Barry Hearn Took Over in 2010 and the Number of Events Tripled
Matchroom Sport's deal with the WPBSA reshaped the professional circuit in three years — more events, more prize money, and a longer qualifying ladder for anyone outside the top sixteen.
Matchroom's 2010 arrangement with the WPBSA tripled the number of ranking events.
Photo: Nikita Kotrelev / PexelsThe Arrangement
Barry Hearn became chairman of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association in 2010, arriving with a management company, Matchroom Sport, and a clear intention to run snooker the way he had run boxing and darts: more events, more broadcast deals, more cities. The arrangement was not a simple takeover. Matchroom contracted with the WPBSA to promote and operate the professional tour — the commercial engine sat with Hearn's company while the governing body retained its disciplinary and regulatory functions. The WST brand, which became the trading face of the circuit, was effectively the joint product of that structure.
The immediate measurable effect was on the ranking-event count. In the season before Hearn's arrival, the number of full ranking events — tournaments whose results directly affected a player's official world ranking and prize-money earnings — stood in single figures, with a calendar that had contracted sharply during the sport's difficult years in the mid-2000s. By the 2013–14 season, that number had more than tripled, with events in China, Australia, Germany and the UK added in quick succession. The WST's own prize-money and event records document the expansion across this period.
The hundred players who lose before the televised stages share a small fraction of the fund.
Photo: Ketut Subiyanto / PexelsWhat the Money Did
Total prize money across the tour rose substantially, though the distribution was, and remains, steeply weighted toward the top. A ranking-event winner in the early 2010s could expect a winner's cheque that had roughly doubled compared with equivalent events a decade earlier. Players finishing in the later rounds of qualifying still earned modest sums, but the existence of more events meant more opportunities to bank ranking points and small cheques — which matters acutely for professionals ranked outside the top sixty-four, who enter tournaments at the first qualifying stage rather than the last.
That qualifying structure is the less-discussed legacy of the expansion. More ranking events meant more qualifying rounds to fill, and that in turn gave lower-ranked players a route back into relevance that the shrunken calendar of the 2000s had denied them. A player ranked near the bottom of the 128-card tour could, across a full season, play considerably more competitive snooker than had been possible under the old model. For some, the additional frames were essential match practice; for others, the additional travel costs to UK qualifying venues were a financial strain that the modest prize money did not fully offset. The tour card system that sustained those players through a two-year cycle was, in effect, being asked to stretch across a longer and more demanding schedule.
Qualifying runs several tables at once in a sports hall, with almost nobody in the seats.
Photo: Joshua Santos / PexelsChina was central to the commercial logic. Ding Junhui's success in the mid-2000s had demonstrated the audience; Hearn's expansion formalised it in the calendar. Multiple ranking events moved through Shanghai and other Chinese cities, bringing broadcast revenue from a market of genuine scale. The model also absorbed non-ranking invitation events, including those with appearance fees, which allowed Hearn to bring in players and generate broadcast content outside the strict qualifying framework.
What Did Not Change
The prize-money distribution at the bottom of the draw did not keep pace with the headline figures. A player losing in the first qualifying round of a ranking event in 2014 collected a sum that, after travel and accommodation, left little margin. The WPBSA published its prize-money schedules, and the gap between the winner's cheque and the first-round exit fee remained wide — a structural feature of the sport that predated Hearn and persisted through the expansion. Prize-money distribution across WST ranking events has been tracked publicly, and the gradient is not flattering to the lower tour.
What Hearn's decade demonstrably changed was the size of the circuit and its geographical reach. Whether the economics served every card-holder equitably is a different question, and one the tour has not fully resolved. The events multiplied; the sport became a genuine global schedule. The benefits, like the prize money, flowed fastest to those already near the top.