The Billiards Data Sheet With Only One Field Filled

On the wall of my study in Liverpool, beside forty-seven diagrams from the match in which Manchester City beat Liverpool 5-0 on 9 September 2026, I pinned a single sheet of A4 paper. The sheet has twelve boxes. The first box contains one word: billiards. The other eleven are blank. I promised myself I would not take it down until I could fill in at least one more line that meant something.

Three years later, the sheet is still there. Not out of laziness. It is because every time I sit down at the desk, I discover that most of what the billiards world calls data is just numbers packaged to look complete.

From 2026, I sat in the VTC commentary box for seventeen years, calling nearly every final of the Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry era. There were no stat screens back then. We counted with our eyes and wrote by hand in a notebook: which ball went in, which was missed, who left a bad position for the opponent. A world final lasted two days, and I could recount every safety exchange without rewinding a tape.

Today it is different. On screen, viewers are shown pot success rate, safety success rate, average shot time. Statistical sites such as CueTracker hold tens of thousands of matches. World Snooker Tour publishes rankings built on century breaks. It feels as though billiards has entered the data age, later than football but surely.

When I open those metrics and compare them with my old notebook, I find a gap larger than the silence of the empty stands in 2026.

Pot success rate is a simple division: pots made divided by attempts. It folds an easy tap into a pocket into a thin cut from the far end of the table, placing both in the same box. A player at ninety per cent may have played twenty safeties and seventy easy pots, while a player at eighty-five per cent has just solved fifteen dead positions. The stat sheet cannot tell those two apart.

Safety success rate behaves the same way. In billiards, a safety only counts as successful if the opponent misses immediately afterwards. A player who leaves the cue ball tight to the cushion and blocks the object ball, yet watches the opponent cut it in anyway, is marked down for a failed safety. That measures outcome, not intent.

Average shot time, the metric most used to describe style, is the most misleading of all. A fast player may have read the position carefully in his head well before, while a slow one may simply be hesitating. We are measuring the cue, not the brain.

The most popular metric in billiards measures the easiest part of the game, while the hardest part goes unmeasured.

That hardest part is cue-ball control. In a frame, the decisive shot is not the final pot but the one that places the cue ball so the next shot becomes easy. The skewed diamond only appears when you stop looking at the ball. A good player does not win by striking better, but by making the next position ordinary. No graphic on television measures that.

I once tried to build a metric of my own. Across several world championship matches, I counted how often the cue ball came to rest in a zone from which the player could reach at least three different pockets on the next shot. I called it the three-pocket zone. After two sessions, I abandoned it. The problem was not the formula. The problem was that nobody else was counting with me, so the figure had nothing to be compared against. A measure with no history is only a private note.

I learned how to name a gap from another sport. In 2026, sitting in the stands in Nizhny Novgorod as Croatia beat Argentina 3-0, I measured the average distance from Luka Modric to the covering defender each time he received the ball: 13.7 metres. 13.7 metres — the ground Modric reaches before anyone else. That name did not make Modric run faster. It only made others see what they had always been watching without being able to call it by name.

Billiards lacks exactly that ritual. Nobody names the ideal cue-ball zone, the distance between cue ball and cushion when a safety is needed, or the angle at which a cut becomes impossible. No name means no argument. No argument means no data.

Pool is even emptier than snooker. The World Nineball Tour arrived with ambitions of professionalisation, with rankings and a points system. But ask for a metric that measures the quality of the break, the shot that opens the rack and decides almost the entire frame, and the answer is still silence. People count successful breaks, meaning balls potted. Nobody measures whether the break left a good layout or a dead one for the opponent.

This is where I want to pause longer than usual, because there is a temptation greater than the lack of data: the temptation to believe that more data will automatically make this sport more transparent.

I am not sure. In football, distance covered and sprints are packaged as effort metrics, but ineffective running also produces pretty numbers. A midfielder who runs twelve kilometres may simply be chasing the ball without ever touching it where it matters. Billiards is walking the same road, only a few years behind. Once sponsors start asking what a player's metrics are, we will get more handsome charts, and they will hide the hardest part of the game rather than expose it.

This gap may have several origins. The most visible one is resources: football has hundreds of data collectors every matchday, billiards does not. But there is a deeper explanation, and it troubles me more. The nature of the game resists measurement. Every shot depends on the state of the cloth, humidity, nap and a sequence of decisions that never repeats. Football has a relatively stable spatial structure to model; in billiards, every position is its own problem. There is one more possibility, the one I have least evidence for. Perhaps people do not want to measure, because a player decoded into metrics is harder to sell than a player told as legend. I place it on the table without concluding.

The pandemic of 2026 taught me a similar lesson. When Everton beat Liverpool 2-0 at Anfield in an empty-stadium derby, home advantage vanished and what remained was pure structure. I deleted a two-thousand-row spreadsheet and asked one small question. Billiards has no noisy stand to blame for form; it has only the table. And yet we still cannot measure what sits right in front of us.

In billiards academies, children are taught by eye and by hand, not by spreadsheets. That may be a strength. But when those players grow up and enter the market for professional playing rights, where places are allocated almost like contracts, the absence of data leaves the weaker side permanently on the back foot. A player with no measure to prove improvement will forever depend on someone else's recommendation. I observe this in both football and billiards: data, when missing, is not neutral. It leans toward those who already have a name.

Based on my experience following matches, I believe next season is when the real test begins. Billiards events are selling more tickets, broadcasting more hours, and pressure for a public layer of data will come from sponsors before it comes from fans. If a new metric appears on screen, it will have to answer an old question: does it measure intent or outcome?

I do not watch billiards for entertainment. I watch to decode. The eleven blank boxes on that sheet in Liverpool remind me that decoding does not begin with having many numbers, but with knowing which ones lie.

The match ends at the eleventh viewpoint. In billiards, nobody has recorded that viewpoint yet. Next season, if a new measure appears on screen, whether it is the quality of the position left behind or how often the cue ball is placed in the three-pocket zone, I will be the first to test it against my old notebook. If nothing appears, the sheet stays on the wall, and I keep counting with my eyes. Every genius leaves a gap few people can measure. My job is to measure it before someone else gives it a name.