The Data Void in Billiards: Why a 150-Year-Old Sport Still Has No Map of Its Own

In the VTC commentary booth, winter 2026, a producer slid an A4 sheet towards me. It held exactly seven lines: the names of two players, the frame scores, and one column marked "highest break". The final had run almost five hours. I turned to him and asked: "Where are the safety-play numbers?" He looked at me as though I had just asked for a map of Mars. "Nobody counts that," he said. "Viewers only care who scores more."

Twenty-five years later, I sit in Liverpool, open a Premier League data file and count tens of millions of logged data points across ninety minutes. At the same moment, a world-class snooker final still offers the public a handful of metrics countable on one hand: pot success rate, long-pot success, century breaks, average shot time. That A4 sheet is still there, merely printed by nicer software.

The distance between those two worlds is not a technology gap. It is a gap in assumptions. Football assumes everything on the pitch can be and should be measured. Billiards assumes only the final outcome of each shot is worth recording. The second assumption held for a century and a half. It began to fail the moment broadcast rights revenue grew faster than the number of people who truly understood the rules.

Context: a sport measured by what it does not own

Professional snooker has a fairly clear governance frame. The World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA) was founded in 2026 as the governing body, while the World Snooker Tour is the commercial arm running the circuit. Three events form the Triple Crown: the World Championship, the UK Championship and the Masters. The World Championship has been staged at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield since 2026 and has never left. The prize fund in recent years has stood at roughly 2.4 million pounds, with the champion taking 500,000 pounds.

That is a solid ecosystem. But organisational solidity is not data solidity.

Compare it with football. From around 2026, Premier League clubs began building their own analysis departments, hiring data scientists, signing deals with tracking-system providers. Every player is logged at thousands of coordinate points per match. From that came derived metrics such as PPDA (passes allowed per defensive action), expected goals, field tilt, progressive passes. An entire content industry feeds on these numbers: podcasts, heat maps, social media arguments.

Billiards has no equivalent. Not because billiards is simpler. Because billiards has never had to prove its value through data.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry dominated snooker, British audiences watched on terrestrial television with two channels. Pay TV arrived later, and when it did, it bought broadcast rights rather than data-exploitation rights. A 2026 final that ended on the final black ball late at night drew more than eighteen million viewers in Britain, becoming one of the most-watched sporting events in the country's television history. That was the peak of a sport loved through emotion, not spreadsheets.

And that very emotion became the trap.

When a sport succeeds without data, it does not build data infrastructure. When audiences are satisfied with knowing who won, nobody pays to know why they won. Snooker entered the 21st century with a data store astonishingly thin relative to its global standing.

This is not merely an academic matter. It directly affects how the sport is understood, sold and protected.

Core: the existing data map, and the blank regions nobody has drawn

What billiards currently measures

The official statistics systems of professional snooker events currently give the public a fairly stable set of metrics. Pot success rate is the share of successful pots out of total attempts. Long-pot success isolates shots from distance. Safety success measures how often a safety shot leaves an unfavourable position for the opponent. Century breaks count runs of one hundred points or more in a single visit. Average shot time measures tempo. Highest break records the match record.

These metrics share one trait: all are outcome metrics, measured at the moment a shot ends. They answer "what happened", not "why it happened".

What billiards does not measure

This is the part that has cost me many sleepless nights. In a snooker frame, each player plays dozens of shots. After each one, the cue ball comes to rest at a specific coordinate on the table. That coordinate determines whether the next shot is viable, whether the player must attack or switch to safety, and the entire structure of what remains of the frame. No public statistics system records that coordinate.

Place two players side by side who both achieve a 92 per cent pot success rate at a tournament. One leaves the cue ball in an open position after every pot, always with a next attacking line available. The other pots successfully but repeatedly leaves the cue ball frozen to a cushion or hidden behind another ball, forcing a switch to safety. On the stats sheet they are identical. On the table they are playing two different sports.

Billiards measures the outcome of a shot but not the price of the position it leaves behind — and it is precisely that blank region that decides who wins.

Football analytics calls a similar blank region a question of spatial control. It solves it by mapping ball and player positions second by second. Billiards could do the same at far lower cost, because only four balls move on a fixed plane of standard dimensions. Nobody does it, because nobody pays for it.

Three metrics that should exist

From years of watching professional snooker and pool, I believe the sport needs at least three new metrics, and all three can be computed from data that already exists if anyone bothered to collect it.

The first is table control. It measures the share of time in a frame during which the cue ball sits in the half of the table favourable to the player at the cue. An approximation: divide the table into zones by distance to cushions and to remaining object balls, then record the zone where the cue ball settles after each shot. A player with good table control will show a high open-zone rate. This is snooker's version of field tilt.

The second is safety-exchange depth. In snooker, safety play often unfolds as a sequence: two players push back and forth, each trying to leave the cue ball in a punishing position. The longer the sequence, the tenser the frame. This metric measures the average number of shots in a safety exchange, and the rate at which a player breaks the exchange with a successful attacking shot. A player with high exchange depth and a good break rate is the one controlling the rhythm of the match.

The third is a decider-pressure index. It measures a player's performance in frames with a level score or in the final frame of a match. The calculation: pot success under pressure minus overall match pot success. A large negative gap means the player declines when it tightens. A positive gap means the opposite. Basketball has had this for years as clutch performance; cricket has it as death-overs performance.

These three metrics do not replace the century-break count. They add what the century-break count can never say: who is truly steering the match.

Lessons from football and basketball

In 2026, hosting "The Digital Tactics Board" for an online sports channel, I analysed the 1-1 draw between Liverpool and Manchester City. I used tracking data to show Liverpool had recovered the ball nine times in the opponent's final third, well above the league average. To explain why that pressing worked, I compared it with the Cleveland Cavaliers' zone defence in basketball: the principles of splitting zones, cutting passing lanes, forcing opponents into dead corners.

A former male international mocked me on social media: "What does a woman know about pressing?" I did not take the video down. I posted it alongside a heat map and data screenshots. The video reached 1.2 million views within forty-eight hours.

The lesson lay elsewhere, not in the view count. It lay in the fact that cross-sport comparison generates arguments that single-sport stat sheets cannot. When you place a football press beside a basketball zone defence, you force viewers to think about principles rather than clubs.

Three years later, when the pandemic halted every competition, I built the talk series "Tactics in Isolation" on a video-conferencing platform. Fifteen analysts from six sports, twelve episodes, 2.3 million total views. Episode four compared cricket's powerplay with high pressing in football. It drew considerable criticism. New followers rose noticeably.

The pandemic did not kill football; it exposed the tactical skeleton.

With snooker, the equivalent comparison sits ready-made. Cricket's powerplay is the first thirty overs, when rules restrict the number of boundary fielders. In snooker, the equivalent phase is the first three reds of each frame, when the colours are still intact and the table structure unbroken. That is when a player must decide whether to attack or build. Both are phases where rules and initial structure create a narrow window of opportunity, and whoever seizes the rhythm there usually seizes the session.

Likewise, snooker's safety exchanges can be compared to the closing minutes of a basketball quarter, when each team must run clock or commit tactical fouls. That is the phase where outcome data becomes least meaningful and most decisive at once.

Names, identity and the cost of mispronunciation

In 2026, commentating the World Cup quarter-final between France and Uruguay, I was the only female expert in the live analysis room. I explained that the opening goal came from a free kick, where the Uruguayan wall jumped early relative to motion data and exposed a gap at the near corner. But in the first half I mispronounced defender José Giménez's name three times. Viewers complained; the broadcaster's management reprimanded me.

I apologised publicly and spent a full month reviewing every Uruguay tape to memorise precisely how each player's name is pronounced. From that came a special series, "Respecting Identity in Sport".

Before you pick a team, read what people call them.

In billiards this problem is far more serious than in football. World snooker has a large generation of Chinese players, and Western media pronounce their names wrongly in repeating patterns. Names such as Ding Junhui, Zhao Xintong and Yan Bingtao have been mangled across hundreds of broadcasts. Vietnamese players arriving on the international stage face the same treatment: Trần Quyết Chiến and Bảo Phương Vinh are routinely announced in versions that do not resemble their actual names.

Mispronouncing a name is not merely a technical error. It signals that the commentator has never spent time with the subject they are talking about. And in a sport whose data is already thin, mispronouncing a name is the one form of information loss we can fix immediately.

A connection few want to name

When a sport has little public data, its capacity to detect anomalies falls with it. This is, to my mind, the most serious consequence of the data void, and it is barely discussed in debates about snooker's future.

The match-fixing scandal involving a group of Chinese players, exposed from 2026 and leading to heavy suspensions in 2026, is one example. I am not claiming that denser data would have prevented it. I am claiming that in a system where every anomaly must be found by manually rewatching footage, detection speed falls behind offence speed.

A sport with a shot-level data model automatically builds a shield. Shots that are probabilistically abnormal rise off the chart. Safety exchanges that run impossibly long become signals. Matches whose pressure indices deviate from multi-year statistical models flag themselves.

A lack of public data does not only impoverish analysis; it also blurs the ability to detect what is abnormal.

And here is the point that touches directly on how we handle blank space. An empty data file does not mean nothing happened. It means nobody recorded it. The difference between those two statements is the entire foundation of professional ethics in sports journalism.

Vietnam as an unlikely laboratory

While snooker wrestles with its own data store, Vietnamese carom billiards sits in a strange and interesting position.

Three-cushion has a broad playing community across Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, alongside players who have reached the world podium such as Trần Quyết Chiến and Bảo Phương Vinh. Three-cushion World Cups have been staged in Ho Chi Minh City, drawing large audiences both in the arena and on streaming platforms.

What is notable is that carom's data structure is even thinner than snooker's. But Vietnam has two advantages Sheffield does not.

First, most Vietnamese billiards audiences reach matches through their phones. That means a data layer designed for a small screen will be welcomed naturally, without persuasion.

Second, a small market is an advantage when building infrastructure. A system collecting ball coordinates across a few dozen competition tables costs far less than equipping twenty football clubs with motion-tracking systems.

People sell shirts, but what they are really selling is the return of a name. With Vietnamese billiards, what is being sold is a name that has never been fully written onto the world's data map.

The counter-intuitive angle: more data is not the answer

At this point I must argue against myself.

The appeal of the claim "billiards needs data like football" lies in how reasonable it sounds. But it rests on a false assumption: that football's data model is universal. It is not universal. It was designed for a sport with twenty-two players moving simultaneously across a large plane, where spatial control is decisive. Billiards is a game of one person at a time, on a small plane, where what is controlled is sequence rather than space.

If we graft football's model onto billiards, we will produce the worst outcome: a mountain of numbers that helps nobody understand more, yet is thick enough to create a false sense of science.

A bigger risk is distortion of the sport itself. Snooker has long had a toxic metric: the century-break count. It is toxic because it rewards speed and perfection, while the essence of snooker lies in the capacity to endure deadlock. A great frame is not one with three century breaks. A great frame is one where two players force each other into increasingly difficult choices until one makes the smallest mistake.

Measuring by century breaks is like judging a football match only by goals. It is right about the outcome and wrong about the essence.

What billiards needs is not more data. What billiards needs is a different kind of data. Data about position rather than score. Data about choice rather than outcome. Data about the price paid for each decision rather than the reward received after it.

And there is a subtler trap still. When a sport has no data, people easily default to assuming there is nothing to report. A quiet tournament is read as a clean tournament. A match without anomalous statistics is read as a normal match. That reading is logically wrong: no data means unknown, not unproblematic.

The denser the data file, the more the story must be told by a human ear, not a machine eye. And conversely, the thinner the data file, the more clearly the storyteller must state what they do not know.

Looking ahead

A major event does not end when the whistle sounds; it begins when the lights go out. For billiards, the lights went out long ago, and in that darkness people are still arguing about shots already played, using numbers that are not enough to retell them.

The next decade of billiards will not be decided by who pots better. It will be decided by who draws the first real map of the table — and where. If that map is drawn in Sheffield, the sport will keep its current shape for another generation. If it is drawn somewhere like Ho Chi Minh City, where young audiences reach matches through phone screens and carry no preconception about how a sport must be measured, people may one day look back on this period as the moment billiards learned to describe itself.

The question I leave readers with is not whether billiards needs data. The question is this: in a sport where every secret lies in where the cue ball comes to rest, why do we still only count the balls that have already dropped?