No, the World Championship is not going to Saudi Arabia

The long saga over the future of the Crucible will soon be at an end

We should know by the end of the year whether the World Championship’s 50-year residency at the Crucible will continue past 2027, a saga which has run longer than most productions staged at the venerable theatre.

The slow crawl towards some definitive news will be a relief to snooker fans after several years of speculation as to the tournament’s future direction, with heavy hints that the Crucible era is coming to an end.

A huge amount of noise has surrounded the ongoing debate about whether the championship should move on, and much of it has drowned out the actual facts.

So here they are:

The World Championship is not going to Saudi Arabia. It is not going to China. It is not leaving Britain. There is not a chance the BBC would have extended its broadcast contract to 2032 if the event was being removed from the UK.

While speculation has run riot, World Snooker Tour executives have been quietly holding talks with Sheffield city council and associated parties to keep the event in South Yorkshire.

While this does not definitively mean it will remain at the Crucible, the omens are good for those who love the intimacy, history and continuity of the theatre.

This includes several players who have won the title there and plenty who haven’t, although not everyone in snooker agrees that the Crucible should remain the host venue in perpetuity. There are various sides to this debate, but also some misunderstandings.

Pre-Crucible, the World Championship was held in numerous locations, few of which attracted praise from the players of the time. When Mike Watterson won the right to promote it, he began looking for a new venue. The Masters had already been staged in a theatre, and the Crucible was suggested to Watterson by his wife, Carole, who had seen a play there.

On visiting the theatre, he found that it only just met the requirements for two tables plus television equipment. In 1977, the championship moved in and the rest is not so much history as a lifetime of memories seared into the collective DNA of the sport.

The problem, as some see it, is that the world’s biggest snooker tournament has long since outgrown its smallest venue. This contradiction cannot be ignored.

However, nonsense solutions such as knocking down the Crucible and building a new one, or some sort of walkway with another venue, were always non-starters.

So many people in this debate seem to forget a simple fact: the Crucible is a theatre. It’s a very well regarded one, but its productions could not sustain a venue with 3,000 seats. That is far too many for the type of shows it produces.

Furthermore, the format of the event, where matches frequently finish early, would leave the public shortchanged if the two tables were in completely different venues.

Last year, Matchroom president Barry Hearn reignited this whole issue by going to the World Championship to talk up the likelihood of following the money by moving elsewhere. This went down badly with many fans, but may have been part of a wider negotiating strategy.

WST does well out of the Crucible deal. They get the venue for free, so every ticket sold is profit. What they are looking for is even more support in the city itself in terms of promotion and a commitment to binding the championship and Sheffield together.

With the current deal nearing an end, WST were left with three choices:

1) Stay at the Crucible

2) Stay in Sheffield but move to a bigger venue

3) Leave Sheffield and host the event somewhere else

Despite the hard-headed talk from Hearn, he surely cannot separate the unique place the Crucible has played in his life and the business decision which must be taken. One of the iconic images – and there are many – of the Crucible era is Hearn barrelling into Steve Davis at the climax of the 1981 championship, Davis having just become champion for the first time. Hearn has many times described this as his no.1 sporting memory.

When the last Crucible contract was announced in 2017 it was for ten years. Hearn said he did not want it written on his gravestone that he was responsible for it leaving.

So what changed? Time passes, priorities shift. Covid was a wake-up call to sport that it is vulnerable to the pressures of the real world.

Hearn’s Matchroom organisation did a superb job in keeping the wheels turning during the pandemic. When so many other top events were cancelled, the World Championship was still played at the Crucible in August 2020. But without ticket sales, it took a financial hit. Perhaps this was the moment his thinking changed.

Saudi interest in sport and the potential riches therein would make any businessman reassess attitudes. However, Hearn has already done a deal for a huge ranking event in Riyadh plus the golden ball tournament. There has never been any actual evidence that they also want the World Championship.

A bigger venue means more ticket sales in theory, but the recent World Grand Prix in Hong Kong was played in a 5,000-seater arena and struggled to attract an audience for several sessions. Rows of empty seats are a bad optic. It is pie in the sky to believe a bog standard first round session on a Monday morning is going to attract 4,000 paying spectators.

In January, I interviewed WST board member Tom Rowell on my podcast, who described talk of taking the championship away from the UK as “wild.”

He added: “Our position hasn’t changed. We’re still talking to Sheffield. We really want to make that work and we hope to find a solution where both sides kind of get what they need out of it and until that changes, that’s our stance. There haven’t been offers from Saudi and China. There’s a misperception that the Saudi’s want to buy the World Championship and that’s a bit wild because that’s never really been the case. They are very happy with the events they’ve got.”

So WST’s discussions with Sheffield have continued in private and an announcement is expected later in 2025.

Some would argue a new venue and a new start would reinvigorate the championship. It’s impossible to know if there is validity to this viewpoint unless it actually happened. The risk is that it backfires and alienates the many fans who pay their hard earned money to make the annual Crucible pilgrimage.

I feel it’s important to correct one narrative before it gains too much traction: it’s not Sheffield that’s special, it’s the Crucible. To me, the worst solution would be to set up shop a few miles away while the Crucible lies empty. Better to go to a different city altogether.

Or maybe just keep faith with the venue which has helped make snooker the success that it is. The Crucible isn’t just bricks and mortar, it’s the stage on which the sport has shone for five decades. It’s where players have been tested and found out, where careers have been made, joy and sorrow has intertwined, a vast store of memories created and cherished.

For so many, it’s where the World Championship belongs.