There have been many public discussions about issues related to prize money distributions in professional snooker [1], or whether the tour is perhaps too UK-centric. To address these issues more quantitatively, a detailed analysis of snooker prize money rankings is presented here. In particular, this analysis focuses on (1) how dominated the rankings are by the top players, and (2) the share of prize money earned by UK players. Seasonal ranking data over a time range of more than four decades (1980-2023) is considered. These analyses and results aim at providing a more objective and quantitative basis for any further discussions on the mentioned issues.

There is no discernible trend over time in the number of tournaments per season, but there is a fairly steady decline in the number of players since the rapid initial increase during the 1980s. With a clear and significant overall increase in total amount of prize money per season, this means that the average amount of prize money both per tournament and per player has increased. In fact, the average amount of prize money earned per player in one season has increased by about one order of magnitude, from around 5,000 GBP to around 50,000 GBP, over four decades.

However, given the highly skewed distribution of prize money among the players, a simple average is not very meaningful. A more informative measure is the 80% rank, which indicates how much a ranking is dominated by the top players. The relative 80% rank varies between roughly 10% and 30%, but with an average (over all seasons) of 19.95%. The Pareto principle, or 80-20 rule, thus seems to apply perfectly well to snooker rankings with (on average) 80% of the prize money being earned by the top 20% of players.

However, the 80% rank has actually increased with an increasing total amount of available prize money (at least up to a certain point), both for the absolute and for the relative 80% ranks. In other words, with a larger amount of available prize money, the rankings become less dominated by the top players. More prize money is of course beneficial to all players, but relatively speaking even more so for the lower-ranked players, as they are able to earn an increasingly larger share of it. A similar conclusion was already drawn earlier [6], but from a mathematically more complicated analysis. Here, a more straightforward and easier to understand analysis has been presented, and on a more complete data set.

Finally, the snooker tour is still highly dominated by UK players, both in terms of the number of players (50-90%) and their share in the prize money earned (70-90%), but with a declining trend in the latter. Moreover, their share in prize money is significantly larger than what could be expected given the percentage of UK players. Although it is not immediately obvious what an expected or “fair” percentage would be, it may be insightful to compare these statistics with for example badminton, another individual sport that was originally brought over from British India and then further developed into its modern form in the UK. Although snooker shares a similar history in that respect [7], badminton seems to have become much more internationalized.

Hopefully these analyses and results will be helpful in any future discussions about prize money distributions in snooker or whether the tour is too UK-centric, by providing some relevant and quantitative statistics over the past four decades that are directly related to these delicate issues.