Nine Empty Columns: Why Billiards Still Refuses to Be Measured

On the evening of May 5, 2026, after the World Snooker Championship final ended at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, I stayed up with my spreadsheet in my Liverpool flat. Fourteen columns. Four weeks of building. The first column recorded frames won. The second recorded centuries. The third recorded pot success in frames where the score was level or separated by exactly one. By the ninth column, I stopped and looked closer: most of the cells had been marked with three letters, N/A.

Not out of laziness. I had Python, OpenCV to extract ball positions from video, and probability models I had used to analyse pressing in football. The problem lay elsewhere: snooker does not release structural data in any form a model can digest. The scoreboard exists. The video exists. But the layer of data between them — ball positions, thinking time, cue power, contact angle, cue-ball path after each shot — barely exists in open form.

When I tried to build a nine-dimension analytical framework for the sport — technique and playing style, player data and form, tournament system and format, competitive power map, rules and governance, career ecosystem and psychology, risk, media narrative, and industry-chain transmission — all nine dimensions, without exception, collapsed into the same conclusion: insufficient information.

That is the strangest thing about the sport I have covered for nine years. Snooker occupies more hours of British television each week during the season than any other individual sport, yet its volume of open structural data trails even a regional table-tennis tournament.

The World Snooker Tour runs roughly twenty ranking events a season, with more than one hundred and thirty players holding tour cards. The BBC, ITV and Eurosport share the broadcast hours. In China, major snooker matches appear on national television to audiences that many European football leagues would envy. The World Championship at the Crucible carries a total prize fund of about 2.4 million pounds, with 500,000 pounds for the champion — no small figure for an individual sport.

But when I want to know how many deciding frames a particular player has won across the last three seasons, in frames where the score stood at 9-9 or 12-12, I have to count them myself. When I want to know his average safety success rate in the fourth session of a long match — the point at which stamina and concentration begin to waver — no database answers. Official tournament statistics show pot success and safety success by match, occasionally by frame, but almost never offer downloadable raw data, and never anything at the level of the individual shot.

Compare football, where I also work. Opta, StatsBomb and Wyscout sell event data detailed to the individual pass, the individual duel, the individual metre of pressing, traced back twenty years. A club-level football analyst can open a file and see everything. A snooker analyst has a scoreboard and a pair of eyes.

This is not a temporary technical shortfall. It is a structural choice. And I want to use the nine dimensions of the framework — the very framework I built and found empty — to show why that choice exists, who benefits from it, and what would have to change before snooker can be analysed as seriously as it deserves.

Dimension one: technique and playing style.

In football, I can measure how many fractions of a second earlier a full-back widens than his teammates, and how much space that creates. In snooker, the most basic unit of measurement — the cue-ball position after each shot — has no public data source. I once spent two months manually logging cue-ball positions for four players across a single tournament, plotting each coordinate onto a scaled table diagram. The result revealed something the scoreboard never would: the success rate of the same player fluctuated by nearly thirty per cent depending on which half of the table his cue ball sat in. The half with a closer cushion contact line produced a markedly higher success rate — an effect no analyst could verify by reading pot success alone.

But to obtain that figure, I had to do it myself. No automated tool logs ball positions in real time across a full season. Which is why every discussion of playing style in snooker stops at the level of impressionistic description: he attacks well, he defends well, he has a strong temperament. That is the language of commentary, not of analysis.

Dimension two: player data and form.

Try placing two players side by side: Ronnie O'Sullivan and a player ranked fortieth in the world. Official statistics give me a few numbers: titles, centuries, 147 maximums. O'Sullivan holds the record for competitive maximum breaks and was the first to pass one thousand centuries. Those numbers tell a story about greatness, and they are true.

But they do not tell a story about form. There is no data on average thinking time across phases of a season. No data on error rates on simple shots versus difficult ones. No data on how many consecutive frames a player loses before recovering his rhythm. In football I can build a form curve over time for a player and see from which month he declined. In snooker that curve does not exist because the horizontal axis has no data to plot.

This also distorts the market. A player's value is only a story the market repeats until it is believed. The world ranking rests on prize money accumulated over a two-year cycle, not on quality of play. A player who wins two minor events during a period when stronger opponents are absent can overtake a player who reached three major finals without winning. The ranking does not measure the gap in level. It measures luck amplified by the calendar.

Dimension three: tournament system and format.

This is the only dimension where I could build a relatively complete analytical framework, because format is public and countable information. A standard ranking event runs from seven frames up to nineteen in the final. The World Championship uses the longest format: nineteen frames in round one, rising to thirty-five in the final, spread across seventeen days.

The long format creates a completely different analytical space from the short format. In a seven-frame match, a player needs only two moments of brilliance to win. In a thirty-five-frame match, he needs a system. I once compared the results of the same group of players across both formats over three consecutive seasons and found that the correlation between short-format and long-format ranking was fairly weak — weak enough to say we are talking about two different sports under one name.

Yet tournaments do not publish the data that would let fans see that difference. A player can be acclaimed as a World Championship contender after winning three short-format events, then be eliminated in the second round at the Crucible after two sessions. The public calls it an upset. The analyst calls it the consequence of using one scale to judge a sport played on two.

Dimension four: the competitive power map.

Here my framework has data, but the data lies. The United Kingdom remains the centre of professional snooker. The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield has hosted the World Championship since 2026 and holds a contract until 2027, despite speculation about a move to the Middle East. The Class of 2026 — O'Sullivan, John Higgins, Mark Williams — has dominated the sport for three decades and still competes at the top.

China is the rising force. The number of Chinese professionals on tour has risen steadily for a decade. Academies in Shanghai and Beijing produce twenty-year-olds with far better fundamentals than the previous generation. Zhao Xintong won the world title in 2026 at the age of twenty-eight, becoming the first Asian player to lift the trophy at the Crucible — and his story is more complicated still, because he returned from a suspension related to betting.

But here the data loses its memory. We have player counts by nationality, but no data on the depth of the development pipeline. How many young Chinese players reach professional level each year? How many keep their tour card after three seasons? What is the survival rate of an eighteen-year-old on tour? No answers, because no one publishes them. We are discussing a shift in power without the figures to measure it.

Dimension five: rules and governance.

This is the only dimension where snooker offers a dense record, and the reason is sad: betting-related cases.

In 2026, after a long investigation into matches suspected of being fixed, the governing body handed down sanctions against ten professional players, most of them Chinese. Two received lifetime bans — meaning they are barred from the sport for life. Others received suspensions ranging from several years to more than seven. It was the biggest scandal in the sport's history since professionalisation.

In governance terms, snooker is an interesting case because its organisational model is far more fragmented than team sports. It has no single international federation as powerful as FIFA. Power sits with the World Snooker Tour, with national associations, and with several independent event promoters. That fragmentation creates gaps through which misconduct can slip.

But even in this dimension my framework leaks. I know the sanctions. I do not know how match monitoring works in practice. I do not know how many matches each season are flagged for review. I do not know where the alert threshold of the irregular-betting detection system is set. Error is where reality signs its name, and in this case the signature sits where the administrators do not want outsiders to read.

Dimension six: career ecosystem and psychology.

What does a professional snooker player earn a living from? This is a question anyone analysing the sport seriously must answer, and the answer is nowhere to be found.

Prize funds are published, but the distribution is deliberately steep. At a mid-tier ranking event, the winner might take eighty thousand pounds while a first-round loser takes three thousand. Counting travel, hotels and living costs, a player ranked outside the top forty can finish a season with a real loss if he stays on tour long enough. That is why so many young cueists leave the game before thirty.

But I can only say that by inferring from public numbers. I have no data on players' actual incomes, on individual sponsorship contracts, on what they earn from exhibitions and displays — an important income stream nobody records. I have no data on how many players have personal coaches, how many have psychologists, how many travel alone.

And this is the dimension I regret most, because it holds the best stories. I once stood outside a snooker club in the Liverpool suburbs on a Tuesday evening, watching a player ranked sixtieth practise alone for three hours, repeating a single type of shot. No cameras. No crowd. No data. Just him and the table. That is the sport in its most primitive form: one person, one belief, and thousands of hours nobody counts.

Dimension seven: risk.

Risk in snooker comes in four kinds. Competitive risk — a player being style-countered by an opponent. Physical and psychological risk — losing focus in the late stage of a long match. Compliance risk — entanglement in fixing. And systemic risk — a sport dependent on a handful of broadcast markets.

I can assess the first and third qualitatively, because both are stories that can be retold. But the second — psychological risk in the closing stage — is the one I most want to quantify and the most impossible. What would it take to measure? Data on thinking time between shots, on the rate of changed decisions late on, on error rates on easy shots in the last three frames of a match lasting more than three hours. None of it exists.

Dimension eight: media narrative.

Here snooker has an excess of data and a deficit of verification. Sports media cannot build stories on snooker data, because there is none. So it builds stories on people. The story of the talented youngster about to inherit the throne. The story of the champion finding himself again. The story of a comeback after suspension.

Those stories have their own power, and I do not deny it. But they have no data spine. The crowdless season erased a variable no model can encode: noise. And even under normal conditions, we still do not know what the noise of the Crucible auditorium does to error on a decisive shot. We believe it matters. We cannot prove it.

This is the mechanism that pushes narrative away from reality. When there is no data to verify with, the story gets repeated until it becomes accepted fact. A player is labelled "weak under pressure in finals" after two defeats in two finals, and the label follows him for a career — even though the sample is two observations. Statistically, that is no evidence. In media terms, it is a sentence.

Dimension nine: the industry chain.

Finally, this is the dimension where snooker has the best data and receives the least attention. The sport's value chain begins with the club and table ecosystem at grassroots level, passes through players and events, and ends in sponsorship, broadcast rights and the accessories market.

At the upstream end, I can observe directly. Snooker clubs in Britain have declined in number over two decades. In China the opposite has happened: the number of tables in major cities has risen continuously, and grassroots tournaments draw thousands of entrants. That shift has a direct effect on the development pipeline and will shape the tour for the next decade.

Midstream, broadcast rights are the most important variable and the most hidden. Nobody publishes broadcast contract values by market. We only know that Asian markets have grown more important in recent deals, which explains why the calendar increasingly places events in Asia at hours suited to viewers there.

Downstream, the star effect is the most visible and measurable. A world champion's career can revive an entire accessories market in his home country. But how long that effect lasts, and how far it amplifies, is a question without data.

Now step back and look at the whole picture across nine dimensions.

One dimension has a relatively complete and honest framework: governance and compliance, because it attaches to cases with records. Two dimensions have data but the data cannot answer the most important question: the power map and the industry chain. The remaining six — technique, player data, format in relation to performance, career and psychology, risk, and media narrative — sit at empty or near-empty.

And here is what I consider most important, the thing I want to state plainly: this emptiness is not a technical accident, but a consequence of the business model.

Look at who benefits from keeping the data closed. Tournament promoters benefit because they control the story of their product. Broadcasters benefit because they monopolise distribution of both the pictures and the numbers. Leading players benefit because when there is no objective yardstick, their commercial value is decided by reputation — and reputation is better protected by friendly media than by open data.

Those who lose out are the fans, the analysts, and the young players with no voice to position their own value. A twenty-two-year-old with better technique but no titles will struggle to convince a sponsor more than a fading former champion, because there is no way to prove with numbers that he plays better.

In football, the data revolution began in the nineties, when a few companies decided that recording every event of every match was a business model. At first clubs laughed. Then they bought. Then they could not work without it. Snooker has not passed through that phase, and the most interesting question is whether it needs to.

Tactics do not live on the chalkboard; they live in the gap between two runs. In snooker, that gap is the space between the scoreboard and the cue-ball position — where the reality of the match actually happens, and where we are completely blind.

I do not believe the sport will remain without data forever. The betting market has begun to drive demand. Broadcast rights growing more expensive in Asia create an incentive to produce more derivative content, and derivative content needs numbers. Academies in China are already collecting training data on their students because they see it as a competitive edge. The first databases will not come from the governing body's headquarters. They will come from private academies, and they will quietly change how people understand the sport.

When that happens, the first question worth asking will not be who plays better than whom. The first question will be: over the past three decades, how many players were mispriced because nobody had the tools to price them?

I built a nine-dimension analytical framework, and eight of its dimensions returned empty or near-empty. That is my real finding from four weeks with that spreadsheet. The verdict on snooker is not that it lacks champions or lacks appeal — it has an abundance of both. The verdict is that it lacks a mirror. When you have no mirror, every light becomes an image drawn by somebody else.

The test for next season is simple. I will pick a mid-ranking player, manually log cue-ball positions after every shot across at least five long-format matches, and compare it with what the official scoreboard says about him. If the two pictures diverge — and I believe they will — then I have an answer to the bigger question: what exactly is the thing we call the world ranking measuring in this sport.

I still enjoy walking into a snooker club in Liverpool on a Tuesday evening and hearing the balls click in the silence. But I want one more thing when I walk out: a number I can verify.