Phil Taylor
John Part
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Phil Taylor leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Phil Taylor at #1 and John Part at #8.
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 Part
The first player from outside the United Kingdom to win a world championship, and the only man to win world titles in both organisations and beat Phil Taylor in a final to do it. Darth Maple won the BDO title in 1994 as an unheralded Canadian, then crossed to the PDC and won the 2003 world championship by beating Taylor 7-6 in a deciding set — ending an eight-year reign and producing one of the sport's genuine upsets — before adding a third title in 2008. Four world finals in all, from a country with no darts infrastructure to speak of and a transatlantic commute to every tournament. He remains the benchmark for non-European players and the proof that the sport's talent pool was never geographically fixed. His post-playing career as a commentator has made him the most respected analytical voice in the game, and his articulate deconstruction of checkout routes taught a generation of viewers how professionals actually think.