If someone had told you at the start of the season that the first eleven major tournaments would produce ten different winners, that three players would claim their first-ever ranking titles, and that the world’s top two players would go months without lifting a trophy, you would have been sceptical at best. Yet that is precisely what the 2025/26 snooker season has delivered—arguably the most open and unpredictable campaign the sport has ever seen.
Consider the roll call of champions. Xiao Guodong defended his Wuhan Open title. Shaun Murphy won the British Open. Mark Williams, at 50 years old, captured the Xi’an Grand Prix. Jack Lisowski finally broke through at the Northern Ireland Open. Wu Yize stunned John Higgins to win the International Championship. Mark Selby claimed both the Champion of Champions and the UK Championship. Zhao Xintong won the Riyadh Season World Invitational. Alfie Burden pulled off the shock of the season at the Shoot Out. Chris Wakelin triumphed at the Scottish Open. Kyren Wilson won the Masters. And Judd Trump took the German Masters.
That is an extraordinary spread of talent. There are maiden winners, returning champions, veterans defying age, and players who have never previously troubled the latter stages of major events. The common thread? No single player has been able to sustain dominance across consecutive tournaments. Even Selby, the only player to win two of these events, did so in different formats—an invitational and a ranking event separated by several weeks.
The drama has been reflected in the closeness of the matches themselves. Three consecutive ranking finals—the Saudi Arabia Masters, Wuhan Open, and English Open—went to deciding frames, a first in the sport’s history. The Northern Ireland Open final was decided 9–8, with Lisowski edging Trump in another nail-biter. The pattern has been relentless: every tournament feels like it could produce any winner from a pool of 20 or more genuine contenders.
What makes this season so unusual is the relative absence of the traditional powerhouses from the winner’s circle at ranking events. Ronnie O’Sullivan has not won a ranking title in over two years. Judd Trump went more than 12 months without a ranking victory before his German Masters triumph. Neil Robertson, despite reaching his 1,000th career century this season, has been unable to convert deep runs into titles. The old certainties have been swept away.
Several factors help explain the shift. The standard at the top of the professional game has never been higher, with more players capable of sustained break-building and pressure play. The expansion of the tour to include more international events has broadened the talent pool. And the rise of Chinese players—with five now inside the world’s top 16—has added a formidable new competitive dimension that barely existed a decade ago.
With the Players Championship, Tour Championship, and the World Championship still to come this season, the question is whether this remarkable trend will continue all the way to the Crucible. If it does, the 2025/26 season will not just be remembered as unpredictable—it will be remembered as the season that redefined what competitive snooker looks like.
