Snooker: Are UK clubs starting to thrive as elite game enters golden age?

The Ryless chain, once synonymous with supplying equipment to the highest levels of the sport, was perhaps at one time the most recognizable face of snooker clubs across the UK.

But it now operates just 15 clubs, an alarming drop-off from 165 in its peak years.

Yet the downturn was far from unusual across the UK’s major towns and cities.

Trying to organize a few frames with just friends has become challenging for those who play recreationally, while online searches for phrases such as ‘snooker club closed’ highlight the depth of club closures affecting communities.

Famous institutions such as the Willie Thorne Snooker Center in Leicester, which helped develop the skills of a young Mark Selby, are among those that have fallen by the wayside in the past 15 years.

High rent and operating costs, declining junior engagement, the coronavirus pandemic and the long-term effects of things like smoking bans — and government laws on jackpot sizes from gambling machines — have all hurt them.

This was supported by Sport England figures which showed that between 2005 and 2014 the number of 16-over games played at least once a week fell from 112,600 to just 47,700.

Speaking to BBC Sport, Jason Ferguson, chairman of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA), said: “If you turn the clock back to the 1980s, it was a boom time for snooker in the UK and there was a club on every street corner.

“But actually it got to a huge saturation point where it had to shrink. There’s no question about that. You need big buildings, you need a lot of space to move around the table and you can only charge a limited amount of money to use a snooker table.

“So we’re getting pushed out of prime city and town center locations and we’re pushing into industrial units and that sort of thing. We’ve also lost clubs to planning applications. The thing for snooker clubs is, if you’ve got a town center location and it’s prime, what happens?

“Well, when a planning application comes in for flats, apartments, whatever else, and the snooker clubs are leased out, those clubs aren’t replaced and that’s a real challenge.”