Glen and I don't always see eye to eye.. In this case, I fully agree with about everything that he's stated in this thread. Spot on, RKC.
How much revenue would be gained by sponsoring ANY 'Professional' pool player? How would you quantify it?
Fact is, these companies make far more revenue by sponsoring tournaments. If sponsorship isn't gaining your company revenue, why do it?
Glen is right: without a players organization, there is NO incentive to sponsoring players. Marketing expenses will net far greater value, used in other ways.
Agree all you want, but, he is wrong about auto racing and the rest are just opinions, not facts. There is no "right" or "wrong"... The market will dictate what happens over time and none of us can predict that.
My question is: why are the chinese creating these "teams"? Predator, Rasson and CPBA Cloth have teams with lots of well known players. There are some american Cue manufacturers that do as well. I wonder what kind of sponsorships these are: just equipment or actual endorsement checks?
IMO, Matchroom is not even from this country, we can count them out for creating an organization. Who will take on this task? I know Glen has some great ideas about how to bring pool to a better place and I hope they pan out. The Netflix idea is awesome for the concept and other platforms are already featuring sporting events, youtube, Amazon Video just to name a couple.
The big question is this: How do we get the masses to WATCH and play the game? Viewers are needed to gain interest of sponsors. ESPN has had pool on in many varieties and to no avail. Barely any coverage anymore.
APA has a HUGE member base and so do quite a few other leagues, but, I also think they overlap, as in players play in more than one league. Is this enough people to attract bigger sponsors?
I have mentioned this before: I have been skateboarding since 1985 and still get out there when I can. Skateboarding made it into the Olympics finally (summer 2020) and since then every big shoe manufacturer has poured money into the sport. Compared to the past, skaters are able to make an actual living off of just their shoe sponsor.
Cue sports are trying very hard to get into the Olympics for 2024, I think this would help immensely! The world is a very large market and pool/ cue sports are doing very well in Asia and Europe. What is the hold up here??
Not trying to argue. Just looking for opinions. I have hear nothing that shows a prominent direction so far.
Trent from Toledo