Phil Taylor
Trina Gulliver
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 Trina Gulliver at #7.
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 Trina Gulliver
The most decorated champion in the women's game and the most repeatedly dominant player on this list after Taylor. Gulliver won ten world championships — the first seven consecutively from 2001 to 2007, then 2010, 2011 and 2013 — reaching at least twelve world finals in a career that ran alongside her work as a carpenter and joiner. She was the inaugural Women's World Champion when the BDO introduced the title in 2001 and defined the event for more than a decade, adding a long list of Winmau World Masters, World Trophy and international titles among more than twenty televised and major championships. Her significance is not only the trophies: for most of her career the women's game had almost no prize money, no television and no professional structure, and she sustained a world-class standard anyway. Every subsequent breakthrough — Fallon Sherrock at Alexandra Palace, the PDC Women's Series, Beau Greaves — is built on the visibility she created.