It’s not an Olympic sport, but put darts away as a café game? Nonsense. With millions of TV viewers, increased sponsor budgets, a global field of participants and tournaments from New York to the Middle East, darts is more than ever a hit.
It still looks like a pub bursting at the seams, there in London’s Alexandra Palace, the arena of the world darts championship. Each session, 3,200 frenzied fans scream their beer-laced throats hoarse. People who dress up as a smurf, nun or Zeeland farmer in wooden shoes are considered perfectly normal. But make no mistake: the sport is more than ever big business.
A new sponsor – gambling company William Hill has been replaced by car salesman Cazoo – provides the most popular darts association PDC with just under 17 million euros in prize money this year. At the World Cup, 2.8 million of these are already flying out the door. The world champion receives a check for 564,000 euros. That is as much as the winner of the snooker World Cup, although very popular in Asia for years, and even more than half a million that the winner of the Tour de France receives after cycling more than three thousand kilometers. The 58,000 euros that Remco Evenepoel received from the international and the Belgian cycling federation after his rainbow jersey suddenly seems like nothing.
Over the past two years, Belgian number one Dimitri Van den Bergh collected 391,000 euros in prize money according to the PDC ranking. The Dutch topper Michael van Gerwen is already worth 10 million.
Only football more popular
It is only logical that the best darts players earn a lot of money. It is thanks to them that the PDC manages to sell the World Cup broadcasting rights in 130 countries. In England, darts is the second most watched sport at the end of the year after football. In England, the Netherlands and Germany alone, the final will attract 4 to 5 million viewers.
“We are selling big drama,” said PDC boss Barry Hearn. “You see the greatest talents, you see the best misses, you see great bursts of joy and you see tears of sorrow.” In summary: darts consists of a lot of emotion, tension and sensation, interspersed with commercial breaks.
“In our country, the hype started when VTM jumped on the bandwagon in 2020,” says Alexander Algoet, who organizes the tournament in Wieze in East Flanders on behalf of Golazo. “The hype has started with those live broadcasts in corona times, in combination with the impressive performances of Dimitri Van den Bergh. It is not an explosion but a steady growth and they would rather see that at PDC Europe. With a Belgian, a Dutchman, a German and an Englishman in the semi-finals of the World Cup, I think globalization will continue to increase.”
At VTM they notice the growing popularity. “In the first year that the World Cup darts was shown on VTM 2, the average market share in the group of 18 to 54-year-olds was 9.2 percent. Last year that was already 11.4 percent and this year it rose to 15.1 percent,” says spokeswoman Sylvia De Doncker. “Each edition had a peak of over 400,000 viewers, especially when the Belgians played.”
Henry VIII and his wine barrel
Darts originated in the late Middle Ages in England, when King Henry VIII’s archers made their arrows smaller for their training. This way they could also throw it at a circle on the bottom of a wine barrel. The king himself was crazy about it and received his own dartboard from his fiancée Anna Boleyn.
The modern dartboard with the numbers comes from an English carpenter at the end of the nineteenth century. In British pubs, darts turned out to be an ideal pastime to fully train the arm muscles: tense the biceps by hoisting pints and the triceps by throwing darts at a block. In the 1970s, darts grew into a TV sport on the BBC, but in a folkloric way. The participants in a smoky room were themselves local café stars who, year after year, dressed themselves in a somewhat bigger shirt. In the 1990s snooker promoter Barry Hearn took matters into his own hands, made a deal with media magnate Rupert Murdoch and professionalized darts as a sport.
To Bahrain
The aim of the PDC is now to globalize the sport completely. Next week, Van den Bergh, Peter Wright and other players will board the plane to throw in the oil state of Bahrain. With tournaments in Australia and certainly in New York’s Madison Square Garden, more money is yet to come. Between 5 and 7 May, the circus will stop for the second time in the Oktoberhallen in Wieze.
“The first edition was already a great success last year,” says organizer Algoet. “We had 18,000 visitors spread over three days and we were very happy with that. Unbelievable, but now everything is sold out half a year in advance. Sponsorship is also gaining momentum. We see men, women, young and old in the audience. It is accessible, with a ticket of 40 to 50 euros you can follow an hour-long session.”
Besides viewing figures, prize money and sponsors, there is something else that indicates that darts is on the rise: entrepreneurs. “I’ve never thrown an arrow at such a board in my life,” says Kurt Derauw of Darts Travel, “but I saw the potential two years ago. I organize fan trips to England, now also for the World Cup. The atmosphere in ‘Ally Pally’ is great. I take my clients for 399 euros: transport, hotel and ticket included. But on the black market today they pay up to 800 euros for an entrance ticket to the final.”