Phil Taylor
Raymond van Barneveld
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 Raymond van Barneveld at #4.
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 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.