IS MATCHROOM STILL GOOD FOR THE GAME?
The World Snooker Tour is not exactly in a good place at the moment, one could say. 10 players banned for match fixing, barely any matches held in three months, and still we struggle to hold events outside the UK since the lockdown eased up.
But there's more in it than that which is bothering me. When Barry Hearn took over the game in 2010, he wasn't just appointed the chairman - his company Matchroom became the owner of 51% of the organization.
Barry revived the sport, no doubt. He brought snooker back into the mainstream and kickstarted a globalization process that accelerated the game's growth amongst other top sports around the world.
However, Barry Hearn stepped down as president of the WST a few years ago, appointing Steve Dawson as his successor. Yet, Hearn's Matchroom still owns the organization, and the company is now run by son Eddie.
Eddie Hearn has done a good job in boxing by the looks of it (I don't follow the sport), but he's definitely not the most enthusiastic about snooker and some directions Matchroom are taking make me have doubts if they're still good for the game.
Amongst those problems I listed in the very first paragraph, WST has also a very poor and amateurish approach to digital media:
- The website is terrible: schedule informations are harder to find now than it used to be even ten years ago, the scoring page hasn't worked all season long, and their so-called "mobile app" hasn't seen a score update since release.
- The streaming service (Matchroom Live) is simply awful: often goes live late in matches, goes off-air regularly, has no time schedule of matches (you have to know when a match is going on, the website won't tell you), has no app and does not even work in some web browsers.
These problems would be normal in a newish platform, but this is a paid service that's been there for a few years now and these problems have been there since day one.
Also, most Matchroom decisions seems to be based on money-making. Even though the World Championship is miles ahead any other event held on tour, including the other Tripe Crown's, that's the tournament Matchroom is aiming changes at - they want bigger crowds and more "money value" attached to it, so much so that leaving the Crucible is again under debate and even Saudi Arabia has become an option.
Meanwhile, the rest of the tour is left behind, certainly because no other snooker tournament has such a lucrative and immediate potential.
And in parallel, Matchroom's newest investment has been the creation of a World Nineball Tour. I like the idea that other cue-sports are being looked after, but there's certainly a feeling that the WST calendar - which used to be busy week in week out - is making way for some pool events. With that, nineball gains in audience and even in players field, as some professional snooker players are now taking part in their events.
Certainly, conflict of interest has to be a situation here and this is another negative weight in the balance of how good or bad Matchroom is for the game of snooker.
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