Snooker: O'Sullivan wants 'dictator' to lead snooker revolution

O'Sullivan believes snooker needs one person in control - who can invest - as they do in Formula One. He said: "Snooker needs a dictator, a Bernie Ecclestone. Someone to say 'look, you are getting that, you are playing to these rules, you can do this and do that and you will all get loads of money, it will be fun and it will be exciting'.

"But snooker hasn't got that. Snooker has got people saying 'you don't want to do this' or 'you don't want to upset that'."

O'Sullivan believes pool in America has such a forward-thinking figure in Kevin Trudeau, the media mogul behind the International Pool Tour. O'Sullivan is one of 150 players from around the world, who will be chasing a $1m (£.57m) prize pot next year.

He said: "He wants to make pool like the Superbowl and I couldn't help but get excited about it. I spoke to a tour director who said they wanted to make pool exciting.

"He said they had noticed in sports that don't go anywhere from top to bottom everyone gets a fair cut and in the sports that are successful the top ones get all the dough and the ones who aren't making it get nothing. And I thought 'there is a different mentality from snooker to pool'. Snooker wants to keep 128 players all happy and they want the top players to carry dead meat. In America, if you are a loser and can't cut it you get out of it. Whether that is right or not I don't know, but it makes sense."

O'Sullivan insisted the snooker establishment had been guilty of under-achieving for a decade, despite having big-name players to rival any of the previous greats. He said: "In the last 10 years they haven't made a success of taking the game on to where it could be. Look at darts - darts is starting to overtake snooker."

World Snooker chairman Sir Rodney Walker has revealed new sponsorship deals are imminent and a sport that suddenly lost £3m when tobacco sponsorship was banned made a £1m profit last year.