"Luke Littler can be a multiple winner... He will have periods of domination" - Barry Hearn credits 'The Nuke' for taking darts to new heights

Since Luke Littler burst onto the scene last December at the PDC World Darts Championship, the sport of darts has garnered mainstream media attention across the globe. Brilliant news for PDC chairman and shrewd buisness man, Barry Hearn.

"This young man has got his feet on the ground. He's got the right attitude and behind Luke Littler are dozens of other Luke Littlers coming from all over the world and that's the excitement. This game of darts hasn't really started. Everyone thinks it's massive and it is but there's a long, long way to go," Hearn tells Sky Sports. "Littler took us from a sport to mainstream. All of a sudden kids were watching, nans and grandads, parents were watching. It became what we always look for in sport - a narrative. It's about the personality and the stories behind the personality, getting people involved so they can enjoy the sport from several different angles."

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After Littler's Ally Pally breakthrough, reaching the World Championship final aged just 16 before losing out to Luke Humphries, some still questioned whether the PDC would offer the teenage sensation a spot in the Premier League Darts. They did and the rest is history as Littler not only topped the league table on debut but also emerged victorious from the playoffs to pick up his first major PDC title.

"There was some feeling within the Professional Darts Corporation 'Is this a bit too early to put a youngster under that type of pressure?' There were going to be 10,000 fans minimum every Thursday night for 17 nights - 'Can he cope?' 'Will it affect his long-term future?' blah, blah, blah," Hearn recalls. "Eddie and I sat down to discuss it and the first thing Eddie said was 'It doesn't matter what age you are, if you're good enough you're old enough' and our job is to give people a chance and roll the dice and my word, didn't that pay off in spades!?"

Littler posing with the Premier League Darts title

The question is though, just how high is Littler's ceiling? "The kid is a lovely boy. He's a talent that's going to be around for a long time," Hearn evaluates. "He's not going to win every match because the standard of competition within darts is so enormous, so many great players, which is why it makes it such a superb sporting spectacle."

So a domination reminiscent of Phil Taylor's heyday is out of the question in Hearn's opinion. "Phil Taylor's title run is probably untouchable," admits the boss of Matchroom Sports. "The man was an absolute legend but the competition wasn't as good then as it is now. Because these darts players are earning millions of pounds a year, have got a huge future, it's attracted an awful lot of talent from a much wider range of people who want to try darts."

"It's not a difficult game to understand, it's a very difficult game to master but we have the strength to factor in that we're using ordinary people but they have extraordinary ability," the 76-year-old concludes. "So I think Luke Littler can be a multiple winner. He won't monopolise but he will have periods of domination."

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Barry Hearn was one of the founding members of the PDC