The winner of the last world championship was Ali Farag , who defeated Tarek Momen in four sets last year . Farag, who was world number one at the time of the tournament and would have started the tournament as the top seeded player, canceled his participation at short notice after his nephew died. In the course of the tournament, Tarek Momen and Paul Coll confirmed their placement by entering the semi-finals. Momen met Simon Rösner , who was fifth , who defeated James Willstrop in the quarterfinals . Willstrop had previously defeated Karim Abdel Gawad , who was third . Coll's opponent was Marwan Elshorbagy , number nine on the seeding list, who had won the game against his top-seeded brother Mohamed Elshorbagy in five sets in the previous round . While Momen won his game against Rösner in four sets, Coll prevailed against Elshorbagy in five sets. Coll was the first New Zealand World Cup finalist since Ross Norman in 1985 . In addition, the final game between Momen and Coll was the first non-Egyptian final encounter since 2015 . Momen secured his first world title with 11: 8, 11: 3 and 11: 4.
The field of participants in the men's competition consisted of 64 players. The best 56 players in the world rankings from October 2019 qualified automatically, the best 16 of them were seeded. Five places were from the PSA awarded through qualifying tournaments on the PSA Challenger Tour, another reigning World Champion got the juniors. If these players were already qualified via the world rankings, the starting place was given either to the defeated final opponent of the respective qualifying tournament or to the next player in the world rankings. The WSF was able to allocate up to two starting places. Per Wildcard received Syed Azlan Amjad and Hamad Al-Amri a starting place respectively. Simon Rösner and Raphael Kandra from Germany and Nicolas Müller from Switzerland took part from German-speaking countries . Aqeel Rehman was the first Austrian ever to qualify for the world championship.
At the tournament, the following prize money and world ranking points were paid out or credited for reaching the respective round. The amounts are not to be understood as cumulative. The total prize pool was $ 335,000.