World Snooker Limited is the commercial entity responsible for the promotion of professional snooker events and is the custodian of the sport’s commercial rights. The World Snooker Tour is experiencing an exciting period of innovation and strategic growth. The Tour has developed a diverse calendar of over 20 international events and nurtured a vast and committed audience of over 500 million viewers worldwide.
As World Snooker Tour look to increase global engagement between the sport and their loyal audience, whilst opening the sport up to new fans, they signed off two key appointments. A Chief Commercial Officer to set overall commercial strategy and a Chief Marketing & Communications Director.
The roles had significant focus on creating and delivering a strategy that maximises ticket sales, global customer engagement, growing audiences and international reach. This required strategic thinkers, who had ideally worked internationally, and could evidence developing, managing and executing integrated commercial, marketing and communications strategies.
Our research team conducted a targeted search of the global sports market, initially focussing on individuals who had been through rapid scale up / growth of leagues and tournaments. We also accessed our global influencer network to ensure we didn’t miss any ‘passive talent’ who might be too busy doing a great job in their current role to have seen either of these opportunities.
Following a robust screening and assessment process, we presented World Snooker with a shortlist of candidates that included professionals from a range of sports who could all evidence big picture strategic thinking and a genuine track record of delivery.
In February 2023, World Snooker Tour were able to announce the appointment of two experienced strategic thinkers who both, by coincidence, had held senior leadership roles in significant English Premier League football clubs. In something of a coup for the Tour, they are now benefitting from many of the positive learnings from football, applied in a sensible manner to the very different world of snooker.
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