Tucked away next to a used-car dealership, on an industrial estate a few miles from Cardiff, the whole club is like this, an echo of a lost Britain. Deep within its cave-like chamber, the players resemble wraiths, forever trapped beneath the golden pools of light that illuminate each table. When I visit, Roxette’s 1987 song “It Must Have Been Love” hums from a TV overhead, perennially tuned to a channel showcasing big-haired hitmakers. The club seems to trade in yesterday’s prices too. I seize the offer of becoming a “lifetime” member for a mere £5, only to be informed that the club has run out of membership cards. Is this how it works at Soho House?

Not that I’d have it any other way. With its odd atmosphere, at once inviting and moody, Penarth Road is the kind of place I’ve been seeking out since I first stepped foot in a snooker hall some 25 years ago. Yet if it feels strange in its oldness, Penarth Road is unusual in other ways too. Over the last few decades, hundreds of clubs have closed right across the country. Cardiff alone has seen the shuttering of several over recent decades, each departure snuffing out a universe of cheap pints and the baize.

It speaks, if nothing else, to the deep questions floating around snooker’s future. How can the game flourish, in this country anyway, if there are fewer places to practice and play? Why would youngsters even want to master this maddening old game, seemingly stuck in the past and played by middle-aged men? And yet, in the Far East, potting balls is increasingly seen as young and cool. It all suggests a sport at the precipice of change, as this quintessential parlour game forsakes its English roots — and globalizes alongside everything else.

On the face of it, snooker is in good shape. Over recent years, the professional tour has seen an increase in tournaments and prize money. Ticket sales are strong: the World Championships and Masters are often sell-outs, with punters eagerly handing upwards of £50 to enjoy the privilege of watching a ludicrously difficult game made to look easy.

Snooker’s global audience has also skyrocketed. That is partly down to growing interest in Europe, following the victory of Belgium’s Luca Brecel in the 2022 World Championships. China, too, is increasingly attracted to the game, with the People’s Republic hosting as many as 60 million active players. The World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA), the game’s governing body, reckons the World Snooker Championship, set to start in Sheffield tomorrow, could attract a global televised audience of 500 million people.

This hardly suggests a sport on its knees, as snooker truly was some years back, when the end of tobacco sponsorship saw the number of ranking tournaments dwindle to just six. Some consider the intervention of Barry Hearn, with the promoter taking control of the tour in 2010, as the moment snooker was coaxed back from the abyss. “Snooker is no longer a UK-based sport,” says Jason Ferguson, the WPBSA chairman. “It’s a truly global sport.”

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It’s perhaps unfair to gauge snooker’s success through this country alone. But for all the talk of the game’s global standing, the only other places outside the UK to host professional tournaments this season have been China, Hong Kong, Germany and Saudi Arabia. In other words, then, the sport seems popular merely in pockets, rather than being a genuinely international phenomenon.

At one point during our chat, Ferguson, himself an ex-professional, tellingly refers to snooker as a UK “export”. “There’s something still quintessentially English about the game,” he says, “be that the dress code or its history.”

It’s a reasonable point. From the bow ties and waistcoats to the emphasis on sportsmanship — players are obliged to admit to fouls even if the referee doesn’t notice — snooker still brands itself on its British roots. But what if those roots are withering? According to one estimate, Britain hosted around 650 clubs in 2019. That pales compared to the thousands that sprung up in the Eighties, when it wasn’t unusual to find three or four in any mid-sized town. Much like pubs, many went out of business after the smoking ban arrived in 2007, while others were gobbled up by developers eager for slabs of prime real estate.

Ferguson says the rate of closures has since stabilized, while implying that the market may have been oversaturated anyway. Perhaps. But beyond the raw numbers, another way of understanding British snooker’s health is by going to places like Penarth Road — and here, the prognosis feels grim.

The punters when I visit are mostly men, with few appearing under 40. One, sporting a large gray beard and wearing an old Cardiff City top, swears as an attempt at a long red misses the pocket by a proverbial country mile. He looks admonishingly at his cue and grouses to his playing partner. “I might as well be playing with a bloody boomerang,” he laments, his South Welsh drawl hanging thick about my ears.

It didn’t used to be like this. Back in the Eighties, snooker was part of the national conversation. Its cast of colorful personalities — from hellraisers like White to housewives’ favorite Cliff “The Grinder” Thorburn — were chat-show regulars. On Fleet Street, each national paper had its own in-house snooker correspondent. A miniature snooker table was the Christmas present to have for any self-respecting child. As Chas ‘n’ Dave sang it in 1986, we were all “snooker loopy”.

While it’s true that snooker’s boom period was helped by there being only four television channels, meaning most households had little choice but to watch, it arguably tapped into the era’s political zeitgeist. As Dominic Sandbrook notes in his history of Eighties Britain, this individual sport, played by working class men dressed as gentlemen, chimed with the aspirationalist promise of Thatcherism.

How, then, to explain snooker’s apparent decline since those heady days? One answer, surely, is that there are now far more distractions. Its slow and gentle rhythm puts it instantly at odds with the mores of modern society. While fans savor the ebbs and flows of the World Championship final, the idea of a sporting contest taking two days feels increasingly ridiculous.

Then there are the multiple demands of being an aspiring professional in today’s game. The long hours of practice. The costs of traveling up and down the motorway to qualifying events. The cheap hotels. The solitude. Ben Harrison, a talented former English amateur champion, abandoned the sport in 2016 because of the strain. “It just all became too much in the end,” he tells me. Harrison now leads a much happier life as a married man and estate agent in his hometown of Trowbridge. “I have no regrets.”

But snooker’s authorities are not giving up bringing young people into the game. This includes projecting a healthier image of clubs, moving away from their erstwhile reputation as smoke-filled dens of iniquity, frequented by truants, gamblers and chancers.

Yet if it’s true that many of these new venues offer better facilities, others feel more like sports bars than snooker clubs, rigged out with bright lights and big screens, where American pool tables outnumber their larger, green-baized counterparts. They don’t immediately lend themselves to the atmosphere required to play a game so demanding in concentration that Australian wit Clive James once described it as “chess with balls”.

Not that everywhere seems to take snooker so casually. For if Penarth Road Snooker Club symbolizes the game’s past, and those shiny bar-and-grill joints seem only tangentially interested in the sport, then Victoria’s Snooker Academy in Sheffield might offer a glimpse into its future.

Located in a converted modern office space, on a quiet street next to the city center — not far from the Crucible, hallowed home of the World Championships — you could easily miss the place but for an A4-sized notice Blu-Tacked to the door: “KNOCK HERE FOR SNOOKER”.

The club is silent, save for the drone of an air-conditioning unit and the purr of a fridge stocked with tubs of Asian ice cream. The wall above the door is emblazoned with a flurry of motivational buzzwords: “Creativity”; “Ambition”; “Belief”. The players, for their part, wear earbuds as they go about various practice drills in metronomic fashion on the professional-grade Star tables, as pristine as country lawns. It’s all a long way from Penarth Road: some of the tables at my old club don’t seem to have been reclothed since before Welsh devolution.

While technically open to the public, anyway, the Academy is very much a place of work. Andrew Bromley, who runs the club with his Chinese wife Victoria Shi, doesn’t seem overly bothered when I mention it’s listed as “permanently closed” on Google. “We don’t really want people coming in off the street with cans of lager and disturbing our players,” he whispers as he shows me around. “This is a professional environment.”

Fair enough: several members of the Academy’s stable have made it to ranking event finals over the past few seasons. That includes the 22-year-old Si Juahui, and the 21-year-old Wu Yize, even as Zhao Xintong captured 2022’s UK Championship at the tender age of 25.

As the names imply, Victoria has become a haven for Chinese players especially, talented young professionals who’ve come to chase their dreams. They’re far from alone — for if snooker has become popular viewing in Beijing and Chengdu, Shanghai alone may have some 1,500 clubs.

China’s fascination with snooker can be traced back to the Eighties, when Barry Hearn organized exhibition tours in Hong Kong, then still a British territory, with the hope of growing the game in Asia. But it wasn’t until an 18-year-old Ding Junhui captured the China Open in 2005 that snooker truly took off on the mainland. Ding’s success turned him into a national hero overnight, and thrust the sport into the public consciousness. Ever the shrewd businessman, Hearn’s first act upon his 2010 return to the sport was to increase the number of tournaments in China.

While there is no evidence of strategic investment in snooker on the part of China’s government, local officials have set up snooker academies. The game is also on the sporting curriculum in schools. There are even so-called snooker colleges, such as International Billiards Academy in Yushan, in which students are taught the art of the baize alongside vocational subjects.

Little wonder, then, that former world champion Stephen Hendry recently predicted that up to eight of the game’s Top 16 players, considered snooker’s elite, may hail from China in the next decade. That’s even as the People’s Republic new stars are feted as heroes in their homelands, with Bromley describing how Academy alumni “can’t walk down the street” without being recognized.

It’s again hard not to make the international comparison. Apart from Ronnie O’Sullivan — arguably the most gifted player ever to pick up a cue, and charismatic enough to have been profiled in the New Yorker — it’s tough to think of any British snooker player the public could spot in a lineup.

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But O’Sullivan, who turns 50 this year, can’t go on forever. Neither can his longtime peers Mark Williams and John Higgins — collectively known as the “Class of ’92” after the year they turned professional. At 35, world number one Judd Trump is still the closest this country has to a cue-toting wunderkind, while the reigning world champion Kyren Wilson is 33.

“Snooker could definitely do with a Luke Littler moment,” says Nick Metcalfe, host of the Talking Snooker podcast, alluding to the impact the teenager has had on darts since winning the world title earlier this year. “While we appreciate the magic of the older guys, seeing them in the big finals time after time is not necessarily a great sign.”

Neither, perhaps, is snooker’s tendency to revere its past. That nostalgia is sure to be on display with the imminent 40th anniversary of the 1985 “black ball final” — when 18.5 million TV viewers stayed up past midnight to watch a bespectacled Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis to become champion of the world.

Taylor and Davis have recreated the famous match countless times over the years in exhibitions, featuring novelty wigs, oversized glasses and exaggerated finger wags. For Ferguson, “it’s a key milestone in the sport that we’ve got to milk.” But others believe the reminiscing has been done to death.

“I think this constant harking back to the Eighties is a real problem,” says Lewis Pirnie, a snooker analyst and frequent visitor to events in China. “The game has moved on and we should be championing the younger players. We have multiple event winners from China and there are still commentators who can’t pronounce their names correctly.”

Pirnie is obviously right. Every sport needs to regenerate if it wants to thrive. You might even say the state of snooker in Britain serves as a microcosm for the country at large: stuck in an endless Thatcherite hangover and in urgent need of renewal. All the while, a conveyor belt of talented young players continues to whir away in China, as the country enters an exciting new chapter.

Yet amid these bewildering geopolitical shifts, and a world where we want things faster and louder, snooker’s immutability remains part of the charm. You can tune into a tournament safe in the knowledge that the same old faces will be there — the same stalwarts as when TV had four channels and Neil Kinnock vied to be prime minister.

Visiting the Penarth Road Snooker Club is to be enveloped by the same kind of nostalgia. Who needs the world outside, with its natural light and unspeakable problems, when within the perpetual gloam there awaits the promise of cut-price lager and a black ball finish?

As I go to pay up, I’m drawn once more to that old photo of the Whirlwind, shrine-like behind the bar. “He was a real character, wasn’t he?” says one punter returning a tray of balls in an enormous splayed hand to the counter. “But then there were lots of them around back in those days.” As I step back out into the starry Welsh night, I can still hear the gentle click of balls as another synth classic strikes up.

Except that hasn’t happened — not, one might say, by a long shot. The game continues to grow. It has been estimated that around 500 million people follow snooker right across the globe. In China, it remains a boom sport, with fanbases rapidly expanding across Europe and the Middle East, especially among young people. In other words — in the midst of our ever more rushed, hyper-accelerated world — snooker is thriving.

How to explain this? Counterintuitively, I’d say it’s that glacial pace. Six-time world champion Steve Davis has defended the game’s “slow burner” spirit. According to Davis, any effort to make snooker fast actually pushes against what makes the game compelling. While initiatives like the Snooker Shoot-Out have their place, it is the long, multi-session matches that remain the sport’s pinnacle. “It’s a bit of a red herring,” Davis has said, “to think that you have to make snooker faster to be more entertaining. Snooker doesn’t work that way, actually it works the opposite way to a lot of sports — it doesn’t have to be fast to be entertaining… sometimes the tactics alone can create the enjoyment and the fascination”.

A quiet game, with a wild history — a working-class pursuit, with an aristocratic look — snooker is, in every sense, a game of contradictions. Its ancestor, billiards, was very much the preserve of the English and French nobility. King Louis XI owned the very first indoor billiard table; Mary Queen of Scots was an avid player, and even had a table in her prison cell. But as snooker out-muscled billiards in the early 20th century, it found new homes in the working men’s clubs of Britain’s industrial towns. And as the years went on, the nation’s billiard halls developed a particular kind of reputation — a less than salubrious one, for suspect characters and shady dealings.

Perhaps it was the location of the halls, often stuck in the rough part of town. Perhaps it was the fact they were so dark — places of shadow and secret things. Perhaps it was something about the game itself, something to do with how quiet it can be, quiet enough for mid-game talks around the tables. Whatever the truth, by the middle of the century, snooker halls had become a little bit dangerous. The Kray Twins bought the Regal Billiard Club in Mile End in 1954, and made it a base for their protection racket. It became one of Ronnie’s favourite places. “There were often evenings at the billiard hall,” wrote their biographer John Pearson, “when he’d just sit, brooding and menacing, sunk in silence”. But it was also a scene of violence. In a famous story, a rival Maltese gang turned up at the Regal and made the mistake of demanding some money. The Krays were unimpressed. Ronnie charged at them with a cutlass, and chased them out to the street.

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Snooker’s shadowy side has always coexisted with a decorous formality that remains unique in world sport. To this day — for most tournaments — players still don the black tie of the traditional English gentleman. Fashion-wise, watching a snooker match can feel like watching a face-off between a pair of Victorian aristocrats. And the audience, too, sits largely in silence — huddled intently, like the audience at a Shakespeare play. Anyone who does call out will be quickly silenced by the referee, or even removed from the arena for improper conduct: such things as noise are for other sports, not for the baize.

Part of the game’s fascination lies in this peculiar blend of wildness and restraint. It has always been a game with a dark edge — a haven of booze and drugs as much as quiet strategy, a volatile meeting-place of order and disorder. And snooker players, from the start, live a precarious life. From a very early age, the choice between completing secondary school and playing snooker is an either/or decision: there is not room for both. A poorly appreciated point arises — partly about class, partly about channels of educational opportunity. In stark contrast to games like cricket and rugby, the infrastructure is just not in place for snooker players to combine their education with the prospect of an elite level future. In order to be good enough — in order to succeed — you have to do nothing but play snooker.

And turning professional does not guarantee a good income. In the game’s lower reaches, players scrabble to earn a living. “It is either top 10 or top 20, or else don’t bother,” former World Champion Neil Robertson has said. “If you are a single guy, you can scrape by. But if you have got a family, snooker is not really a viable career choice.” The introduction of £20,000 guaranteed annual earnings, two years ago, for all players on the main tour was an effort to ease such financial pressures, at least by a little. Snooker, in short, is a tough road; brutal, poorly lit, and hard to follow. The need for young cueists to sacrifice their lives to it shows fissures in society — dramatic inequalities between the social profile of different sports, and the support structures they offer.

Snooker’s money struggles have led the game to a crossroads. In recent years, Saudi Arabia has risen as a leading tournament venue — bringing with it vast reserves of prize money. The inaugural Saudi Masters this summer — billed by the board as the game’s “4th major” — had a prize pot of £500,000 for the winner, the same sum as the World Championship itself. It looks more and more likely that the future of snooker will involve a big shift towards Saudi, and its seductive pots of cash. But it will come at a price which, for many, is too high.

As the site of the World Championship for nigh on 50 years, the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield has been the spiritual home of snooker for so long now that any move away from the city has always seemed unthinkable. “In my lifetime, however long that may be, there will be no changes,” said Barry Hearn, snooker’s longstanding supremo, in 2022. “And after me, my son Edward will be here, with a little note in his dad’s will which says ‘Crucible. We’re staying’”. But earlier this year, Hearn abruptly changed his tune. “The Crucible is past its sell-by date,” he announced in May. “What we’re saying is, for the sport to be bigger, we’re going to be judged by prize money … In all sport it does come down to money, whether we like it or not.” After almost half a century, the mood music has dramatically shifted. Hearn is jangling the keys of the kingdom — and the Crucible’s time is running short.

Hearn’s all-about-the-money philosophy has angered many fans, who remain passionately attached to the poetry of snooker’s past. Some prominent players have also gone public with their concerns. “The Crucible is very special,” claimed former World Champion Ken Doherty. “It should be sacred, and you can’t buy sacred things.” Yes, the Crucible might be fantastically small — with a capacity of less than a thousand — but the intimacy provides a claustrophobic intensity that is unrivalled. What’s more, the Crucible is something more than just a venue; it is a cauldron of history, drama, and memory, the site of snooker’s most famous moments and its foremost iconography. This is where, in 1982, a triumphant Alex Higgins cried into his baby’s arms. It is where, in 1985, Dennis Taylor held his cue aloft after beating Steve Davis on the final black. It is where, in 1997, Ronnie O’Sullivan composed the game’s most perfect frame, in the form of the fastest maximum break that the world will ever see.

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The Crucible, in other words, is a fatherland, a spirit — located not just in Sheffield, but in the heart of every snooker fan. In considering its future, something far more important than money is at stake. “It is not just fans who are doe-eyed traditionalists,” journalist Phil Haigh has written. “Some players still see the value in sport outside of cold hard cash.”

A shift to an overseas locale would also be a sea change of a different kind. The national identity of snooker has always been complicated. On the one hand, its worldwide appeal continues to grow; on the other, its infrastructure remains very much based in Britain. An unshakeable feeling lingers that the game is tangled with the texture of Britishness, a deep-set bond that it would be dangerous to break. The qualities it brings — of slow-paced, cosy, televisual comfort — correspond with a jewel cabinet of much-cherished British rituals, the sacred consolations of tea and toast, living room, snug TV, raining outside, putting-the-kettle-on everydayness.

A brave new world for international snooker — with a World Championship in Saudi Arabia, or China, or a range of locations each year — could well be a good thing. After all, the idea of a football World Cup staged in England every single time would be both outrageous and daft. The use of the Crucible every year is, quite obviously, unfair on international players, who now make up nearly half of the tour.

Maybe, though, that is not quite the whole story. Maybe, in a small theatre in Sheffield city centre, the soul of snooker really does live and breathe — a soul that, torn away from the ghosts of its past, might not be able to survive. If so, it is a soul that — for the sake of cash — we toy with at our peril.