Every sport awaits the emergence of the next up-and-coming star. It has been seen recently with Sam Prendergast taking a starring role in Ireland’s Six Nations campaign and the much-touted young footballer Mason Melia being bound for Premier League club Tottenham next season.
Snooker is no different, and Ireland could have a future star on its hands in the form of the 18-year-old Leone Crowley, as the young Cork prodigy continues to impress. His trajectory as an amateur has been remarkable, culminating with a recent title win at the 2025 WSF Junior Championship in Morocco.
Crowley makes history at the World Junior Championship
Crowley’s progress was highlighted recently when he won the 2025 World Snooker Federation World Junior Championship. This was by far the most significant achievement of his young snooker career.
Crowley went up against England’s Kaylan Patel in the final of the world’s biggest amateur snooker tournament. The Irishman showed no sign of nerves as he powered his way to a 5-0 victory in the match, becoming the first player from the Emerald Isle to land the prize.
How Crowley did it
Winning the World Junior Championship is no easy task against the pick of the world’s top young players. The tournament action for Crowley started in the group stage, where he faced four opponents in a round-robin format.
He started the tournament with a 3-1 win over Germany’s Christian Richter. This sparked a run of fine form, as Crowley also won his other three pool stage matches, dropping just one further frame in total along the way.
The knockout stages
In the round of 16, Crowley squared up to Scotland’s Ayaan Iqbal and made light work of his opponent in a 4-0 win, making it his third consecutive match where he had not conceded a frame.
The quarter-finals would prove to be Crowley’s biggest challenge at the tournament, as he faced Poland’s Michał Szubarczyk. After Crowley had found himself 3-2 down, he pulled things level at 3-3 to send the match to a decider. Ultimately, he managed to squeeze through to the semi-final, where he met up with Iqbal again.
Again, Crowley had no problem dealing with the young Scot. He always looked just out of reach in what was a long competitive match that lasted almost four hours. Despite the match ending 4-1 in Crowley’s favour, it was a much closer affair than their round-of-16 clash.
The final
The result put Crowley through to the final against Patel, who had been bidding to become just the second Englishman to win the coveted trophy. Crowley powered ahead to a 4-0 lead at the interval (without racking up a half-century break) as his opponent struggled to find his best form. Crowley sealed the deal with a 73-24 result in what proved to be the decisive fifth frame.
Following in Crafty Ken’s footsteps
There is some correlation between Crowley’s progress and that of Ireland’s only snooker world champion, Ken Doherty. In 1989, Doherty won the World Amateur Championship, the year before he turned professional. He was also a World Under-21 Amateur Champion.
So, Leone Crowley has the chance to follow in Crafty Ken’s footsteps. Doherty’s World Championship title happened in 1997 when he produced an underdog success against Scotland’s Stephen Hendry, who had been on a 29-match winning streak at the Crucible before that final.
Doherty swept Hendry aside in the contest with a comprehensive 18-12 victory, but it has been a very long wait since that historic moment for Ireland to see another world champion crowned. Could Leone Crowley become that man?
Tour card earned
Crowley’s victory at this prestigious amateur event was undoubtedly significant, but the win also earned him a much-coveted two-year World Snooker tour card, which has opened up tremendous new opportunities for him.
Crowley will start during the 2025-26 snooker season this year, joining the professional ranks of the game and competing for places on the big stages such as the British Open, Shanghai Masters and Tour Championship.
He’ll also get to rub shoulders with legends such as John Higgins, Ronnie O’Sullivan, Mark Williams and current world number one Judd Trump. Crowley is said to admire Trump, citing the Englishman as someone who he would like to go up against in the future.
Where it all started – Crowley’s career background
Crowley’s win at the World Junior Championship was the result of 10 years of hard work. He has already dedicated a tremendous amount to the sport, and this dedication could well pay off further down the line in the form of major snooker titles.
No one, of course, is expecting him to make huge splashes during what will be his debut professional season on the tour. There is a lot to learn about the experiences of playing in front of bigger crowds, of being in the spotlight as a professional player, and, of course, the steep learning curve of facing a higher quality of opposition.
A quick bio
Crowley was born in 2006 in Ballyvolane, Cork. One of his regular training haunts is a camp run by Northern Ireland professional Mark Allen in Belfast. This has been a valuable experience for Crowley because it has exposed him to experienced practice partners with high levels of ability. Crowley has also worked with Anthony O’Connor, a former professional snooker player.
There is also a bit of family history in this story, as Leone’s father John ran snooker clubs in Cork. This will probably have been nothing more than an insignificant side note during Crowley’s youth, but just that small factor of having access to a table is likely a massive cornerstone in the career that the youngster has built for himself.
Rising through the ranks
Crowley has had something of a meteoric rise through the ranks of snooker as a junior player. He has never found championship titles hard to come by, and this started back in 2017 when he got his hands on the Under-12 Irish Championship. Following that, he went on to record multiple Irish national championship wins at different age levels.
Leone Crowley’s national titles
- Under-12 Championship (2017)
- Under-16 Championship (2021, 2022)
- Under-18 Championship (2021, 2022)
- Under-21 Championship (2022, 2023)
In 2022, Crowley was a losing EBSA European Under-18 finalist in Albania. However, just two years later, he did win a notable title. Crowley really solidified his potential as one of the rising stars of the sport when he took the Under-21 UK Open Championship in the summer of 2024, which saw him build on his Under-21 Irish titles from the previous two years.
Televised appearance
Crowley has made a television appearance before. In December 2023, he participated in the Snooker Shoot Out in Swansea. This unique ranking tournament consists of matches of just a single frame. This rapid-fire event is far removed from the long battles of attrition that traditional snooker is known for.
Crowley was in the mix, though his journey ended at the first hurdle when he lost 9-64 to Welshman Jackson Page. This remains Crowley’s only appearance in a ranking snooker event, but there’s now the opportunity for plenty more down the line.
What’s to come for Crowley?
The tour card that Crowley earned through his WSF Junior World Championship title is massive. It’s a springboard to so many bigger things, and it is something that all amateurs dream of achieving. However, only a select few ever make the grade and get to pocket one.
Where is this going to take him? Far outside the Emerald Isle as the World Snooker Tour season is long. Crowley will hit the tour when the new season begins in June 2025 and will face competitive, gruelling challenges all across the world until the season’s conclusion next summer with the 2026 World Championship.
World Snooker Tour ranking events
- Championship League
- Xi’an Grand Prix
- Saudi Arabia Masters
- English Open
- British Open
- Wuhan Open
- Northern Ireland Open
- International Championship
- UK Championship
- Shoot Out
- Scottish Open
- German Masters
- Welsh Open
- World Open
- World Grand Prix
- Players Championship
- Tour Championship
- World Championship
2025 World Championship qualifiers
That WSF Junior World Championship title wasn’t just about the tour card though. It also came with the prize of entering the qualification process for the 2025 World Championship. The qualifiers will take place in mid-April and there will be 128 players taking part. Of those, just 16 will reach the main draw.
There are four rounds of qualifiers that Crowley would have to work his way through to get to the Crucible later this year. The final round of that qualification process for the biggest snooker tournament in the world is called ‘Judgement Day’, and matches from it are broadcast.
Draw set for Crowley
The draw for the 2025 World Snooker Championship qualifiers has already been made, and in the first round Crowley will face Thailand’s Manasawin Phetmalaikul, who is ranked 113th in the world.
Should he progress through that, he would then meet England’s Robbie Williams, who is ranked 51st in the world. In the third round of qualifying, Crowley would then go up against China’s Fan Zhengyi, who is ranked 46th in the world.
From the other side of the bracket in his section of the qualifying draw, the highest-ranked player that Crowley could meet on ‘Judgement Day’ would be Stuart Bingham, who is currently ranked 19th in the world.
Prediction for the World Snooker Championship
Kyren Wilson is the reigning World Champion after defeating Jak Jones in last year’s final. This was Wilson’s second appearance in the final of the World Snooker Championship after he was heavily defeated 18-8 by Ronnie O’Sullivan in the 2020 showcase match.
Wilson is among the front-runners in the 2025 World Snooker Championship markets at around 7.5 odds, leaving only Judd Trump, O’Sullivan and Mark Selby at shorter prices than him. Selby, incidentally, was the last player to successfully defend the title, winning it back-to-back in 2016 and 2017.
At the head of the market is 2019 winner and current world number one Judd Trump, who is around a 4.5 quote at Tonybet to take the title. Trump has won two ranking tournaments this season (plus the non-ranking Shanghai Masters), but Wilson is well out ahead of him, having racked up five ranking titles (he was also the former player of the season).
The two recently met in the final of the Players Championship, with Wilson beating Trump to the punch in a deciding frame. It wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see both of them knocking around the semi-final stage at the very least.
What about the Rocket?
Whenever the World Snooker Championship rolls around, there’s usually only one name on the lips of most people, and that’s Ronnie O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan has been tied with Stephen Hendry’s record of seven World Championship wins since landing that 2022 title against Wilson.
Another win would see him earmarked as the great of the modern-day greats, and eight titles would put him level with Fred Davis and John Pulman, but still a long way behind the legendary Joe Davis’s record of 15.
Multiple-time World Snooker Championship winners
- Joe Davis 15
- Fred Davis 8
- John Pulman 8
- Stephen Hendry 7
- Ronnie O’Sullivan 7
- Ray Reardon 6
- Steve Davis 6
Tonybet has a full listing of the latest odds for the 2025 World Snooker Championship, which begins on Saturday 19th April and concludes on Monday 5th May. You can check out the odds for the tournament outright winner and the pre-match odds on all individual games, and you will also be able to catch the latest live betting markets throughout the 2025 World Snooker Championship draw.
Follow the Snooker championship matches on Tonybet!
