Michael van Gerwen
Dennis Priestley
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Michael van Gerwen leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Michael van Gerwen at #2 and Dennis Priestley at #9.
The case for Michael van Gerwen
The best player of the post-Taylor era and the most naturally gifted thrower the sport has seen. Van Gerwen won the Winmau World Masters in 2006 at 17, becoming the youngest world champion of any description at the time, then took three PDC world titles in 2014, 2017 and 2019 from five finals, seven Premier League crowns and three World Matchplays among more than 25 televised majors. His statistical peak is unmatched: the highest televised three-dart average in history, 123.40 against Michael Smith in the 2016 Premier League, and the highest average in a World Championship final, 114.05 in the 2017 win over Gary Anderson. He held the world number one ranking continuously for roughly seven years from early 2014. Where Taylor's dominance was built on relentless accumulation, van Gerwen's was built on speed and a scoring ceiling nobody else could reach — he throws fast, rarely reconsiders, and at his best simply outscores opponents into irrelevance.
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.