Snooker Is Booming at the Top — But Grassroots Clubs Are Still Fighting for Survival
The Sport Is Thriving on TV. The Local Club Down Your Road? That's a Different Story.
The 2025 World Championship has been a genuinely brilliant advert for snooker. Wu Yize reaching the semi-finals, Stan Moody, Liam Pullen and Antoni Kowalski all announcing themselves on the Crucible stage, and John Higgins — yes, that John Higgins, Class of 92 vintage — reminding everyone he still belongs among the elite. Prize money is climbing, global audiences are expanding, and despite the unfortunate loss of the Saudi Arabia Masters from the calendar, the professional game has rarely looked healthier. But step away from the Crucible's famous lighting and into your local town centre, and the picture looks considerably less rosy.
From 165 Clubs to 15 — The Rileys Collapse Tells the Real Story
If you want a single statistic that captures just how badly the grassroots snooker scene has suffered in the UK, try this one: Rileys, once the most recognisable snooker club brand in the country and a name synonymous with the sport at every level, now operates just 15 venues. At its peak, that number stood at 165. That is not a gentle decline — that is a near-total collapse of a once-dominant leisure institution.
Rileys is the headline act in a much broader story, though. Across the UK, beloved local clubs have been shutting their doors for the better part of two decades. The Willie Thorne Snooker Centre in Leicester — the very place that helped a teenage Mark Selby develop his game — is among the casualties. Try Googling 'snooker club closed down' and you will quickly get a sense of how deep this problem runs in communities up and down the country. Simply getting a few mates together for a casual evening on the tables has become genuinely difficult in many parts of Britain.
Sport England data underlines the scale of the problem in cold, hard numbers. The number of over-16s playing snooker at least once a week collapsed from 112,600 to just 47,700 between 2005 and 2014 — a drop of more than 57% in under a decade. Multiple factors drove that decline: punishing commercial rents, the smoking ban reducing the social club atmosphere many venues depended on, government legislation restricting gambling machine jackpots that had subsidised club income, reduced junior participation, and then the coronavirus pandemic landing a further hammer blow on top of already struggling businesses.
"We're Being Pushed Into Industrial Units" — WPBSA Chairman Jason Ferguson
Jason Ferguson, chairman of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA), has been candid about the structural challenges facing the amateur game. Speaking to BBC Sport, he acknowledged that the 1980s boom — when snooker clubs genuinely did seem to exist on every street corner — was never going to be sustainable indefinitely.
"It reached a huge saturation point where it had to contract," Ferguson explained. "You need large buildings, you need huge amounts of space to get around tables and there's a limited amount of money you can charge for use of a snooker table. So we're getting pushed out of the towns and city centre prime locations and we're pushed into industrial units."
That is an honest and, frankly, depressing assessment. Snooker is simply not a sport that lends itself to the compact, flexible leisure formats that have thrived in modern urban environments. A decent snooker hall needs space — lots of it — and space in prime locations costs money that table fees alone cannot justify. The economics have always been difficult, and changing consumer habits have made them more so.
Is There Light at the End of the Tunnel?
The good news — and there is some — is that the professional game's current boom is at least creating renewed interest in the sport at ground level. The emergence of exciting young talent at the Crucible, combined with snooker's growing international footprint, particularly in China, means the sport's profile has arguably never been higher on a global stage. Clubs that have survived the lean years are now actively working to attract the next generation of players, recognising that the appetite exists if the facilities can meet it.
Northern Snooker Centre in Leeds is among those working hard to buck the trend, investing in junior development and modernising their offering to bring in new audiences. These kinds of grassroots efforts matter enormously — without them, the Crucible heroes of 2035 simply won't exist.
Snooker's administrators face a genuine challenge in translating the sport's elite-level success into sustained grassroots growth. The professional circuit is in rude health. But if the clubs keep closing, the pipeline of future talent will eventually dry up — and no amount of prize money at the top will fix that.
Please gamble responsibly. Visit BeGambleAware.org or call the National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133 if gambling is affecting you or someone you know.
