Kim Huybrechts was about to lose his Tour Card, now he's knocking on door to elite return

Over the last eight months, Kim Huybrechts has been able to transform his career, going from losing the first round in the World Championships in front of the world, as Arno Merk dismantled him 3-1 in sets to end a disappointing year in the worst way.

In 2026, Kim Huybrechts will be at the Alexandra Palace with something to prove. Looking likely to qualify for majors later on in the year and already increasing his prize money won by 82.4% compared to last year, the Belgian looks set to challenge for the top 32 for the first time in years.

Spiralling is one of the many superlatives to describe the last two years of Kim Huybrechts career before 2025. After winning his last Players Championship event in 2023, Huybrechts has failed to find any form of consistency on the floor, and after repeated early exits, he developed a defensive posture. Ranking 53rd in 2025, this was a decade low for the Belgian, who ten years earlier was ranked 12th on the Order of Merit and competing in the Premier League.

This drop would hurt anyone, and it certainly weathered the hurricane, which, combined with a defensive posture, started introducing bad habits into his game. Snatching the third dart, letting out emotion that should have stayed in, and failing on simple arithmetic, it looked like the Belgian’s days were over. Winning just £45,500 in 2025, if he’d replicated that figure this year, he would be ranked 70th, outside the tour card places.

35 first and second round exits. A 78% failure of going past the second round led to a failure to qualify for any major tournament, and ranking money slid off due to an inability to defend a single penny. In the last 6 months of 2025, Huybrechts averaged 90.37 and had a checkout percentage of 36.7%, both stats below tour standard and made even worse with a solid average just months before of 92.36. Heavy shoulders kicked in and his doubles hesitated, with every missed dart feeling financially consequential. What’s most important, he recognised this.

Speaking in an interview, the 40-year-old said “2025 was easily the most miserable year of my professional life. When you lose your rhythm in darts, it doesn't just affect your arm … I was going to Players Championship events knowing I needed money to survive, and that pressure is toxic. You start throwing with heavy shoulders. Every double feels like life or death”. He’d hit his worst but this still wasn’t rock bottom.

December 2025. As the opening game of the newly increased ranking money World Championship arrived, Kim Huybrechts walked out in the first game of the event with the whole world watching him. Facing a relatively unknown German qualifier, Arno Merk absolutely dismantled the out-of-sorts Belgian, and the once Premier League player looked like the qualifier. Averaging 86.24, the game was the complete nadir of his career data.

After this event, his tour card was in genuine danger, and a trip to Q School in 2027 looked more likely than any trip to the major events. After this calamity, an emergency meeting was called with his management and the renowned Belgian coach Eric Clarys. This was to define the World Championship as a wake-up call, and Huybrechts revealed this: “That match was the absolute wake-up call. I came off stage at Ally Pally, and I felt completely hollow. I knew my Tour Card was in genuine danger for 2026. For ten years, I took being on the tour for granted.

Sitting down with Clarys, the Belgian coach and former player, outlined one goal for Huybrechts: to keep his tour card. This clarity for Huybrechts was damaging, as he’d been aiming for majors just months before, and this wasn’t based at all on his performances, just an expectation built from the past. In the context of Belgian darts, Huybrechts was another player falling. Mike De Decker was failing in 2025. Dimitri van den Bergh looks more likely to play in the Modus Super Series than a Players Championship event in 2027. His ego was trashed and now had to be rebuilt, and Clarys knew what to do.

Known as “The Sheriff”, Erik Clarys was a legendary figure in Belgian Darts known for his unique arithmetic routes, but after a career-ending arm injury, he took up coaching and started to develop a deep understanding of the mental fragility of elite sportsmanship from personal experience. To rebuild Huybrechts's career, Clarys built four pillars for his hacking framework, including his goal simplification to keep his tour card, mechanical alignment and rhythm, mathematical logic, and emotional decoupling.

These abstract foundations had deeper meanings, and they all had their separate goals to reach the intertwined goal of Huybrechts climbing the Order of Merit. Clarys banned phone apps during practice, forcing Huybrechts back to manual board management and chalkboard arithmetic. This was important because he needed to reconnect with his roots, and to do this, his psychological game needed to be transformed to what it was in 2015 and his peak. This was called the cafe roots philosophy, where Clarys reconnected with his darts culture from his childhood, where he used to play for fun in his cafe. Not just this, relying on counting apps means that once Huybrechts was at the Players Championships and he needed a combination finish, he would pause to count, and this affects concentration and focus.

Speaking on this subject, Kim said: “A dart player who can't count well is not good. It affects your concentration and focus, and you lose matches because of it. Eric made me put away the apps and get back to raw arithmetic.". For a two-year process of Huybrechts spiralling out of the PDC, the top tier of professional darts, this seemed too simple. Yet, he was blunt, and he broke down Huybrechts’ game and stopped him from snatching his third dart. Huybrechts described this as, “I felt pressure in 2025; my third dart was snatched. I was rushing because I wanted to get off the oche. He forced me to pause, take a deep breath, and reset my stance before every single dart.".

A tedious routine focused on the mechanical breakdown of a player's throw, which, almost nine times out of ten, can ruin a player due to excessive psychological monitoring of the throw, causing dartosis. But Huybrechts was the one out of ten. This seemed like it wouldn’t work, with Kim even saying, “When you've played in Premier League arenas in front of 10,000 people, you think you know everything. But Eric is a legend in Belgian darts. I trust him with my life. When he told me I was throwing poorly, I didn't argue. I listened. Clarys took the risk, and Huybrechts grabbed it with open arms, and his results did the talking.

The Belgian Darts Open in March was the turning point. Breezing through the host nation qualifier, Huybrechts beat Josh Rock 6-4 after training 2-4, winning four consecutive legs against the Premier League star. Roared on by his home crowd, he reached the last 16, and after that goal against Huybrechts, he said, “Calmness. In 2025, at 2-4 down, I would have panicked and thought, 'Here we go again, another early loss, more points gone.' In Wieze, I looked at Eric in the crowd, took a breath, and said to myself, "Hold your throw, hit your setups, execute.”. Just three months into his coaching programme, the results were tangible, and with Clary in the crowd, both Belgians’ focus started to shift. With the Austrian Darts Open in May resulting in another last-16 exit, Huybrechts and Clarys met to adjust their expectations. The goal had been achieved, and in the space of five months, Huybrechts had saved his tour card; in the last three months, you can see the goal shifting towards the top 32.

Reaching the last 16 at European Tour 3, 4, 7, and Players Championship 15 and 23 are the key results, and although not yet groundbreaking, it is consistent. Hitting a nine-darter at Players Championship 16 was the highlight and is the biggest moment of his resurgence. Fighting for survival a year ago, he produced perfection a year later, and his confidence is now thriving. In 2025, he had a 53% win percentage, which is below tour standard. In 2026, he increased this figure by 15 percentage points. Huybrechts is a different animal in 2026, and his prize money shows everything you need to know. £83,000 in eight months, nearly doubling his £45,500 in 12 months. The stats reveal how this has happened.

A checkout percentage improvement from 32.1% to 41.5% represents a 9-percentage-point increase in a year, the largest single metric improvement of any player in this publication in 2026. His first nine has crossed 102 for the first time, his 180s per match have risen from 1.85 to 2.60, and his deciding leg win rate has risen from 28.5% to 62.5%. That last figure is the one that proves Clarys worked. A player winning 28.5% of deciding legs in 2025 was losing matches he should have been winning, with 35 first- and second-round exits confirming that. A player winning 62.5% of deciding legs in 2026 has a completely different psychological structure under pressure. The chalkboard arithmetic, the mechanical reset, the café roots philosophy, abstract on paper, transformative on the oche.

What makes Huybrechts' 2026 resurgence genuinely remarkable is not one result. It is the absence of one. No Players Championship title, no European Tour final, no televised quarter-final run that inflated his earnings in a single weekend. Twenty-fourth in the European Championship race, eighteenth in the World Grand Prix race, comfortably inside the Players Championship Finals top sixty-four; all of it built through consistency rather than one moment of brilliance.

The nine-darter at Players Championship 16 is the highlight, but it came in a Last 64 match. Josh Rock's comeback in Wieze is the statement, but it ended in a Last 16 loss. Huybrechts has climbed to the edge of the top thirty-two by accumulating wins across thirty-plus events rather than cashing in on a single tournament run. That is a harder thing to do and a more reliable foundation to build from.

The implication of that foundation is significant. A player who has rebuilt his ranking through sustained consistency is a player one defining result away from a completely different conversation. A European Championship quarter-final in October, a Players Championship Finals run in November, a deep World Championship week in December would not just add ranking money.

It would confirm that the rebuilt version of Huybrechts can compete at the level his old ranking suggested he always could. The structure Clarys built was designed for exactly this moment. The tour card was the first target. The top thirty-two is the second. A major run is the third.

The honest position is that the top thirty-two are not yet within one result. His average of 92.28 in the most recent quarter and his checkout at 38% show there is still work to do before he is consistently beating top-twenty players across a full tournament day. But his ranking is built on 2026 earnings to 43.3%, meaning his position reflects what he is doing now rather than defending a historical peak. The qualification picture heading into the final four months of 2026 is the most encouraging it has been since 2022. Six months ago the only conversation was Q School. Now the conversation is the European Championship, the Grand Prix and what happens if the moment arrives. For Kim Huybrechts, the moment has not arrived yet. Everything about 2026 suggests it is coming.