Clowns to the left of me, strapping jockeys to the right, here I am, back at Alexandra Palace once more. The PDC World Darts Championship has become the Wimbledon of the English winter, the hedonistic alter ego to the collared repression of tennis’s stainless showpiece, strawberries and cream replaced by lukewarm lager, sundresses by Super Mario.
Both events capitalise on the twin poles of English entertainment - dressing up and prosaic drinking - but if Wimbledon is where graduate consultants and estate agents and accountants cosplay at being millionaires, Ally Pally is where they co-opt what was once a blue collar sport, now flattened beyond recognition, classless and ageless. Four years ago the crowd sang abusive songs about Boris Johnson”, and on Friday Keir Starmer received a similar treatment.
Having received his MBE last week, 2024 world champion Luke Humphries reckons Prince William would “probably love to come to be fair, if it wasn’t so much of the protocols that he’d have to face”, while PDC president Barry Hearn has been clear he would expect royals to pay. Darts is nothing if not egalitarian, still the sport’s quintessence and sustaining force. If you like beer, you’ll like it here.
Set play remains an unimpeachably entertaining format, as 50-year-old Swede Andreas “Dirty” Harrysson proves in beating the 12th-seed Ross Smith 3-2 on his World Championship debut, despite Smith missing six match darts. Claudia Winkleman should be delighted to know she is 2026’s costume du jour, covens of fringed Winklemen wallowing in simmering anger at the realisation they were not the only people inspired by the decade’s most popular British TV series. Originality has never been the Ally Pally crowd’s forte, the majority still dress as traffic cones, jockeys, bananas, Ali G, or inexplicably, pints.
But the idea that nothing here ever changes, that the PDC have landed on a formula they have little need to tinker with, masks a sport in rapid transition. This is the first year the winner will earn £1m, a sum which will eventually reshape darts, inviting further professionalism and ever-more talent from a wider pool, raising the level and altering an already-shifting demographic.
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For 20 years, the age of leading players did not move – the eight qualifiers for the 1996 PDC Worlds were 39-years-old on average, as were the 32 seeds in both 2006 and 2016. But by 2026 (when the final will take place) that number has dropped to 36, an all-time low certain to keep falling. This year’s top 32 also features four players aged 25 or under, a new high, and the four favourites are all 30 or under for the first time. The oldest major winner in 2025 was 36-year-old Michael van Gerwen, and even that was something of a shock. A generation gap is emerging which will only widen.
15-year-old Mitchell Lawrie was the beaten finalist in the WDF World Championship last week, averaging over 90 throughout the tournament, and there are more where he and Littler came from, the first generation of players to not need a job outside of darts to support their early careers. Littler has earned more than £2m in prize money from the PDC without tallying sponsorship deals with Xbox, KP Nuts and BoohooMan, and a steady supply of matches around Europe.
Friday night’s headliner is Gian van Veen, a 23-year-old Dutchman with an aviation engineering degree, the two-time PDC World Youth champion who won his first major in October, beating then-world No 1 Luke Humphries to claim the European Championship. Most markets consider him third favourite for this year’s Worlds, the only player with the form and scoring power to potentially disrupt Littler and Humphries.
This is also the first year of an expanded format – 128 players, up from 96 – a decision led by wanting to sell more tickets but vindicated over the first few days, not only through performances like Harrysson and Cristo Reyes’s, but also in uncloaking the depth and breadth of darting talent outside the 128 Tour card-holders. One of Harrysson, French world No 61 Thibault Tricole and Japan’s Motomu Sakai, winner of this year’s PDC Asian Tour, will reach the last 32, worth at least £35,000.
But as much as the Worlds could be accused of gradually descending into a stereotype of themselves, this is still an ornate house of magic. The floor shakes after every set as fans dance to a riff they have heard a thousand times. Some players have learned how to weaponise the People’s Palace’s unique force, most obviously Ricky Evans, a World Championship cult hero.
On Friday, Evans walked out to Shakin’ Stevens in a shirt featuring an AI depiction of him as Santa Claus, wearing a mitre-cum-Christmas tree and trousers adorned with snowflakes. After beating Hong Kong’s Man Lok Leung, Evans told Sky Sports “Christmas is rubbish” and “gravy is the devil”, before holding court, largely unintelligibly, for almost 20 minutes in his press conference. He later blamed a particularly strong “mid-match pint of gravy” on Facebook.
From White’s middling marathon over fellow veteran Mervyn King to Harrysson and Smith’s instant classic, Friday’s eight-match billing was a glorious reminder why darts remains a perfect sport for 2025; easily comprehensible and consumable, endlessly dramatic and attention-demanding, a sponsored mirror to the full gamut of humanity and being.
Prince William probably would love it. Everyone else does.
Photograph by Adam Davy/PA Wire