The Luke Littler effect has supercharged darts – and the boom has only just begun

In one of the all-time great pieces of nominative determinism, the man at the epicentre of the poker boom was called Chris Moneymaker.

Moneymaker found himself in the eye of a perfect storm: it came around the time of the 1998 film Rounders, starring Matt Damon and Ed Norton, and amid the explosion of the internet which spawned poker websites and drew millions of American players. In 2003, a broadcaster was persuaded to take a punt on televising the biggest event in poker, the World Series.

They struck gold with Moneymaker, an accountant from Georgia who became the world champion, beating 852 opponents and turning his $40 buy-in into the $2.5m winners’ prize. He was an ordinary American Joe and his story had an inspirational effect. People who’d never picked up a deck of cards before suddenly wanted to be the next Moneymaker.

Two decades on, there is something of Moneymaker in the Luke Littler story. Like Moneymaker, Littler doesn’t necessarily look like the archetypal sporting superstar, and there is something relatable in that. Moneymaker was an ordinary accountant, and Littler is an ordinary teenager who likes computer games and junk food. Against the backdrop of his humanity, his godly talent is all the more mesmerising to watch.

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And right now Littler is having a similar effect on the game of darts as poker once felt. January’s World Championship final drew 4.8 million viewers, Sky Sports’ highest ever non-football audience. The Premier League Darts season enjoyed its best ever figures since its inception in 2005, and Thursday night’s astonishing final played out in front of 14,000 fans at a sold-out O2 Arena, a UK record for the sport’s organisers. Littler threw a breathtaking nine-dart finish en route to beating world No 1 Luke Humphries and sealing the biggest triumph of his career so far.

Not everyone is enamoured by the Littler story. Several lower-ranked players have complained that his popularity is buying passes to events he hasn’t yet earnt the right to enter, although that talk might quieten down after this Premier League victory.

As 2023 world champion Michael Smith said last week: “The people at 70, 80, 90 [in the rankings], all they should think about is that their money is going to keep going up and up and up. The more this kid is playing, we get better sponsors … My money is just going to keep going up because some kid is doing it for me. I’m not annoyed and the other players shouldn’t be either. The kid is doing nothing wrong.”

Littler channelled the negativity into producing some of his best darts yet, saying as he held the trophy on Thursday night: “For all the doubters, hello? I’ve just picked up this. You’re not doubting me any more.”

It is this side of Littler that has taken some people aback. Littler’s talent is extremely rare, but that it’s coupled with a natural bravado and a sense of showmanship is marketing gold. It is not necessarily the highest ranked eight players who receive invites to the Premier League but the eight most interesting to put on television, and Littler is No 1 there.

There were moments during this Premier League season when he toyed with his opponent, with the board, with the entire arena just for the fun of it. Like the time he needed 120 in Sheffield, and instead of the orthodox treble 20, single 20, double 20, he attempted three double 20s and didn’t only find the bed with all three but put them on a pinprick, so that they fanned out like one dart had been perfectly spliced in three. Littler grinned and his opponent, Peter Wright, was so dumbfounded he spilt his drink.

Or when he finished off a leg in Belfast with an outrageous 125, throwing bull, outer bull, bull. His rival Nathan Aspinall laughed, and a few minutes later Littler won his first night of the season.

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Or Thursday’s nine-darter, which had grown men standing and staring in disbelief in the crowd, while others leapt into the arms of total strangers. This is the Littler effect, to take the viewer to a place of utter disbelief, one they will talk about for years to come. No one inside the O2 will ever forget the rising noise that accompanied those final three darts.

The crowd was typically raucous. Hours before the first dart was thrown, the bars and restaurants around the arena’s perimeter were teeming with mostly young men in their 20s bowling up in fancy dress – mostly bananas, for some reason. Darts’ demographics are tilting dramatically younger, and the challenge for the PDC is to get children tasting this sort of event when it is currently something of an adult piss-up. There is certainly the interest, with kids clubs popping up all over the UK and applications overflowing.

The sport is blooming and Littler is only just getting started. And perhaps the only thing that can kill this momentum is a sense of apathy setting in as he wins year after year after year. As his opponent Humphries said after defeat: “It might get to the point in 10 years where everyone wants him to lose, like Phil Taylor, because he just wins everything.”