Premier League Darts Play Offs & Final Night

Seven players, ten nights, one foregone conclusion: Taylor took the inaugural Premier League title without so much as a raised eyebrow.

Barry Hearn and the PDC launched the Premier League Darts in January 2005, sponsored by 888.com. Seven players competed in a round-robin league format across ten weekly nights at venues around the UK, with the top four progressing to a play-off final. Phil Taylor, predictably, won the inaugural title, beating Colin Lloyd in the final at the Reebok Stadium in Bolton. The concept was simple but revolutionary: take darts out of the traditional tournament setting and give it a league season, complete with weekly fixtures, a table, and relegation battles. Sky Sports broadcast every night live, and the format clicked immediately with audiences.

Fancy dress, chanting, and a party spirit; by 2006, darts had already become something no other televised sport could touch.

The second season expanded to eight players and fourteen league nights, with Phil Taylor again claiming the title. The format grew in confidence, visiting larger venues and drawing bigger crowds. The atmosphere at these occasions was already becoming the stuff of legend, with fancy dress, chanting, and a party spirit that set darts apart from any other televised sport.

Twenty thousand seats filled; darts had outgrown leisure centres and claimed the same stages as rock royalty.

From 2008, the Play Offs and Final Night moved to the O2 Arena in London, giving the occasion a permanent, prestigious home for its climax. The 20,000-capacity venue sold out, confirming that darts had outgrown leisure centres and was now filling arenas usually reserved for rock concerts and boxing.

Nine perfect darts, five consecutive titles; in 2009, Taylor did not merely win the Premier League, he owned it.

Phil Taylor achieved the perfect leg, a nine-dart finish, during the 2009 Premier League season against Adrian Lewis. It was the first nine-darter in the competition's history and a moment that encapsulated why Taylor was known simply as 'The Power'. He went on to win his fifth consecutive Premier League title that year, a run of dominance unmatched in the sport.

Van Gerwen dethroned Taylor at the O2 in 2013, and the sport has never quite looked the same since.

Michael van Gerwen won his first Premier League title in 2013, beating Phil Taylor in the final at the O2 Arena. The young Dutchman had been tearing through the PDC circuit with averages that made seasoned professionals look ordinary. His victory signalled a genuine changing of the guard, ending Taylor's stranglehold on the competition.

Sell-out crowds in Dublin, Rotterdam, and Berlin confirmed darts had outgrown its postcode.

The Premier League expanded beyond the UK for the first time, staging league nights in Dublin, Rotterdam, and Berlin. The move reflected the sport's growing international appeal and the PDC's ambition to build darts into a truly global product. Sell-out crowds in each city proved the appetite was there.

Durrant lifted the title to silence; not a single roar in the building.

Covid-19 halted the 2020 Premier League season after nine of the scheduled sixteen league nights. When it resumed in October, the remaining fixtures and Play Offs were held behind closed doors at the Marshall Arena in Milton Keynes. Glen Durrant won the title without the roar of a Finals Night crowd, a strange and subdued end to a disrupted season.

Sixteen nights, sixteen mini-tournaments; every week carried knockout stakes before the Play Offs even began.

The PDC overhauled the Premier League format in 2022, replacing the traditional round-robin league with a weekly knockout system. Each of the sixteen nights became a self-contained mini-tournament, with quarter-finals, semi-finals, and a final played in a single evening. Points accumulated across the season still determined the top four for the Play Offs, but the new format injected unpredictability into every night.

Cool Hand Luke made it a double in 2024, adding the Premier League crown to his world title with a final victory over van Gerwen at a sold-out O2.

Luke Humphries, the reigning PDC World Champion, won the 2024 Premier League title at the O2 Arena, beating Michael van Gerwen in the final. 'Cool Hand Luke' had been the form player on the circuit all season, and his victory confirmed him as the sport's dominant force. The O2 was at full capacity, the atmosphere as raucous as ever, proving that Finals Night remains one of the hottest tickets in British sport.