Ronnie O'Sullivan is eyeing up becoming the best player in ANOTHER sport when he retires from snooker... and the switch could see him net £600,000 in prize money from one event

Ronnie O'Sullivan is widely considered to be the greatest snooker player of all time.

'The Rocket' has won 41 ranking titles, including eight UK Championships and earlier this year he won his record-breaking eighth Masters title in May. 

He is currently fifth in the world rankings and later this year he will defend his UK Championship title.

At the moment, O'Sullivan is in China attempting to defend his Shanghai Masters crown for a fifth straight year. On Thursday morning the 48-year-old will face either his rival Ali Carter or Ding Junhui in the quarter-final.

But for 'The Rocket' a new sport with rising popularity in China might just become his next challenge. 

The sport O'Sullivan is considering flipping over to is the hugely popular Chinese 8-ball pool.  

O'Sullivan has previously spoken of his interest in moving across to a new cue game. 

When asked in Shanghai where he stood on things now, he acknowledged he was still strongly considering a shift to pool.

‘Any cue sport fascinates me, so I’m looking at how popular Chinese 8-Ball is in China now. It’s huge, it’s massive,’ he told Shanghai outlet Let’s Meet.  

At the UK Championship last season, O'Sullivan made a similar claim, saying that the only reason he'd stuck with snooker for so long was to keep his sponsors happy. 

‘I’m trying to see if there’s an appetite for me to go over and play pool at some point,’ O’Sullivan said last November.

‘I can’t keep playing snooker against the young guys, getting up for it, match-in-match-out, I don’t want to be playing just for the sake of it.

‘I want to keep playing for the next 10-15 years, earning a living, having a good time. China’s a place I like to go, obviously it’s a very popular sport out there. But I’ll just have to see what my sponsors are like because at the moment they’re sponsoring me as a snooker player, but I’m trying to see if they’ll sponsor me as a pool player.

'To me it’s about keeping my sponsors happy, it doesn’t matter if I play pool snooker, billiards, whatever. I just want to have a nice life. 

'They pay my bills, pay my salary, so obviously I’ve got to keep them sweet and if they want me to keep playing snooker then I’ll have to keep playing. If they’re cool with me to play pool I’ll definitely entertain that.

‘I’d have to get used to the game, but it wouldn’t take me long.’

Fellow Brit Mark Williams has already made the jump over from snooker to Chinese 8-ball pool. 

Williams played in the Joy Cup World Heyball Masters Grand Finals this year, where the top prize of $700,000 (£557,900) dwarfs the £500,000 on offer at the snooker World Championship at the Crucible.

Small wonder then that perhaps snooker's greatest ever player is considering the shift to the small table. 

O'Sullivan has come under fire in Shanghai. But not for considering a move away from the snooker table. 

The newest tour card recipient Antoni Kowalski, who previously described 'The Rocket' as 'arrogant', once again criticised O'Sullivan. 

'I don’t like Ronnie for his character, just because sometimes he lacks the respect. That’s it. I don’t have anything against Ronnie, just to be clear,' Kowalski said of the seven time world champion. 

'He’s the greatest ever to play snooker, of course. But talking about numpties a couple of years back – I would never do that and I don’t see any other player doing that.

'That’s just it. Apart from that, I don’t have anything against him. If it’s possible, I will tell him straight to his face and we can become friends.'