Barry Hearn

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Barry Hearn is an English sports entrepreneur, the founder and chairman of promotions company Matchroom Sport. He first came to notice in snooker, where he was the manager of six times world champion Steve Davis, and prospered from the snooker boom of the 1980s. He moved into boxing, and has promoted leading British and Irish boxers such as Chris Eubank, Nigel Benn, Lennox Lewis, Naseem Hamed, Herbie Hide and Steve Collins. Matchroom is also involved in pool, tenpin bowling, golf, fishing, darts and poker. It specialises in creating comparatively low-grade events to fill the hours of television sport air-time created by the boom in digital sport channels.

In a separate venture, Hearn has been chairman of the football league club Leyton Orient since 1995. Prior to Hearn's takeover the club was facing a financial disaster due to the collapse of the then chairman Tony Wood's coffee business in Rwanda, Hearn's intervention and financial input assured the club's future. Although Hearn has been succesful in stabilising the club financially his tenure has overseen the club's longest run in the bottom division (known through the years as '4th Division', '3rd Division' and 'League 2') of the Football League since its creation (in 1958). However at the culmination of the 2005-06 season Leyton Orient earned promotion to the third tier of English league football (league 1) this being their first automatic promotion since 1969-70.