. But yeah, what are the hot markets for you at the moment, Simon? Well, I will go on record to say that I think the golden ball concept was fantastic. I didn't come up with it, so I can say that without any kind of blushing.

31:50But I think that was a real innovation within the sport and I loved it. And I think the Middle East is a huge opportunity for the sport. We've had three events in 2024 in the Middle East. We're currently planning our next event in Jeddah, which will take place in August. And that's a massive growth opportunity for us. So that's one area. I think Southeast Asia is another really exciting opportunity. We've been speaking to a number of different people, commercial opportunities in Southeast Asia. There's lots of Q sports played, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia. We've visited lots of those territories and we're excited about opportunities that can come there.

32:38So that's another opportunity. North America, our sport has a great affinity with Canada, for example. some of the past kind of champions that we've had in our sport and heroes that we've had in our sport hail from Canada and North America is a great opportunity. We've just, in January of this year, we created an OTT platform called WST Play and that's providing us with our foot in the door of a lot of new territories to find out how many people are watching the sport. We engage the social audience as a starting point. We then kind of market the WST Play OTT product. We try and drive an audience of that.

33:29And once we've created an audience for that, we can take that audience to a local broadcaster and try to put in place a broadcast plan and an arrangement. And we're working on that strategy as we speak. we're halfway there and hopefully North America will become an opportunity for us in the future and let's be honest Europe as I mentioned earlier on there's 30 million people that the world championships would have reached across Europe and yet we only have currently one event in on the continent which is the German Masters in in in Berlin at the Tempodrome which is a 2 ,000 2 ,000 three or 400 seater arena that's packed out and has been packed out for years we've got a fantastic audience.