Monday’s TV broadcast showed what kind of special treatment money can get. Anywhere else, the misbehaving Saudis would have flown out of the stands, writes journalist Atte Husu.
Atte Husuurheilhu reporter
What do you get when Lato puts a couple of million euros on the table, brings the ten best snooker players in the world and modifies the rules of a game that is over a hundred years old?
The answer: empty stands, badly behaved spectators and bad blood in the sports community.
The professional snooker invitational tournament organized for the first time in Saudi Arabia started on Monday in the country’s capital, Riyadh. There was already a lot of fuss about the competition in advance, because the event was built to serve only the top ten players in the ranking list. The original pledge by the Saudi organizers and snooker’s umbrella organization World Snooker included all 128 players on the professional tour.
In summary: The Saudi tournament became one more way to funnel money to the top group that already earns the best, behind which the vast majority of professional players cannot even reach the level of the average Finnish wage earner.
The winning prize is not the biggest
If the Champions League tournament series, which is organized without spectators, is not included, the Saudi competition will be played with the standards of the professional tour with the shortest possible game system. Only four sets are required to win the match, except for the final, where five set wins are enough to win the championship.
The winner of the tournament will receive almost 300,000 euros. It is the same amount as the champion’s score in snooker’s second most prestigious tournament, The Masters, which will be played in front of packed stands in London in January.
However, the prize money paid for matches in the Saudi competition is only a side plot. The event was marketed with a golden ball to be added to the traditional game table. A ball worth 20 points remains on the table as long as the player has the opportunity to make the maximum break, i.e. a hitting streak of 147 points.
In the normal maximum break, the player alternately pockets 15 red and 15 black balls, followed by traditional color balls in order of value from smallest to largest. In the Saudi competition, the player has the opportunity to try to break the snooker world record, if he manages to bag the golden ball after the last black that ends the normal maximum break. At the beginning of the set, the golden ball is placed close to the wall of the starting end, in the same line as the point of the brown ball.
A break prize of 500,000 dollars, or about 460,000 euros, is promised for a maximum break of 167 points. So, one and a half times more is paid for one hitting series than for winning the entire race.
You can’t buy a sense of style
The ME company was immediately seen on the opening day of the tournament by the legends of the sport of John Higgins and by Mark Williams in the encounter. Higgins tried a maximum break in the first set and progressed all the way to the color balls. However, he failed to pocket the yellow ball when there were 120 points at the break.
However, the attention was stolen by the Saudi audience, who wandered into the stands in the middle of the deciding moments. Williams, who was watching Higgins’ break on his own bench, looked a couple of times wondering at the audience’s behavior.
Higgins, on the other hand, had to stop his preparation for the 15th black bag while the audience was looking for a suitable seat in the stands, more than 80 percent of which were empty.
At this point, it is good to repeat a few basic things.
First. In professional competitions, the public is not allowed in the stands between sets, and it is only possible to leave the stands during the two-minute break between sets. If the spectator does not get back to his seat when the set starts, he has to wait for the end of the set to get back to his seat.
Second. If a spectator moves in the player’s aiming line when the player is preparing to hit or is down in the hitting position, the referee will warn the spectator. If the spectator shows complete disregard and blatantly interferes with the player’s hitting performance, the referee orders the umpire to remove the troublemaker from the stands without prior warning.
Snooker is a sport of etiquette where the above examples rarely happen, but when one does, the player’s reaction is, to put it nicely, hostile. On Monday, Higgins was content to shake his head and laugh at the situation. The reaction would have been the exact opposite anywhere else.
The reason for the four-time world champion’s amusement can only be found in money. In addition to the huge break and win prizes for the snooker players, the stars have not traveled to the Saudis for free. According to Urheilu’s information, everyone has netted a six-figure sum just by bothering to attend.
Is this what snooker wants?
Arab countries have profiled themselves in the 21st century in terms of organizing major sports events. A large part of these is marked by the lack of interest of the local population, even if you don’t have to shell out a cent for the tickets.
My personal experience is limited to the 2019 World Championships in Athletics in Qatar, which took place at the 40,000 capacity Khalifa Stadium. The Qatari organizers knew how to expect a crowd, because the upper stands of the stadium were covered with massive sheets with competition logos even before the first competition performance. During the games, there were episodes where several hundred guest workers were marched to the stands.
Snooker, which is mostly stuck in Britain and China, is desperately looking for new countries where it could expand its activities. You can ask whether empty stands improve the image of the sport or vice versa.
At the same time, in Finland alone, well over 20,000 tickets have been sold for exhibition matches of professional players during the year, the average price of which has hovered around 80 euros.
Organizing a high-quality professional competition is an investment of around one million euros, the kind of which has not yet been found in Finland.
If snooker’s umbrella organization is looking for expansion with money first, Saudi Arabia is a natural option that doesn’t require the business acumen of any kingdom to make it happen.
If, on the other hand, the sport is looking for credible visibility, Finland will wash the Saudi oil millions for nothing.