The Mosconi Cup fills a 2300 seat venue. Snooker has reached over 6000 in China. With giant screens, the audience can follow the small details, while feeling they're participants. The MC is about $500k in ticket sales. The real money is from broadcast rights and advertising and millions of remote live viewers.
Those are truly paltry attendance numbers for a sport/activity.
Broadcast rights are big money for popular sports. In the US, in any given year, there are about 20 NFL fans for every American playing American football at any level. They pay exorbitant ticket prices live or spend 25-33% of their viewing time watching commercials/advertisements, often on top of paying for the services streaming/broadcasting the game. That funnels a massive amount of money to teams and players.
In the US, the fan/viewer
layer ratio for cue sports is about 1:1. For American football, international football, baseball/softball, hockey, and basketball, that ration ranges from about 3:1 (international football) to 15:1 or higher (American football) in the USA. In China and USA, cue sports have about the same number of participants
per capita, but the China's fan
layer ratio for cue sports is around 2.5:1 to 3:1, similar to table tennis in China. In the USA, there just isn't much interest in watching pool, live or otherwise.
Further, China heavily subsidizes cue sports, which isn't the case in USA, and probably won't be any time in the foreseeable future. In the USA, the overwhelming bulk of the funding comes from amateur players via inflated equipment prices and expensive table time. Pool rooms have to be not just profitable to stay in business, but also, in the long term, more profitable than other uses for the same real estate space. I have no intention of debating the overall merits of capitalism vs socialism, but with respect to popularity of cue sports, Chinese government subsidies appear to be very helpful for increasing popularity.
In the USA, I see the pool industry making the same mistakes as the USA's bicycle industry. Take a look at the bikes people ride internationally in places where regular people ride bikes for reasons other than poverty, e.g., Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Germany. The bikes are usually heavy, often 50+ pounds, with comfortable saddles, cargo capacity, and plenty of useful accessories that allow the bike to serve as practical and reliable transportation. Such bikes are very hard to find in the USA, because they are inconsistent with the dishonest marketing of the bicycle industry, e.g., bikes need to be light, special pedals and clothes are needed for bicycling, etc. Heck, it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to even find a proper bicycle headlight in the US that wasn't imported from the European market. The lights marketed to the US are glorified flashlights, with round beams that blind oncoming traffic. In my experience volunteering for a local bike co-op, I know that a bike configured like a proper Dutch-style city bike will usually sell within minutes or, at most, hours of being completed, whereas the co-op might sit on mountain bikes and road bikes for weeks or months before they sell. The US bicycle industry doesn't loathe proper city bikes because people won't buy them; they loathe city bikes because they are very reliable and durable, and their users tend to not suffer from upgraditis. The US bicycle industry has long relied on upgraditis among cyclists to remain profitable, and that business model is incompatible with offering practical, durable bikes that people ride for decades without replacement.
Look at the number of pool players in the USA who have been led to believe that fancy, high-tech equipment is necessary to play pool well. Look at how many people have "upgraded" from standard maple shafts over the last couple decades. In hindsight, it might seem amazing Willie Masconi was ever able to string together an entire rack with the equipment he had to use. How was he even able to pot a ball without a low-deflection shaft? How did he manage to avoid frequent miscues without a $20 (in 2026 dollars) piece of chalk?
In China, cue sports are growing in popularity. In the USA, the quest for large prize purses and high equipment profitability are arguably doing more harm than good, because the financial burden is passed on to the amateurs, making the sport less accessible to new players.
