An 18-year-old prodigy is setting the darts world alight. Where are all his US rivals?
Sport insiders and Northeastern experts look at the hurdles darts hopefuls have to overcome to turn professional in America.
LONDON — The crowd, dressed as Power Rangers, Minions and other assortments of characters, climb to their feet and start to roar.
Luke “The Nuke” Littler steps up on the stage in front of them. Thud on cork. The dart misses. There’s a collective “ooooh.” A second thud and the small metal-tipped arrow nestles inside the top green area of the number 16, signalling a double. The audience, clad foot-to-toe in fancy dress, erupts into joyous chants.
With that final throw on Jan. 3, the 17-year-old became the youngest world champion in darts history and pocketed $1.3 million in the process. On Dec. 11, the Englishman, now 18, will begin his bid to retain the title at the World Darts Championship at Alexandra Palace in London.
Among the 127 players looking to topple him in the competition, run by the Professional Darts Corporation, or PDC, are just three Americans. The Netherlands have quadruple that number, while six from Germany have qualified.
In a country where the sport is estimated to be played by 17 million people, why is there a dearth of professional dart players in the United States? Dan Lebowitz, executive director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, said one reason is the lack of a progression “pipeline”.
“It is basically a bar game [in the U.S.],” said Lebowitz. “It is considered as a leisure activity, more so than a sport. And for anybody that gets really serious about the sport, there’s not the structures that there are in England to be able to develop those skills at a level where they can compete in the PDC and do well.”
Lebowitz contrasts it to American football, where there is a feeder program of high school and college teams taking the most talented all the way through to the NFL. “You have to create a pipeline of success in sport, and there is no pipeline in the United States for darts,” he added.
It is a theory that Danny Lauby, the highest-ranked American darts player, can vouch for. He relocated from Indiana to the United Kingdom three years ago, leaving behind his young son, now 6, to advance his career. Lauby, the only American in the PDC’s top 100, said he had little choice.
“If you want to really do the big time and do the PDC and really take that seriously, you’re either traveling back and forth or you have to make a move,” Lauby told Northeastern Global News. “That means you’ve got to put everything else on hold that’s not darts.”
Lauby, 32, clearly remembers the “culture shock” when he visited England as a teen for the first time to compete in the Youth World Masters. There were shops dedicated to darts, the game was frequently on television and the standard among his peers far surpassed what he had experienced back home.
In Britain, players have been known to throw their first dart while still in diapers. Littler started when he was 18 months old, after his father bought him a magnetic board.
Littler learned his trade at a darts academy in St Helens, a town in northwest England. It is one of 190 academies that form the Junior Darts Corporation, which arranges tournaments across the British Isles.
A similar academy structure is required in the U.S., Lauby argued, if the country is to send more players to the world finals. “I think hopefully, with the right people, that would really boost it and you’d have more U.S representation,” he said.
Karl Remick, vice president of the American Darters Association, said his organization is on the same page as Lauby. The darters association wants to develop regional centers across the U.S. where young people can be introduced to the sport, trained and readied for competitions.
Remick said darts has been growing in popularity in the U.S., particularly online, where fast internet speeds and electronic boards mean players can face each other almost in real time. The lack of physical activity involved means people can play well into later life.
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“Darts has now surpassed bowling and pool over here in the states because of the internet connectivity,” the 45-year-old told NGN. “There are more darts players than baseball players in America, if you can believe that.”
The issue, Remick said, is providing a platform where people can compete at a high level. Remick’s association aims to do that with its annual National Championship. The next one is due to take place in July in Louisiana, where as many as 700 people are expected to slug it out for a prize of up to $70,000.
Another hurdle darts faces in the U.S., according to Lauby, is that it is “still, at its core, a pub game”. That means it is mostly played in settings that serve alcohol and so can be restricted to people aged 21 or older. It worked the other way round in Britain, where the pub setting is what turned darts into a major sport, said Lars Kjaer, a sociologist and historian at Northeastern in London.
Public drinking houses began introducing games, such as darts, after World World I as “competition for the working-class man’s pound” increased with the growth of cinema, explained the associate professor.
Darts proved popular with bar owners as it was “cost-efficient” and could be set up even in confined spaces. “It requires skill and it is a shared thing you can do with others, but it fits within this urban context where space is at a premium,” Kjaer added.
Darts in the 20th century became associated with socializing and drinking alcohol, Kjaer said. In a country like the U.S., with its Puritan origins, a sport with that image has not managed to translate easily.
In Britain today, there are bars dedicated to darts, and the 2024 World Darts Championship final was watched by 4.8 million viewers. Almost 100,000 people turn up annually to watch the finals and enjoy its party-like atmosphere.
For Lauby, the US Darts Masters 2025, where eight of the top PDC stars took on the best U.S. players, gave him hope that the American game may be catching up. The event at Madison Square Garden rivaled anything Europe has to offer, he recalled.
“I’ve played at the worlds, I’ve played the World Cup, I’ve played on big stages — and that compared, big time,” he said. “It was packed, it had an amazing atmosphere. So the culture is there and that’s great, that’s a step forward.”
His hope is that the current generation of fans will pass on that enthusiasm and inspire the next to take its prospects seriously.
“It is going to be those people that are going to have to introduce darts to their kids, and hopefully in the next five or so, you are going to see a lot more youth players coming up from here,” Lauby said.
