From untouchable to vulnerable: The striking decline of the top seed at the World Matchplay

Anyone looking at the history of the World Matchplay would expect the top seed to be an automatic frontrunner. For decades, results backed that up.

The highest-seeded player won the prestigious Blackpool event – often dubbed the summer Worlds – no fewer than seventeen times and exited in the first round only four times. Those figures underline how significant the historical advantage of top-seed status once was.

Recent history, however, tells a very different story. The World Matchplay has become one of the most unpredictable majors on the darts calendar. Although the world number one still heads to the Winter Gardens with the highest expectations, that position has been anything but a guarantee of success in recent years.

In fact, over the past nine stagings, only one player managed to lift the Phil Taylor Trophy as the top seed. Luke Humphries did so in 2024, winning the World Matchplay for the first time. In doing so, he broke a striking sequence in which the top seed repeatedly came up short in Blackpool.

The fact that Humphries was knocked out early again a year later only makes the trend more remarkable. As reigning world champion, world number one, and defending champion, he was once more the standout favorite in 2025. Yet his campaign ended in the first round with a defeat to Gian van Veen. Humphries thus became only the fourth top seed in World Matchplay history to pack his bags after the opening match.

He followed in the footsteps of Michael van Gerwen, who was also surprisingly eliminated in his opener in 2018. At that time, Van Gerwen had dominated the PDC Tour for years and seemed almost untouchable.

That is precisely why his early exit came as a major shock. Seven years later, Humphries suffered the exact same fate, underlining once again that top-seed status appears to carry less weight in Blackpool.

That stands in sharp contrast to the tournament’s first decades. Especially in the Phil Taylor era, the number one was almost automatically the man to beat. Taylor dominated the World Matchplay like no other and contributed significantly to the impressive tally of seventeen titles for the top seed.

In recent years, however, the gap at the very top has narrowed considerably. The elite is no longer one or two dominant players, but a broad group of darters who are scarcely separated on the big stages. As a result, a top favorite can run into a formidable opponent in the first round who is capable of springing an immediate upset.

The numbers show a clear shift. Historically, the top seed was the most likely winner of the World Matchplay. In the modern era, however, that statistic seems to have less and less predictive value.

Just one title in the last nine editions and two surprise first-round defeats illustrate that the battle for the Blackpool crown is now far more open than ever. The top seed still starts as favorite, but no longer as the presumed champion.