Dennis Priestley
Luke Littler
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dennis Priestley leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Dennis Priestley at #9 and Luke Littler at #12.
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The case for Dennis Priestley
The only player to win a world championship at the first attempt in both organisations. The Menace took the BDO title in 1991, beating Eric Bristow 6-0 in the final on debut, then joined the 1992 breakaway and won the inaugural WDC World Championship in January 1994, beating Phil Taylor 6-1. He reached six world finals in all, losing four of them to Taylor across the late 1990s, and won a Winmau World Masters among more than eight televised majors. Being the second-best player of the Taylor era is a thankless historical position, but Priestley's peak was genuinely close: he was world number one, he won the sport's biggest title in two separate universes, and in an era without Taylor he would plausibly have collected five or six world championships. He continued competing into his sixties, having also fought and beaten prostate cancer during his career.
The case for Luke Littler
The youngest world champion in the sport's history and the biggest audience driver it has ever had. Littler reached the 2024 World Championship final at 16, losing 7-4 to Luke Humphries after arriving as a qualifier ranked outside the top 150, and won the title a year later on 3 January 2025, beating Michael van Gerwen 7-3 at 17 years and 347 days old. In between he won the 2024 Premier League at his first attempt, beating Humphries in the final, and the 2024 Grand Slam of Darts, among a major haul already larger than most professionals manage in a career. He throws quickly, appears immune to the occasion, and has averaged above 100 in televised finals since he was a schoolboy. His 2024 run drew the largest television audiences in the sport's history and a surge in board sales and junior participation across Britain, the Netherlands and Germany.