The snooker bosses have started this year with a massive bang. World Snooker is no more. It is ceased to be. World Snooker has joined the choir invisible and gone to meet its make. That is a late brand. World Snooker is bereft of life and rests in peace. Now that they spent money on revamping, the name and logo are pushing up the daisies. It is ex-World Snooker.
I couldn’t help myself. But yes, it is WST now.
The Birth of World Snooker Tour
World Snooker is transformed into World Snooker Tour (WST). The logo itself has changed into something more vibrant and ambitious. When I saw it, I really loved it. It also introduced short 10-second snippets of its transformation. The timing isn’t an accident either. The announcement at the start of 2020 tells me that the time when the sport had just six events last decade is behind them. This is the new tour that is ready to take on the world by storm! Initially, I thought WST’s video was something you could see out of Formula 1. But it does support to invoke enthusiasm and excitement!
They have also published a 30-minute video too. Colin Murray talks about how snooker was invented and goes through the iconic moments and players, such as the 1985 black ball finish, the emergence of Ding Junhui and Steve Davis winning everything. Then snooker was at its lowest ebb and Barry Hearn came in to save the sport. And made it massive.
The video doesn’t shout out about how great Barry is. It talks a lot about how global and well-connected the game is and more importantly, it will get bigger. To reinforce that, the video has snippets from other players from a plethora of nationalities: Simon Lichtenberg (Germany), Hossein Vafaei (Iran), Adam Stefanów (Poland) and Thepchaiya Un-Nooh (Thailand). Below is the video and I would certainly recommend it. There are a lot of stats on snooker’s international outreach using televisions and social networking.
So what do we think of the World Snooker Tour (WST) logo? On it’s own, I do like it! It is new, modern and it looks very pretty!
Is the branding too generic and similar?
But is it so perfect that it doesn’t deserve criticism? Well, no. It goes back to my point where I mentioned that a snooker snippet sounds like something out of Formula 1. I can imagine the logo itself, as awesome as it looks, on a video game cover of Need For Speed. This isn’t the first logo to involve a man playing a sport either. So here’s the logo of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) Tour. Is snooker becoming similar to other sports?
Then we talk about the word ‘tour’ – the ATP has a world tour. World Snooker Tour has no current events in Australasia, Africa or any of the Americas. Snooker is not quite there just yet!
So WST’s logo is revamped, as is the YouTube channel and Twitter. All excellent news. The World Snooker Tour website is okay, but considering the ambition the video and the logo seems to convey, ‘okay’ is not good enough. The number of times I have to accept cookies on that website is insane. The live scores can be improved. I would love to see more Q&A interviews on the website from lesser-known players so that we, the consumers, feel closer to the action. There are lots to do.
Finishing Touch
I’m excited about the logo. But I hope snooker as WST stays humble. There’s are good conversation I had with James and Snooker Bunny about the World Snooker Tour revamp. Enjoy!
