European Pocket Billiard Federation (EPBF) board member David Morris has expressed his concerns regarding the World Nineball Tour model.
Having been involved with the EPBF for almost three decades and now the president of their commercial arm, he believes that players won’t be able to ‘earn a living’ whilst competing on the WNT circuit.
Morris candidly discussed the funding players receive from European governments and the hinderances that non-sanctioned tournaments can have on those endorsements in a recent interview with the Doggin’ It podcast.
“Of course I’ve seen the sport grow,” said Morris. “I think when I first started with the EPBF, we maybe had 13 countries as members or attending the European Championships, and now you have 38 member countries so the growth is clearly there.
“But it’s the structure that’s actually enabled that, especially since the Olympic recognition because since then we’ve seen a massive growth in many countries that we probably would not have seen before.
“In America it’s recognised, but in Europe the Olympic recognition is really utilised because there you have each national Olympic committee – so each country, their sports council or some form of funding – willing to invest in the athletes because it’s IOC recognised.
“Because they’re recognised and they’re getting funding, the players actually get funding to go to official events. It’s not just funding for events, they get funding for different programmes, training camps and all kinds of things.”
The EPBF have a rule in their regulations which suggests that there ‘could be consequences’ for players that prioritise non-sanctioned events should they collide with Euro Tour events.
Despite that rule not being brought into force when numerous European players opted to compete at the UK Open Pool Championship in May instead of the Euro Tour in Finland, Morris discussed the effects that decision can have on players.
“I think that’s going to be the player that determines [which event they choose to play] because if he goes to a non-sanctioned event then he won’t get any funding so he’s got to fund himself,” he said.
“He’s then got to perform to the top level to get in the top eight to earn any money, or he gets funding to go to the sanctioned events.
Morris added: “We’ve been around a while and we’ve seen a lot of people come and go with all these great ideas and everything like that. But we’ve never stopped the players. We never stopped the players when we had all these funny guys throwing their dollars around.
“It’s not in our interests to stop the players either. Europe is an exception – we have such a good structure there that it’s like a conveyor belt coming through so we’re still going to have people going to the Euro Tour and European Championships and the structure will survive.”
In addition, Morris made known that it’s the players who suffer from any tournaments clashing and he picked holes in the World Nineball Tour structure due to the amount of events that he believes players need to play.
“I really feel sorry for the players today that they’re having to choose. They need to be in so many events on the Matchroom calendar to get in the top ranking to get into the major events,” Morris said.
“It’s the same as snooker and darts and it’s the same model that Karl Boyes said that he doesn’t want because snooker is a closed shop. But Emily [Frazer] is looking at that sort of model. The players can’t earn a living that way. They have to travel to 30-odd events.”
Despite the comments of Morris, the top 64 on both the professional snooker and darts circuits have won at least $75,000 over a two-year period, while the world’s top three in darts have each earned $1.2m across the same timeframe.
