Is Darts the second biggest sport?

So we all know that football, and more specifically, the Premier League is England’s number one sport. In the 2020/21 season an average of 27 million people watched Premier League coverage at some point, that’s a whopping 40% of the UK’s population.

The Premier League is high stakes, high octane, billion pound, high quality football that’s played almost constantly. In a world where people demand quality and constant action another sport has risen to the mainstream.

With the well documented decline of cricket and the slow decline of Rugby Union, in the midst of the receding popularity of the UK’s traditional sports, darts, out of nowhere and nearly unthinkable 25 years ago, has shot itself into the spotlight.  

Cast your mind back to 1999. Brittney Spears was top of the charts, the nation was obsessed with Harry Potter and the PDC’s Darts World Championships final between Phil Taylor and Peter Manley had just pulled in 200,000 viewers.  

In 2016, the same final pulled in 1.7 million viewers, a record for the time, and then fast forward just eight years to this January and the 2024 final had a staggering 4.8 million viewers; three times as many as 2016 and a gargantuan 24 times as many as 1999 . 

The sport has also grown massively globally with the PDC hosting events across the world. They now have events in the Czech Republic, Poland and even Bahrain.

It’s also getting more popular in some of the more traditional dart playing countries with viewing figures in Germany and the Netherlands doubling in the last four years. 

But to put it bluntly, darts is a sport born from people throwing spikey things at a board in a pub. So how can that became so successful in a relatively short period of time? 

There are numerous reasons.

Firstly it’s a simple game, throw three things at some numbers…add them up and that’s your score…easy.

It’s also a very accessible sport. You can go to most pubs and there’s a dart board there, just buy yourself something and you can use it for as long as you want without having to pay.

Or you can pick up a cheap board and set of darts for a pretty small fee, hammer it into your least favourite wall at home and play. 

It's also a friendly sport. Bust ups are few and far between and the culture of respecting the other player goes back to the sport’s origin and still remains to this day. 

Players also respect the officials and there’s rarely controversy with scoring and officiating, something that a lot of sports lack in the modern age. 

As for the viewing side the overarching reason is action. From a literal side darts is on a lot and is on more and more what with the PDC introducing the national masters competitions.

But on the side of the game itself there’s always action; 180s, high check outs and high averages. There’s always something to talk about after a session of darts whereas in football there’s often little to take from a 0-0. 

It’ll only keep growing too. With darts only really being popular in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands (I’ve no idea why either) for most of its history, the rest of the world is picking up their darts, waking up and smelling the tungsten.