Luke Littler doesn’t remember when he first threw a dart at a dartboard, but there’s a video of him doing so at 18 months old. The year was 2008, in Cheshire, England, where Littler was born. His father drove a taxi and his mother worked in a candle shop, and like many families in the area, they watched professional darts on TV at home. The pastime had grown over the decades from a working-class hobby to a national fixation, and by the 2000s, the prize money for winning the Professional Darts Corporation’s World Darts Championship, the biggest tournament in the sport, was over 100,000 pounds. (It might as well have been deposited directly into the pocket of Phil Taylor, who won the event 14 times between 1995 and 2013.) For families like the Littlers, darts’ popularity meant new dreams. Your child didn’t need to be the next Beckham — he could be the next Taylor.
In that home video from 2008, you can sense a nascent promise. Littler, wearing a diaper and a baseball hat too big for his head, lifts his right arm and flings a dart at a magnetic board. For all his toddler awkwardness, the movement is instinctive, even graceful, his fingers pointing downward for a moment before they quickly grasp another dart from his left hand. When he finishes his third throw, he holds his final pose for a second, his torso twisting slightly, as Taylor’s often did, and then turns toward the camera, an open-mouthed smile plastered on his face.
“Luke was in his nappies, and he was throwing like a professional,” Polly James told me on a recent spring night in Newcastle. James covers darts for Sky Sports, England’s largest sports-television network, and she was sitting backstage at the Utilita Arena watching a broadcast of the event there. It was the eighth night of the Premier League, a six-month-long competition run for the world’s best darts players, and the arena, which seats 11,000 people, was sold out. Many were there just to see Littler. “He’s all anyone wants to hear about,” James said.
After making the finals of the 2023-24 world championship as a 16-year-old, Littler completed the most successful rookie season in darts history, winning 11 titles, including the Premier League and the 2024-25 World Darts Championship, and earning more than a million pounds in prize money. Now 18, he is widely considered to be the best darts player in the world: He is already ranked No. 2, after just a year and a half of professional play. (Darts rankings are based on tournament winnings over a two-year period.) Starting tomorrow, he will compete against 15 other top pros at the U.S. Darts Masters in Madison Square Garden.
In a sport that has been historically dominated by middle-aged men with paunches, his talent seems to both fascinate and disorient fans. Many, like James, bring up the 2008 video as an attempt to account for what can otherwise seem like a magical ability. “It just seems so effortless,” one fan told me in Newcastle. “He just gets up there and does it.”
Littler was facing the sixth-ranked player in the world, Stephen Bunting, in the first match of the night. Fans walked around balancing pints of beer, breaking spontaneously into chants. It has become a tradition, encouraged by the Professional Darts Corporation, for fans to dress in costume for big events, and on this occasion they came as Minions, inflatable flamingos, bananas, shrimp, Ninja Turtles and Borats. P.D.C. players compete exclusively in a game called 501, which is the number of points you have to score exactly before your opponent does, in alternating “visits,” or rounds, of three dart throws. As Littler warmed up, noise swirling around the arena, it was hard to overlook how much he still resembled the 18-month-old in the video: his body composed, his arm flashing to his side after a throw, his eye turning automatically toward the camera.
At the front of the stadium floor, near the stage, a cluster of teenagers and children wearing darts jerseys looked out of place in the rowdy atmosphere. It was a scene you didn’t see a year and a half ago. Across Britain, the allure of Littler’s success has inspired youngsters to join darts clubs in the hopes of following in his footsteps — what many people are calling the “Luke Littler effect.” Within the crowd were a father and son, the former dressed in a skintight Robin suit and the latter like Batman. The father told me that tickets to the event were the boy’s Christmas present. “If it wasn’t for Littler, no one would be here,” he said, gesturing at the children around him. “This was known as an old-man social club.”
A man in front of us turned and nodded. “He joined the darts league last year because of Littler,” he said, putting a hand on his son’s shoulder. “There’s now a waiting list of 50 or 60 for that league.”
Littler’s first six darts were perfectly placed, the crowd roaring in approval, and he swept Bunting in less than 11 minutes. “It’s like he can do it when he fancies,” Wayne Mardle, a darts commentator said, a note of awe creeping into his voice. “Obviously you can’t, because it’s not that simple. But it’s like he can.”
The first father adjusted his tights. “He’s like Messi,” he said. “But Messi was then, Littler is now.”
I met Littler in early April, a week after the Newcastle event. He was in Berlin for the next Premier League competition, and we spoke in the back of the Uber Arena, which was sold out. Onstage, Littler is confident, often needling spectators when they root against him, but in person he comes off as the teenager of stereotype. It was a designated media day for the P.D.C., and Littler had hours of back-to-back interviews with German television channels and international outlets. When he entered the room — bare white walls, fluorescently lit — he looked around and, not seeing any cameras, shrugged and pulled out a nicotine vape. “Why not,” he said, sucking at it.
Littler’s first foray into competitive darts was in 2016, at the St. Helens Youth Darts Academy, when he was 9. Karl Holden, one of the academy’s leaders, recalls the first time Littler’s father brought him in: “We knew he was a different animal altogether,” he told me. Littler began playing darts “nonstop,” as he put it, at least four times a week. At 10, he was entering under-21 tournaments, and then local pub tournaments, where he would beat 40- and 50-year-old men. In 2021, at 14, he left the academy and traveled around the country to play in a national league for teenagers run by the Junior Darts Corporation. When he was 15, he won the J.D.C.’s world championship; he turned professional the year after that. “He is the best player I’ve seen in my entire life,” said Neil Devlin, a St. Helens resident who six years ago lost in a tournament to Littler, then 12.
It is difficult to say what makes Littler so good. As an activity, darts is distinctively static. Dartboards are like pies that have been cut into 20 equal slices, each labeled with a number between 1 and 20, indicating the points to be earned. A thin outer ring, a few millimeters wide, circles the edge; its segments double the points for each slice. An even smaller inner ring through the midpoint of each slice triples the points. (The most valuable part of the board is the “treble 20,” which is about the size of a small Band-Aid, so the most points you can score in a visit is 180.) The bull’s-eye is worth 50, and the ring around it 25. All this is standardized, as is the distance players stand from the board: just over 7 feet 9 inches.
Every player’s throwing motion is different, but the best ones are controlled and repeatable. Some players line the barrels of their darts between their eyes, tap their forefingers on the stems, twitch their mouths. They make hundreds of thousands of throws in a year. And when they struggle to hit their desired spot, you observe a disappointment that’s less like that of someone who fails a difficult task and more like that of someone whose car fails to start on a cold morning; it’s the realization that something you believed to be dependable actually isn’t.
Littler almost never appears to encounter this issue. He seems to sustain a faith, despite contrary evidence, that his every dart will go where he wants it to go. He experiments with his throw in the middle of competitions and goes for flashy, risky combinations in high-pressure moments. At a tournament in 2023, with the match on the line, Littler began shooting for the bull’s-eye (at a half-inch in diameter, the smallest region of the board) and squeezed in four darts over two consecutive visits to begin a successful comeback. He will often try to hit shots that his opponents have just missed, even when it disadvantages him. Stephen Bunting told me that Littler usually sits in the back room on his phone before a match, then throws casually at a board for 20 minutes while his opponent warms up for three hours. “He’s a bit of an alien, isn’t he,” Bunting said. “He does everything that you’re taught not to do as a player.”
In Berlin, when I asked Littler to describe what sets him apart from other darts players, he didn’t offer much clarity. Mostly he spoke in platitudes about a “winning mentality,” which seemed to consist of telling himself to “just hit it.” I couldn’t blame him. There’s something about top athletic performance that resists articulation. What made Michael Jordan such a great basketball player or Roger Federer such a great tennis player? Beyond the obvious answers — speed, power, dedication to the craft and so on — it’s easy to drift into hand-waving. People talk about “feel” and “elegance,” “intuition” and “clutch-factor,” about being “born with a ball in your hands.” But these descriptions tell you more about what it’s like to watch someone perform than what it’s like to actually perform, which, in the end, is what we really want to know. And those who know best, the people who are able to do what so fascinates us, are stuck trying to communicate their distinct subjective experiences to others who haven’t experienced anything like it. Asking Littler to describe his darts playing is a bit like asking Mark Rothko to describe how he sees red. He just does.
Maybe it is, in part, the inexplicability — or art, if you will — of Littler’s play that has made him so popular. He has become one of the most recognizable names in Britain, benefiting from the growth of the P.D.C. over the last two decades at the same time as he is now stoking it. According to the Britain-based bookmaker bet365, darts wagers doubled between 2022 and 2024, reaching a level similar to that for tennis and cricket, and the purse for winning the world championship has grown to one million pounds. Since 2020, viewership on Sky Sports for the world championship has tripled, and in January the network retained streaming rights to P.D.C. events in a deal that was reported to be 125 million pounds over five years. The sport has expanded globally, with events around Europe and Australia. The U.S. Darts Masters is expecting record attendance at Madison Square Garden this weekend.
Littler does not look like someone you would think to build a sport around. One YouTube comment in 2023 described him as “the oldest looking 16-year-old in the world.” But in the 2023-24 world championships, nearly five million people watched him lose to Luke Humphries, the top-ranked player in the world, in the finals on Sky Sports, more than doubling the number of viewers of any previous darts event. Immediately afterward, Humphries told me, he started being recognized on the street, something that had only happened a few times before.
Karl Holden told me that, after Littler’s 2023-24 world-championship performance, he began seeing lines stretch out the door of his shop, which could only hold a few dozen people at a time. One of the most popular items? A Luke Littler dartboard. Business increased threefold, with more than a thousand customers coming in on weekends, and Holden decided to change locations as a result. He also began fielding more requests for admission to his academy, which had about 70 members in 2023 but has grown to over 100 since then, with 200 people on the waiting list. “I’ve probably said there was about 100 to 150 kids playing darts at academies three years ago, four years ago,” he said. “That figure now must be near the thousands.”
In March, I attended a tournament in Coventry, England, for the J.D.C. Foundation Tour, an open competition for players between the ages of 10 and 17. More than 200 people showed up (including one who traveled from Mongolia), and Sean Casey-Poole, then the J.D.C.’s director of operations, had to cut off registration for the first time ever — the building would have been over capacity. “I always say to the new kids that come: ‘Believe it or not, Luke Littler used to play here,’” Casey-Poole said. “And they go, ‘Whoa, Luke Littler used to play here — that’s crazy!’” Nearly all the players I spoke with told me that they had taken up darts within the past year or two and that they were hoping to play professionally.
The day after we met, Littler faced Chris Dobey, the current world No. 7, in the first round of the night. The Berlin stadium was packed, and the crowd of 12,000 roared for Littler as he climbed the stairs to the stage. Earlier, when I asked him whether he feels pressure under the scrutiny of so many, he shook his head. “It’s like, when you’re just good at something, you just kind of want to keep doing it, right?” he said. “Sometimes you can obviously be up for it, but some days come around and you’re like, ‘I can’t be bothered doing this.’ But you’ve still got to get up onstage, you’ve got to play.” This comment seemed prescient as the match started. Littler immediately began missing throws that he would normally make. The crowd quieted, then, after Littler finished a particularly bad visit, started to jeer him. Littler swiped at the air facetiously.
It was hard to reconcile this image of a slightly impatient teenager with the figure who had become the face of darts. But Littler’s appeal lies in that tension. It’s the combination of his commonplace facade and his touched-by-God talent: He’s both highly gifted and completely ordinary, both mythological and relatable.
Littler continued to miss, smiling and shaking his head after each throw. He started throwing the darts faster, barely waiting to see where one landed before throwing another. As the loss appeared inevitable, he shrugged. He knew that as far as the Premier League standings were concerned, one match would prove inconsequential. (He would go on to finish as the runner-up to Humphries in late May, with total winnings of 185,000 pounds.) Outside it was warm, the sky blue, the chants from the crowd faint. Somewhere a child was throwing darts at a board with Littler’s name on the side. Lose or win, he was still the guy everyone was hoping to be.
Oliver Whang is a writer based in Brooklyn. He started writing for The Times in 2020.
The post An 18-Year-Old Prodigy May Be Darts’ First Global Superstar appeared first on New York Times.
