Selby Wants World Snooker Championship in UK for 2029

Snooker has spent the better part of a decade navigating the tension between its heritage and its global ambitions. The Crucible Theatre has been the sport’s spiritual home since 1977, a 980-seat arena in Sheffield that has produced some of the game’s defining moments. It is cramped, ageing, and utterly irreplaceable in the minds of most fans. Now, with a £45 million refurbishment confirmed for 2029, the sport faces a question it has been quietly circling for years: where does the World Championship go when the doors in Sheffield temporarily close?

Mark Selby, who has won the title at the Crucible four times, has a straightforward answer. The 42-year-old wants the tournament to remain in the United Kingdom, full stop. He is not naive about the competing forces at play, acknowledging that Matchroom Sport president Barry Hearn has historically favoured taking marquee events to new markets. But Selby’s instinct is clear, and it reflects a broader anxiety among players and supporters who fear that a temporary relocation could quietly become permanent.

The stakes are not imaginary. China has approximately 60 million active snooker players and currently provides the sport with its reigning world champion in Zhao Xintong. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, already hosts one of snooker’s four major tournaments. The Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters in Jeddah offered a prize pot of £2.3 million last year, matching the World Championship’s current purse. The financial logic of taking the sport’s biggest event to either country is obvious. The cultural argument against doing so is equally obvious to anyone who has sat inside the Crucible during a tense final session. Part of what makes that argument more than mere sentiment is the Crucible’s unique format: the best-of-35-frames final, played across two days in front of the same intimate crowd, creates a sustained pressure that a venue chosen for commercial convenience simply cannot replicate.

A Venue Transformed, A Tradition Preserved

The refurbishment of the Crucible is, in important ways, good news. The planned work will increase capacity from 980 to up to 1,480 seats, adding as many as 500 places and improving spectator facilities throughout the venue. Barry Hearn himself had previously described the Crucible as “not fit for purpose” in its current state, a blunt assessment that nonetheless came with a clear condition: he wanted to see it revamped, not abandoned. That revamp is now happening, underpinned by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s involvement in securing the tournament’s future in Sheffield through an agreement that runs until 2045, with an option to extend to 2050.

The scale of that political and financial commitment reflects how seriously the sport is now taken at the highest levels of British public life. A deal of that kind does not happen quietly or quickly. It signals a genuine determination to preserve the Crucible as snooker’s permanent home, even as the sport simultaneously pursues growth across Asia and the Gulf. What remains unresolved is the specific question of 2029, and potentially 2030 as well. World Snooker Tour officials are hoping the construction period covers only one year, but Selby is aware that plans do not always run to schedule. A two-year absence from the Crucible would test the “temporary relocation” framing considerably harder than a single season away.

Selby’s Case for Keeping It British

When Selby talks about keeping the World Championship in the UK, he is not simply voicing sentiment. He is making a measured argument about what the sport already has abroad versus what it risks losing at home. His point about China and Saudi Arabia is worth examining carefully. Snooker already stages numerous high-profile ranking events in China, and the Saudi Masters now carries prize money equivalent to the World Championship itself. Both markets are thoroughly catered for. Taking the sport’s premier event to either location for even one year would therefore represent something more than practical convenience; it would represent a shift in the tournament’s identity. The World Championship derives much of its authority from continuity: players, fans, and broadcasters all understand what it means precisely because it has happened in the same place, in the same format, for nearly five decades.

Selby acknowledged Hearn’s fondness for spreading events around and is clearly not dismissing the commercial realities that drive those decisions. But he drew a line at the World Championship specifically, expressing a preference that the temporary venue, wherever it ends up, stays on British soil.

Two venues have emerged as the most credible candidates for hosting duties during the Sheffield closure. Alexandra Palace in north London already hosts the PDC World Darts Championship each December and January, demonstrating its capacity to handle a major televised sporting event over a sustained period. Manchester Central, currently home to the Tour Championship, offers a different profile: a city with deep sporting heritage and strong transport links. Neither venue carries the history of the Crucible, but both are credible settings that would keep the tournament within the British sporting calendar.

The Title Race: Wide Open and Worth Watching

While the venue debate simmers in the background, Selby turned his attention to the tournament itself, which begins in Sheffield shortly. He suffered a first-round exit at last year’s World Championship, losing to Ben Woollaston in what was one of the more surprising results of the event. He responded in the way that champions typically do, recapturing form when it mattered and winning his third UK Championship title at the York Barbican in December, a result that gave him his 10th Triple Crown honour and underlined that he remains a serious contender at major events despite his recent health-related absence from competition. That UK Championship win was particularly telling: the format, with its punishing best-of-11 and best-of-17 matches across a packed schedule, demands the kind of sustained concentration that separates genuine champions from players merely in form.

On the state of the draw and the likely contenders, Selby was notably generous in his assessment of the field’s depth. He listed Neil Robertson, who leads the money list, alongside Kieran Wilson, Shaun Murphy and Mark Allen as players capable of going all the way, alongside more obvious candidates such as Judd Trump, Ronnie O’Sullivan, Mark Williams and defending champion Zhao Xintong. That Selby is able to name somewhere between 16 and 20 genuine title contenders is itself a commentary on how far the professional game has developed in recent years. A tournament that once had two or three clear favourites now has a genuinely open field at the top level.

O’Sullivan’s Record and What Comes Next

No conversation about snooker at this moment can pass without reference to Ronnie O’Sullivan, who continues to generate headlines even in a season where his form has been characteristically unpredictable. His achievement of compiling a break of 153 at the World Open in China stands as a landmark in the sport’s history. The maximum break, traditionally capped at 147 using the balls on the table in their standard configuration, was surpassed after a free ball opportunity presented itself in the opening frame of his 5-0 win over Ryan Day. O’Sullivan, never one to leave a record unclaimed, duly took it.

Selby’s take on the achievement was admirably direct. He acknowledged that O’Sullivan is simply the kind of player for whom such moments seem inevitable. The seven-time world champion subsequently reached a ranking final for the first time in over two years before losing to Thepchaiya Un-Nooh of Thailand, who produced a 147 maximum break of his own during a 10-7 victory. Whether O’Sullivan can translate that return to form into a record-breaking eighth world title in Sheffield remains the tournament’s most compelling individual storyline. Given how frequently O’Sullivan has used a run of results just before the Crucible as a springboard rather than a spent force, his recent final appearance arguably makes him more dangerous than his inconsistent season might otherwise suggest.

Verdict: Heritage and Ambition Must Find a Balance

Selby’s intervention in the venue debate is useful precisely because it comes from someone who has no obvious axe to grind. He is not a sentimentalist railing against modernisation, he is a four-time champion who has played the biggest matches of his career at the Crucible and who also competes regularly on the international circuit. When a player of that experience says he would prefer the World Championship to stay in the UK during the Sheffield closure, it carries weight beyond nostalgia.

The broader challenge for World Snooker Tour and Matchroom Sport is one of managing perception as much as logistics. A temporary move to Alexandra Palace or Manchester Central during a clearly defined construction period is easily framed as a practical necessity and a show of confidence in the refurbished venue to come. A move to Riyadh or Beijing, even as a one-off, would be much harder to frame that way. The sport has worked hard to build international markets without sacrificing the identity that makes the World Championship matter in the first place. Those two things are not always compatible, and the decisions made between now and 2029 will reveal which ambition ultimately takes priority.

What is encouraging is that the structural framework appears sound. A deal running to 2045, a refurbishment adding 500 seats, and a reigning world champion who has helped bring the Chinese audience even closer to the game: snooker is in a position of genuine strength. Selby’s hope is simply that the sport uses that strength wisely, protecting the tournament’s character rather than trading on it. On that, he is unlikely to find much disagreement among the game’s supporters.

Sources: Match statistics, quotes, and tournament information sourced from Sky Sports’ coverage of Mark Selby’s pre-tournament interview ahead of the 2025 World Snooker Championship.