Eric Bristow
Raymond van Barneveld
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Eric Bristow leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Eric Bristow at #3 and Raymond van Barneveld at #4.
The case for Eric Bristow
The player who made darts a television sport. The Crafty Cockney won five world championships in 1980, 1981, 1984, 1985 and 1986 from ten world finals, five Winmau World Masters and two News of the World titles, and dominated the boom years so completely that his defeats became more famous than his victories — Keith Deller's 138 checkout to beat him 6-5 in the 1983 final is still the sport's best-known moment. He was the first darts player recognisable to people who never watched darts: chalk-white shirt, little finger cocked, an arrogance he cultivated deliberately because it sold tickets. Dartitis struck at the peak of his powers in the mid-1980s and he never won another world title, though he reached the finals of 1989, 1990 and 1991 while fighting it. He then bankrolled a young Stoke potter named Phil Taylor, who beat him in the 1990 final. No player has been more consequential for the sport's commercial existence.
The case for Raymond van Barneveld
The man who turned darts into a mainstream sport in a country that had barely played it. A former postman from The Hague, Van Barneveld won four BDO world titles in 1998, 1999, 2003 and 2005, crossed to the PDC in 2006, and won the 2007 world final against Phil Taylor 7-6 in a sudden-death leg at the Circus Tavern — a match still routinely voted the greatest ever played, in which he came from 3-0 down in sets. Five world titles from six finals puts him level with Bristow and behind only Taylor among men. He added the 2012 Grand Slam of Darts and the 2014 Premier League among more than ten televised majors. His real legacy is national: Dutch television audiences for his matches ran into the millions, participation exploded, and the pipeline he opened produced Michael van Gerwen, Jelle Klaasen, Danny Noppert and a generation for whom being a professional darts player was a plausible ambition.