Championship chaos:PDC hint at major change to World Darts Championship that will impact or destroy Luke Littler…..read more
Championship chaos:PDC hint at major change to World Darts Championship that will impact or destroy Luke Littler…..read more
The PDC World Darts Championship could be set for expansion in 2026, after plans for the 2025 tournament were shared by the organisation.
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Luke Littler watches on from the oche.
Darts sensation Luke Littler went all the way to the final on his worlds debut.
The PDC World Darts Championship is poised to expand its reach come 2026, and the number of players could rise to 128 from the current 96 at the iconic Ally Pally. Since 2018, the championship has operated with a mix of 64 initial round contenders and 32 seeds who get to skip ahead to the second round.
This format will be retained for the 2025 tournament, though, which sees Luke Humphries aiming to hold on to his champion status with the final in the early days of January.
Despite these plans, PDC CEO Matt Porter has discussed ambitions to transition the contest into a straight knockout tournament. While the upcoming 2025 event will stick to the usual template, there’s hope that the following year will mark the envisioned growth.
Porter indicated this during his chat with the Online Darts YouTube channel: “Yeah, we are close to that,” when queried about boosting participant numbers to 128. He added: “It’s not there yet, but we are quite close to that,” setting expectations high with a “hopefully” regarding the desired change for the 2026 edition.
In the most recent event, an initial flurry of 32 automatic entrants matched against another 32 competitors who had battled through their qualifying rounds. Each victor from these encounters then faced off against one of the seeded competitors in the next phase.
Just five qualifiers made it through to round three of the 2024 tournament – but among them was finalist Luke Littler. The young darting prodigy caused a stir by defeating 20th seed Andrew Gilding in round two and went on to claim victories over Matt Campbell, Raymond van Barneveld, Brendan Dolan, and Rob Cross before being bested by Humphries in the final – defying odds on the way.