The Pitch: Rapid 3Arena sellout a measure of darts health, with purses set to grow

The picture is the same across the UK and Europe with every event — except Aberdeen at this moment — sold out.

For Rotterdam’s show in April the best tickets are currently exchanging for €677 on Viagogo, in a country which outside of Ireland and the UK has become utterly obsessed with the sport and produces some of its greatest players.

For anyone who hasn’t been to a major PDC event, it’s a mix of hype and pazazz, walk-on music, crowd participation, fancy dress and dogged competitiveness from eight players at the very top of their game, who will earn multi-million euro fortunes throughout their careers.

Dutch master Michael van Gerwen, the three-time world champion, has banked more than €13m in prize money for his career to date, with considerable sponsorship and endorsement deals on top of that.

The prodigious Luke Littler, world championship finalist for the past two years and winner this year, has already amassed purses in excess of €1.5m, despite being only 18 and having just completed his first year as a professional.

Littler and van Gerwen will be the biggest draws at the 3Arena where the world’s top four Order of Merit players — and four season-long Wildcard picks — battle it out in the latest leg of the 17-date tour event.

Throughout the evening’s fever pitch atmosphere there will be a seven match card comprising four quarter finals, two semis and a final — with prize money for the season exceeding €1m — on top of nightly payouts for the winner of each leg.

These values will surge from next year when the PDC pumps millions more in prize money into its official events — including most notably the World Darts Championship — thanks to the largest percentage cash injection across any sport. The Pitch understands that an extra €6m will be injected into overall PDC prize money in 2026, taking the total annual purse from just over €16m to more than €24.2m.

Such a wealth increase is directly linked to a major new broadcast deal with Sky Sports worth more than €24m, agreed with the broadcaster in recent weeks and set to run from 2026 to 2030.

The fees agreed are almost double the value of the previous Sky deal, and demonstrates the incredible growth of the sport and its engagement with a far more diverse, wider and multi-demographic fan base.

All of this growth has increased the overall value of the PDC to somewhere between €100m and €200m, good news for the franchise and its 100% stakeholder Matchroom, owned by Barry and Eddie Hearn. The Hearns own 87% of the parent organisation — which also promotes top level boxing, snooker, basketball and other sports — with a 13% stake taken by Pitch International.

The darts side of Matchroom is run by Matt Porter, who has overseen a rapid rise in brand engagement and visibility in recent years.

Ahead of tonight’s Dublin leg Porter told The Pitch that one of the clearest on-the-ground indicators of the popularity and growth of darts is seen through ticketing for major events and championships.

“The decisive point for me is that where events were selling out before, they’re selling out much more quickly now,” he explains.

“The demand is growing, there’s been a real boom in sponsorship, with lots of brands coming on board that you wouldn’t have normally associated with darts.”

BIG corporates like Ballygowan, Foster’s and Uber Eats, sit alongside Paddy Power, BetMGM and a raft of betting companies, demonstrating a sporting brand which is perhaps the most sought after outside of football in these islands.

This is mainly down to the extraordinary marketing success of fixing darts alongside the Christmas holidays where the PDC World Championships has become a dedicated seasonal entertainment draw in millions of households.

This year’s final between Luke Littler and Michael van Gerwen was watched by a peak audience of 3.2m people here and in Britian, the second biggest audience for a non-football match ever on Sky — the largest was the previous year’s final between Littler and Luke Humphries.

Throughout the tournament more than 10m people watched the PDC World Championship, adding to a 67% increase in total hours of viewing of all PDC events, with a 139% surge into that highly valuable 16-34 age-group market.

“The beauty of it is younger people are now so engaged digitally, along with what was once a more traditional older audience who continue to watch the broadcasts in considerable numbers,” adds Porter. “I think one of the key reasons in its popularity is that the players are very relatable, like Luke Littler for example.

“There’s not too many 17 (or 18-year-old) footballers playing Premier League football who people can relate to, but with darts they’re just seen as normal, relatable people.”

For the youth market in particular, this relatability has manifested itself in exceptional growth on social media, particularly on TikTok and Instagram through Littler’s six million followers, and even through the likes of Stephen Bunting.

Bunting’s appeal to the masses best sums up ‘the guy next door’ image of the sport, a rotund, balding, bespeckled Dad, but someone who has fully embraced his anti-hero status to create enormous social media traction, particularly with male teenage fans.

Littler, with 2.7m (TikTok) and 1.8m (Instagram) followers is of course the fan’s favourite, the prodigiously talented World Champion teenager, and a significant gamechanger for the sport’s visibility. However, due to his young age — even though now an adult — he is still not that commercially valuable to the PDC, where restrictions around betting advertising still prohibit him from promoting the multitude of gambling firms associated with the PDC or its beer partner.

He doesn’t drive, he doesn’t drink and therefore has yet to become a top-end commercial attraction to the PDC, beyond his obvious qualities as a big draw player. Littler has immense value however, for his own suite of youthful sponsors, including Boo Hoo and Xbox and assuming he continues on his current path, these earnings will continue to outperform actual winnings.

The real pity for Irish darts fans and the PDC is that there has still been no replacement venue found to host the PDC’s Grand Prix event, a multi-day tournament which attracted tens of thousands of fans to CityWest in its pomp.

This came to an end when the west Dublin hotel and conference centre was leased to the State during covid, and subsequently to cope with the asylum emergency.

One option was the National Basketball Arena, but that didn’t go anywhere after Basketball Ireland began its redevelopment programme of the Tallaght venue, while we reported last year that Millstreet in Cork was considered briefly, but ruled out due to access issues.

For now fans will just have to make do with the Premier League and all that that brings to a sport which continues to grow in value and wealth, year-on-year.

Aviva Stadium operates false economy for food and beverage 

The Pitch embarked on a road trip of Premier League action last weekend, a timely check-in with how other ‘nearby’ stadia prices compare with the Aviva Stadium.

We visited the Ethiad on Saturday and Anfield on Sunday, and the price differences between both venues and the Irish home of football were stark.

Using the renowned global valuation metric of ‘the Price of a Pint’ the differential between here and the UK showed that in both Manchester and Liverpool the cost was more than reasonable.

In Anfield a pre-match scoop converted at just over €4, while at the Ethiad it worked out at €5.50, with both venues offering reasonably priced, tasty food options, unlike Lansdowne Road.

In the Aviva – the pint will set you back €7.50 – and that doesn’t include the exhaustive queuing processes here compared to the ease of access in the UK.