More than 3,000 people are on their feet, singing a song about what a fantastic time they’re having.
“Stand up, if you love the darts,” they chime in unison, raising their pints into the air, which carries an unmistakeable whiff of alcohol fumes and dank sweat. There is a World Championship match taking place yards away, but half this crowd are not even facing the action.
A booming voice yells the words ‘One-hundred-and-eighty’ into a microphone and the whole place loses its collective mind; arms up, beer spilling, open-mouthed grins. It doesn’t matter one iota which player just registered that score. What does matter is that good darts are happening.
They carry on singing. They are dressed as bananas, turkeys, dart boards, Batman, Mario and Luigi, a tin of baked beans, Jesus, Homer and Marge Simpson, a gingerbread man and a bottle of ketchup.
They sing about players walking in a winter wonderland, former Premier League footballers Yaya and Kolo Toure and about not wanting to go home.
This is the best atmosphere in sport. This is undiluted carnage. This is the PDC (Professional Darts Corporation) World Darts Championship.
Wearing costumes to the PDC World Darts Championship has become a Christmas tradition in the UK (Kieran Cleeves/ PDC)
“The world is a s**t place, and yet you can have a night at the darts and forget everything,” PDC president Barry Hearn says in the immaculately-titled recent documentary about the sport, Game of Throws. “You’re with your mates, you’re having a little bit of a liquid refreshment… and most importantly you’re going to leave with a smile on your face.”
This has been true of top-level darts for many years, but now more and more people are embracing the beautiful madness.
Tickets for the entirety of this year’s 16-day tournament (all 90,000 of them) sold out in 15 minutes. Between three and nine million watch the best throwing-based clips on the PDC’s YouTube channel, while the event’s main broadcaster Sky Sports (a subscription service) has seen record viewing figures broken in the last year.
Singer Ed Sheeran turned up to watch this week. A Premier League and England footballer (James Maddison of Tottenham Hotspur), a former champion heavyweight boxer (Derek Chisora) and David Beckham’s son, Romeo, attended last year’s final. Prince Harry was there a few years ago. Even Shaquille O’Neal’s curiosity was piqued.
Prince Harry in the crowd at the 2014 PDC world championship (Charlie Crowhurst/Getty Images)
Why has darts become so popular? Or, perhaps a more pertinent question if you’re a newcomer to the sport is: ‘Literally what is darts?’
OK. So, basically, players stand 7ft 9in (234cm) from a numbered circular board 18in (45.7cm) across and throw little tungsten darts at it. Both players start on 501 and take turns having three throws, with the scores their three darts earn being subtracted each time from that initial 501. The first to get down to zero wins the individual game, known as a leg.
The board is numbered from one to 20, but if you hit a thin inner ring which runs around the board it offers treble that number (so the highest score on the board is a treble 20, and the highest achievable with three throws is 180). The outer ring offers double the number and to win a leg you must finish with a double (if you’ve scored loads of points and are left with 38, you need to hit double 19 to win).
In the very centre of the board, a small red ring is worth 50 points (the bullseye, which is the only non-double you can finish a leg with) and a slightly larger green ring around that is worth 25. To win a match in the World Championship format, the first to three legs takes a set and matches are the first to three sets in the early rounds, but first to seven in the final.
Simple, right? It actually really is, and that’s one of darts’ charms.
Eventual runner-up Luke Littler competing at the 2024 PDC world championship (Taylor Lanning/PDC)
The sport is played professionally all year round but the piece de resistance is this world championship, which is played at Alexandra Palace (known to all as Ally Pally), an exhibition and performance venue situated on a hill in north London that overlooks the rest of the city. It’s a pilgrimage to get up there.
Every world championship tournament has been held in the UK since 1978 and players from the UK and Ireland dominate the field, comprising 41 of the 96 competitors to reach Ally Pally, but darts is also more global than ever, with entrants this year from the Bahamas, New Zealand and Hong Kong.
Like tennis getting its annual UK popularity bump in June and July when Wimbledon comes around, or snooker seeing the limelight in April and May for its world championship, so darts is absolutely massive during the festive season, with the tournament traditionally straddling the period from late December to the early knockings of the new year, attracting holiday-based drunkenness in person (yes, alcohol is an essential ingredient in the darts-watching formula) and an increasing number of turkey-heavy, Christmas-weary watchers on sofas at home.
Joe Clark Smith, lead producer for darts coverage in Sky Sports’ multi-sport department, has worked on it since 2022 and says it is the “jewel in the crown” of the broadcaster’s non-mainstream sports (the ones that aren’t football, Formula 1 and cricket).
Fans attending this year’s PDC world championship dressed as Sesame Street characters (Taylor Lanning/ PDC)
“The ‘Worlds’ is the biggest Christmas party,” he tells The Athletic.
“You can turn up, have fun, dress silly and see some elite sportspeople play this sport. It’s just got this appeal; because even if you don’t quite understand the scoring, the graphics tell you what they’re going for, our commentators tell you what they’re going for, the referees tell you what they’ve scored and the drama just builds and builds when you know they’ve got one dart at a double.
“That drama translates across any language. It’s such an easy sport to watch and to fall into.
“And it’s not like anything else. These guys aren’t like NBA, 6ft 8in, ripped athletes, they’re normal people. A lot of them still have other jobs and that is just completely different to any other professional sport you see.”
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The sport needs storylines and likeable personalities to generate popularity, but arguably the biggest personality in darts is the crowd.
They sing, they scream, they cheer, they boo, they dress up as religious saviours and condiments, all fuelled by cheap lager and unbridled enthusiasm for throwing and points.
The alcohol is important (as Hearn said recently, Saudi Arabia “can’t have the darts” unless they serve alcohol at tournaments) and helps generate arguably the best atmosphere in British sport today. You can argue that football is louder or more evocative, but darts is purer.
Fans have their preferred players and reflect that with their support, but there’s no tribalism here. People just love good darts.
They will go barmy for 180s, barmy for big checkouts (getting to zero from a substantial score with your last three darts… 170 being the highest possible) and barmy whenever darts’ theme Chase the Sun is played.
There has been no better example — and may never be a better example — of all of the above, as well as the skill, the drama and the raw, uninhibited mayhem this sport can provide than this leg of darts between Michael van Gerwen and Michael Smith two years ago, with both players chasing the holy grail of a perfect nine-dart leg.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved,” Hearn adds on Game of Throws. “We create heroes — and players that come from the same working-class areas that I came from can achieve their dreams and change their lives… which is the essence of what sport is about.”
So big is the darts now (and yes, you have to say ‘the darts’ in the comforting English manner of ‘the pub’ or ‘the telly’) that Sky Sports’ advertising campaign for its festive schedule, which is always exclusively dominated by live Premier League football, has been rebranded this year as ‘Football Dartsmas’, telling viewers to combine the two for all their sport-watching needs this Christmas.
And yesterday, the broadcasters’ schedules were aligned to allow the showpiece darts match of the evening at around 9pm, featuring teenager wunderkind Luke ‘The Nuke’ Littler, to sit in between Arsenal’s Premier League match at Crystal Palace (5.30pm-7.30pm GMT) and the Oleksandr Usyk-Tyson Fury world heavyweight title fight (around 10pm GMT).
As he unforgivingly pounds the soft red bed of treble-20 with the velocity and precision of a turbocharged sewing machine, Littler has the Ally Pally audience on strings.
Treble-20, treble-20, treble-20. He is entering Boss mode, going nuclear. Treble-20, treble-20, treble-20… he has a smile and a swagger now and the crowd are baying, begging and hollering for perfection. Six darts down, three to go. Littler’s opponent ruefully smiles in admiration as he takes his turn; beaten, helpless, a sideshow and ignored, like Showaddywaddy warming up for Taylor Swift.
The fans roar encouragement as Littler perches for greatness…. treble-20 — YESSSSS. Treble-19 — YESSSSSS. And then a millimetre from double-12 – OHHHH. Everywhere you look, heads are in hands, people are genuinely pained. Littler shows with his finger and thumb how close the nine-darter was.
He wins 3-1 after producing godlike darts in the final set, registering a three-dart world championship record set average of 140.91 and winning consecutive legs with 11 darts, then 10, then 11. Phenomenal numbers. Seeing Littler at work, peppering the treble-20 bed, is like watching Michelangelo’s David being sculpted.
Then, after the match, he is asked a question on stage about his performance and he starts to cry. He can’t finish the interview and leaves the stage to give his mother a hug. Yes, darts players tend to just be pretty normal people.
Littler is a 17-year-old lad from Warrington, near Manchester in the north-west of England, and a darts obsessive who also eats kebabs, loves football and has facial hair ZZ Top would be proud of.
Teenage phenomenon Littler is arguably one of the most recognisable sportsmen in the UK (James Fearn/Getty Images)
Littler burst onto the scene at age 16 in last year’s PDC world championship, getting to the final, and is the figurehead of a new era of relentlessly metronomic darts players who, as they have to, practice a lot and keep standards incredibly high. The old image of top darts players drinking and smoking and being overweight is almost gone. Yes, there are still a lot of big lads in the sport, but last year’s PDC champion Luke Humphries partly credited his success to losing four stone (25kg).
It’s also — and this probably belies the alcohol-induced madness in the crowd — one of the more inclusive sports you’ll come across. The fake machismo and unnecessary aggression you see at almost every football match in the UK is largely kept to a minimum.
“I’ve actually found it the most welcoming sport,” Emma Paton, Sky Sports’ lead darts presenter, tells The Athletic. “I’m lucky to work with some brilliant women; our reporters Abi (Davies) and Polly (James), Laura Turner, who’s one of the best commentators out there, let alone one of the best female commentators.
“Darts has the same trajectory as a lot of women’s sports; it’s on the up. Fallon Sherrock broke through and grabbed people’s attention and there are some brilliant youngsters, like Beau Greaves.
“And the sport is so unique in that it’s an open sport, one of the very few you’ll see that, if you’re good enough, you’ll make it to Alexandra Palace and compete alongside the men.”
A man dressed as a ketchup bottle at the 2024 PDC world championship (Kieran Cleeves/ PDC)
In 2019, Sherrock made history by becoming the first woman to win a match at a world championship. She then won another to reach the last 32. The high pitch of the rabid celebrations in the crowd when she did so tells a story of Sherrock’s popularity.
She and Littler are part of a cast of eclectic characters; three-time world champion and Dutch maestro Van Gerwen, flying Scotsman Gary Anderson, “Bully Boy” Michael Smith, Peter Wright with his ever-changing hair colours. Throw in multi-coloured shirts, daft nicknames and lavish walk-on ceremonies and you have yourself entertainment as well as sport.
They are aggressive, vanilla, emotive, fast, slow, all the while being judged in their rearview mirror for their personality and their throwing. As Oliver Reed would say; ‘Win the crowd, Maximus Luke.”
With events sold out throughout the year and TV viewing figures for some tournaments up almost 200 per cent, darts is a growing sport in the UK.
“Even in 2022, it felt like darts was on an upward trajectory and tickets would sell out very quickly,” Clark Smith adds. “Then we had the Littler phenomenon that exploded the interest. Since his run last year, every event has been sold out from way earlier than it normally is… big arenas, all sold out. It’s been brilliant.
“But what’s great about darts is I don’t think people are only tuning in to watch Littler or Van Gerwen or Fallon Sherrock. Almost not having the big superstar household names is part of the attraction and charm. You can flick it on and whoever’s throwing darts, there’ll be drama.”
Some of these players are stinking rich, for sure — the PDC’s eventual world champion next month will receive £500,000 ($628,300 at current conversion rates) — but they are mostly a humble, relatable bunch who play, react and speak honestly and without a media sheen.
Presenter Paton, now on her fifth PDC world championship, adds: “Darts, this year especially, is really taking off. For a long time, for a lot of us inside darts, it felt like we were shouting about it to everyone else. Now people want to really talk to you about darts.
“It lends itself to stories. A great sporting story emerged from nowhere last year with Luke. The year before, there was the greatest leg ever between Van Gerwen and Smith (see above). There’s always something.
“I don’t think there is a crowd or atmosphere like it in any other sport. Everyone is here to have a good time, 90 per cent of them are dressed up. They follow their favourite players in a way, but a lot of people might turn up and not really know who they’re going to see that night.
“How many sports can you say that about?”
(Top image: PA Images/Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
