Premier League payday is coming, believes Higgins

John Higgins believes the day when snooker stars pocket rewards comparable to Premier League footballer wages is just around the corner.

The 41-year-old Scot suspects he will just miss out during his career on such sky-high earnings, but given the global growth of the sport he feels it is heading towards being an inevitability.

As he looked ahead to the World Championship which begins today, Higgins was asked whether snooker still held the same appeal to British youngsters as it did in the past, given the dramatic growth of footballer salaries compared to the relative plateauing of money for cue stars.

“Possibly not,” Higgins said. “But I think around the world it’s getting bigger, and I think that possibly when I’m ready to retire the game could explode.

“I could be one of the players you see who are like the old footballers who maybe weren’t paid the money they deserved back in the day.

“Snooker could go that way, but every credit to them and they’ll deserve it because they’ll be the best players.”

The world champion in Sheffield this year will collect a tournament-record £375,000 top prize for their 17 days of battling, but leading footballers can earn close to that sum in a week.

Four-time Crucible champion Higgins begins his latest campaign in an optimistic frame of mind, starting his opening match on Monday against world No 18 Martin Gould, the highestranked of the players who came through the qualifying event.

Higgins’ fellow Scots Stephen Maguire and Anthony McGill go head to head today, with Maguire bidding to avoid a fifth successive first-round defeat at the World Championship.