Luke Littler is the kebab-loving 16-year-old lighting up the darts
“I will treat myself to a kebab. Get myself some bottles of Coke and bottles of Fanta.”
It’s not the most audacious way to celebrate winning your debut PDC World Darts Championship match and at least £15,000, but legally there’s little else 16-year-old wunderkind Luke “The Nuke” Littler can do. He can’t drink, drive, bet or vote, but he can play darts. He can really play darts.
Littler makes darts look so easy you begin to distrust everything around him and yourself. He can’t be 16. These can’t be his first World Championship matches. Was there something in those brownies? Am I really here? Is this really happening?
He has been called the most naturally talented darts player ever, but Littler could be a lab-grown dartist, the product of Phil Taylor’s DNA and a mad scientist, pre-made with stubble and portly frame and receding hairline. He started playing at 18 months old, and it is not infeasible he already looked as he does now – like a teenager trapped in a 30-something’s body.
Born 21 January 2007 in Runcorn and brought up in Warrington, Littler first picked up a set of magnetic darts as a toddler. His dad Anthony said: “As soon as he threw his first dart I knew he had something. The stance and everything was there – I just said wow.”
By four he was playing with “proper Phil Taylor darts” and throwing at the right height and length two years later, the same age he hit his first 180. When asked a few years ago about his first television darting memory, he recalled Gary Anderson’s 2015 World Championship win. Littler would have been seven.
He started playing adult-scale darts at nine and within three years he met veteran player Deta Hedman at the Isle of Man Open, who wrote: “Met a talented 12-year-old today, Luke Littler, remember this name, awesome talent.”
13 was a special age, beating his first PDC opponent Joe Cullen in an exhibition game and also throwing his first competitive nine-darter. At 14, he produced the first nine-dart finish in the Junior Darts Corporation caught on camera. In the two years since, he’s won everything that can be won at youth level: three successive Junior Darts Opens, back-to-back JDC World Championships and this year’s PDC World Youth Championship, beating 21-year-old Gian van Veen.
He has already had success at senior level too, winning the Welsh Open in 2022, before winning the British Open, British Classic, Isle of Man Classic and Gibraltar Open in 2023. Those in darting circles have known Littler’s elite-level success is an inevitability for some time.
And now he is walking out to Pitbull’s “Greenlight” at Alexandra Palace for the PDC World Darts Championship 2024, having so many autograph cards and shirts lobbed in front of him he can’t begin to sign them all. His shirts conspicuously lack any Paddy Power branding – he’s just too young.
Littler won his first-round game against 37-year-old, 2012 BDO world champion Christian Kist in straight sets, dropping just two of the 11 legs and averaging 106.12, somehow down from his first-set average north of 110. It made him the second-youngest player to win a PDC Worlds match, with the highest average of the tournament so far and the highest debut average ever.
He then produced a very different performance the next day to beat 53-year-old Andrew Gilding, who won the UK Open this year and is currently 20th in the PDC rankings. Littler was clearly affected by the pressure yet steadied himself to secure a gritty 3-1 win and at least £25,000.
“We may never see the like again,” effused commentator and former pro Wayne Mardle. “We saw it with Phil Taylor and then we saw it with Michael van Gerwen. This may be the third coming of that. I don’t know, but I’m a little bit carried away.”
Mardle, along with almost every other professional player of the past decade and beyond, has a picture with a rapidly-aging Littler over the past few years as he has torn his way through the darts stratosphere. Regular comparisons have been made with world No 2 Van Gerwen in particular, but even the Dutchman was 19 when he ran Taylor close in his World Championship debut.
Littler has regularly called Taylor his hero, and the two finally met earlier this year. The 14-time world champion praised Littler’s first-round performance and has previously said: “I’m predicting he will be one of the best players ever.
“He’s the best [teenager] I’ve ever seen in my life. We’ll see what happens over the next 10 years, and what happens over the next five years when he’s earned a few bob and wants to enjoy himself.
“Naturally when you’re 16, 17, 18 [you want to go out and enjoy yourself], and the lad could be a millionaire. But then you’ve got to stay in and dedicate yourself, and that’s going to be a bit difficult.”
Except it doesn’t seem to be. Pre-tournament, Littler said: “I’m always at home practising when I have spare time. Most of my mates go out, drink, smoke, whatever. But I’m not into all that.
“I just get my head focussed on the darts. Now I’ve got a Tour Card, I have to focus on one thing.”
A natural showman on stage, celebrating every 180 and big checkout, he understands the value of getting the often-hostile Ally Pally crowd onside. Yet away from the oche, he’s quiet and understated, media trained and mature.
Post-match, he seemed almost irked that fans were chanting: “School in the morning, you’ve got school in the morning” – he doesn’t. He sat his GCSEs at Warrington’s Padgate Academy earlier this year and has opted out of college having earned his Tour Card. He’s playing with the big boys now and expects to be treated as such.
Having started the tournament a 66-1 favourite, most betting sites are now offering 7-1 for Littler to win his debut World Championship. The current youngest winner is Van Gerwen, who was 24, meaning Littler will get eight more years of theoretical constant improvement and maturity to take that title.
In 2060, Littler will be 53, the same age second-round opponent Gilding is now. If he’s still playing darts, it’s likely there won’t be a record standing which doesn’t bear his excellently-brandable alliterative name. We are watching the start of the future.
