Raymond van Barneveld
Trina Gulliver
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Trina Gulliver leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Raymond van Barneveld at #4 and Trina Gulliver at #7.
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.
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.