One of the most iconic venues in world sport, the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England is the home of the World Snooker Championship.
Used as a traditional theatre for the majority of the year, the Crucible is best known for and synonymous with snooker’s blue-riband professional event.
Every year since it was first held there in 1977, a champion has been crowned in South Yorkshire, including 2020 and 2021 when the event was played either behind closed doors or with limited capacities due to the coronavirus pandemic.
WATCH: World Snooker Championship live on DAZN in the United States
How did the Crucible Theatre come to host the World Snooker Championship?
The World Professional Snooker Championship was first won in 1927, but the event struggled to find consistency, with the final taking place at several different venues across the UK and beyond, with places in South Africa and Australia even taking turns to stage it.
Coinciding with the rising popularity of the sport and a boom in terrestrial television coverage in the 1970s, then World Snooker Championship promoter Mike Watterson was looking for a permanent home for the event that ticked all the boxes.
Purely by chance, Watterson’s wife Carole had been to the Crucible Theatre to watch a performance and was…
