Phil Taylor
John Lowe
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Phil Taylor leads 3 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Phil Taylor at #1 and John Lowe at #5.
The case for Phil Taylor
The most dominant athlete any professional sport has produced. Taylor won 16 world championships — two BDO in 1990 and 1992, then fourteen PDC including eight consecutively from 1995 to 2002 — from 21 world finals, and added 16 World Matchplay titles and six Premier Leagues among more than 80 televised majors and over 200 professional titles in total. He hit 11 televised nine-dart finishes, including two in the same match in the 2010 Premier League final against James Wade, a feat nobody else has come close to repeating. Backed as a young apprentice by Eric Bristow, he beat his mentor 6-1 in the 1990 world final and then rebuilt the standard of the sport around himself, dragging televised averages from the 90s into the 100s. He was still reaching world finals at 57, losing to Rob Cross in 2018 in his final match before retirement. Every metric the sport records, he holds or once held.
The case for John Lowe
The only player to win world titles in three different decades — 1979, 1987 and 1993 — from seven world finals, across a career that bridged the pub era and the professional one. Old Stoneface was the technical antithesis of Bristow: unhurried, expressionless, orthodox in stance and grip, and admired by coaches as the model throw. He added two Winmau World Masters and a News of the World title among more than ten televised majors, and on 13 October 1984 he threw the first nine-dart finish ever seen on television, at the MFI World Matchplay against Keith Deller, closing 180, 180 and treble 17, treble 18, double 18 for a prize of £102,000 — an enormous sum for any British sportsman of the period. He was among the sixteen players who broke away in 1992 to found what became the PDC, and he remained competitive on television into his fifties.