This article is from the WeChat public account: Sports Economic Observation (ID: titansportsindustry), author: Xie Zechang, original title: "The interests behind the snooker "match-fixing case": someone owes more than 100,000 pounds, and someone has only 100 pounds left in his account, the title picture is from: Visual China
On June 6, 2023, Beijing time, the World Professional Billy and Snooker Association (WPBSA) announced the punishment results and details of the case against 10 Chinese players suspected of gambling and game manipulation. Although all the players involved in the case can appeal until June 20, it is widely believed that this is the final judgment of the gambling-related case - Liang Wenbo and Li Xing were brutally banned for life, Xiaotianwang Zhao Xintong and Yan Bingtao were banned for 20 months and 5 years, and a number of promising stars with great potential were also suspended and fined accordingly.
Whether in terms of the number of people involved, the severity of the punishment, or the time span of the investigation, this is undoubtedly the heaviest fine in the history of professional snooker. In particular, the lifetime suspension penalties of Liang Wenbo and Li Xing easily broke Stephen Lee's 12-year record that year. The previous record for the longest ban for a Chinese player was 10 years and 9 months for Yu Delu.
The question arises, why are snooker players so keen to participate in gambling? Why did so many Chinese players, especially young players, jump into the "big dye tank" so easily, wasting the precious time that was easiest to achieve results, and even directly ruined their careers?
Young players, who are "tightening their belts"
In the background, snooker is still a very shabby sport after all.
All professional events are governed by the WPBSA and WST (World Snooker Tour Ltd.) as the promoter, and each player who qualifies for the professional circuit needs to sign a contract with the above two organizations, accept the rules, fulfill the competition obligations, and obtain the match prize money by participating in the competition.
This seems like a very reasonable and efficient mechanism, but the reality is that with the exception of the top 16 players in the world who receive additional sponsorships, exhibition invitations and commercial reward opportunities, the vast majority of players rely on meager tournament prize money to survive. The total prize money for a single season of the Snooker Tour is only about 10 million pounds, which is still the statistics before the epidemic. But the nature of competitive competition dictates that snooker also follows the law of the jungle, and the more top the player, the easier it is to play and thus share most of the prize money.
Take the most lucrative world championships as an example, the champion prize money is 500,000 pounds, the runner-up is 200,000 pounds, and this year's young player Si Jia Hui who reached the final four as a dark horse also received a prize check of 100,000 pounds, although he did not rank high. But even so, about 70% of the total prize pool was divided among the top 32 players - Pang Junxu, Wu Yize and Fan Zhengyi were eliminated in the first round of the main game and could only get 15,000 pounds.
In contrast, the average ranking tournament prize money may only be a few thousand or even a few hundred pounds, and if you can't go further, in extreme cases, it's not enough to cover travel and accommodation costs. Xiao Guodong, who is the same age as Ding Junhui, has also played professional snooker for more than ten years, but there has been no substantial improvement in income, and he has become an anchor whenever he has free time, and he can be regarded as having a part-time job in the live broadcast platform to explain the competition.
Among the players who were suspended this time, Chang Bingyu earned £15,000 in prize money in 2022/23, Chen Zifan 13,000, Zhang Health 3,000, Liang Wenbo and Browning with zero bonus income. Of course, they were punished by an early ban and directly cut off their source of income. But even if you are a top player with outstanding results, how much can you earn in a year? The winner of the past season was Mark Allen, accumulating £650,500, equivalent to two weeks' salaries of Premier League superstars such as De Bruyne, Haaland and Salah. In the first two years, O'Sullivan earned millions of pounds in a single season, which is an absolute ceiling, but it is not worth mentioning in other sports. "Fire Teacher" has a career of 30 years to play a "river" of 13 million bonuses, football, NBA, tennis, golf and other superstars, in just about a year can easily earn.
To cultivate the next Ding Junhui, financial support is indispensable
In terms of revenue, Ding Junhui is an exception, with his prize money of £180,500 last season, which is quite shabby compared to his income off the field. At the end of last year, as a snooker player, he announced his endorsement of the Chinese eight-ball, and the outside world widely speculated that the endorsement fee was definitely expensive, in addition, he also has his own business territory, business sponsorship and family business have long allowed him to worry about his livelihood.
In fact, his road to fame is also the dream path of many Chinese children. At present, the younger generation in the Chinese Legion basically grew up watching Ding Junhui's ball, and their parents worked hard and carefully cultivated, just looking forward to the day when they could get ahead like Ding Junhui. Many of them, born in the CBSA World Snooker Academy in Beijing, cost 100,000 yuan a year to start a flight, and if they can rise to the top of their peers, they can enter the lower cost of long-distance flights and pilot flights, participate in Asian and world-class youth competitions, and gradually step on the threshold of professional football.
Some people roughly estimate that at least 2 million yuan will be invested to complete this process.
However, this is just the beginning, the UK is the birthplace and event center of snooker, if you can obtain a professional qualification, you must be based in the UK, participate in various events large and small to earn bonuses, annual training competitions, life travel, hard costs at least three or four hundred thousand yuan, affected by the epidemic, this number may be higher.
Children who can play and go to the UK should be the best among their peers, but subject to factors such as cultural level, language ability, and economic level, Chinese players can often only huddle to keep warm, except for a few players, they are basically gathered in Ding Junhui Snooker Academy and Victoria Snooker Academy (founded by Chinese). Here, the conditions for living, lodging, training and competition are available, but as mentioned above, the economy is not enough, the spirit is monotonous and empty, and the lust for profit takes advantage of the void, so that they can easily gamble on the trap and cannot extricate themselves.
Gambling breeds, taking risks to survive?
However, gambling and manipulating the game is not a shortcut to riches, or even a point of no return. According to the survey, in December 2022, Zhang Health had only £100 left in his bank account, Browning had a debt of £15,000, and Lu Ning's debt even reached more than 100,000 pounds.
According to the findings released by the WPBSA disciplinary committee, Liang Wenbo and Li Xing were undoubtedly the worst perpetrators, who "solicited, induced, lured, persuaded, encouraged or assisted players to manipulate the game". After the East Window incident, there were also charges of "not cooperating with the investigation" and "threatening other players not to cooperate in the investigation". In fact, Liang Wenbo has been missing for a long time, and his self-depraved career has ended. There are even media people who broke the news that there may be manipulation by underworld forces behind him, suspected of violating domestic laws. Several young players who are not deeply involved in the world, instigated and lured by the "big brother", completely left their original intention and dream of this sport behind for thousands of pounds or tens of thousands of yuan, and eventually caused a disaster.
As the future leaders of the Chinese Legion, the loss and sinking of Yan Bingtao and Zhao Xintong is even more distressing.
Yan Bingtao won the Masters two years ago with a prize fund of £250,000, while Zhao Xintong won consecutive British Championships and the German Masters in 2021/22, earning a total of £280,000. It stands to reason that they are not short of money. But the survey results show that Yan Bingtao began to participate in match-fixing as early as 2016, born in 2000, he was only 16 years old at the time, just entered the professional snooker world, and plunged into the big dye vat of gambling!
Zhao Xintong mentioned in an "apology statement" that "living alone overseas is boring and closed", and "blindly imitating others and choosing the most wrong way to pass the time - gambling". Although more details are missing, these facts fully show that although the circle of snooker is not large, it is still full of all kinds of black hands and various temptations, which is objectively one of the reasons for the concentrated outbreak of this gambling incident.
It is not difficult to find that except for the professional tournaments held in China, basically all the major ranking tournaments of snooker (including the three major tournaments) are sponsored by bookmakers. Since the beginning of the 21st century, tobacco advertising has been completely removed from the shelves in the UK and even Europe, and this pattern has gradually taken shape.
In fact, snooker competitions naturally have strong bettable attributes because of the characteristics of their own sports. Because of this, snooker has become the hardest hit area for all forces to manipulate matches and play match-fixing, and it has been a lingering shadow since the gradual commercialization in the 70s of the last century. In 2010, four-time world champion "The Witcher" Higgins was fished by a reporter from the newspaper World News, talking about cheating in snooker games "very easily, very easy" in front of a candid camera. It's easy for a professional player to deliberately lose a particular game, or to lose with an agreed scoreline.
Because it was just "mouth hi" and no real hammer, Higgins was suspended for half a year and fined £75,000. But with the popularity of smart devices and mobile internet, betting on snooker has become simpler and more volume. Yu Delu once bet £65,000 in a match and made a profit of £86,000. In 2017/18, before he was banned, he earned just £55,600 a year.
After the gambling turmoil, Chinese snooker went back 10 years
The price of the Chinese Legion's "annihilation" can be described as tragic, and for a long time in the future, it is likely to return to the "pioneering" era when Ding Junhui led more than a dozen young players to break into Britain. However, this may not be a new beginning for the rebirth of Chinese snooker, except for a few "heinous crimes", I believe that most of the young people affected by this gambling incident will eventually change their minds and return to the arena.
Cao Yupeng, who was banned for eight years for gambling and manipulating games in 2018, was eventually suspended to two and a half years due to his cooperation with the investigation and a good attitude of admitting his mistakes. His career was revived in the 2020/21 season. Later, when faced with Liang Wenbo's temptation again, he sternly refused.
After the pandemic, the Chinese snooker market will also restart, and the 2023-24 season calendar has been marked by the Shanghai Masters, Wuhan Open, and international tournaments. The future of snooker is China, and this phrase has been heard for the past 20 years.
Hopefully, this vision, in the near future, will be more than just a slogan.
This article is from the WeChat public account: sports economic observation (ID: titansportsindustry), author: Xie Zechang
This content is the author's independent opinion and does not represent the position of Tiger Sniff. It may not be reproduced without permission, please contact [email protected] for authorization
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