22/01/2021

PDC World Championship achieves record-breaking viewing figures

The 2020/21 PDC World Darts Championship was an interesting one due to it being behind closed doors but it was also a record-breaking one in terms of viewership across the globe.

In the UK, Sky Sports was broadcast on both the Main Event and dedicated Darts channel with a peak of around 1.25 million and an average of 1m viewers for the final.

In Germany, the growth of darts continues with record figures on Sport1 during matches for Max Hopp, Nico Kurz and Gabriel Clemens. During the Kurz v Clemens game in particular, there was a record peak of almost 1 million fans.

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Clemens' third round shock over Peter Wright saw it jump to 1.2 million before this was an average against Krzysztof Ratajski with a record peak of 2.2 million.

DAZN streamed over 7 million hours in Germany around 40% up on the previous year while RTL7 in Holland recorded strong figures especially Michael van Gerwen losing to Dave Chisnall.

While as revealed this week, Belgium recorded half a million viewers for Dimitri van den Bergh's fourth round tie against Dave Chisnall which has now seen them pick up further coverage.

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"It was a wonderful event and a great statement of how a sport like darts can help the mental health of the country and of the world by giving them sporting entertainment at a time when we all needed a little lift," said PDC chairman Barry Hearn.

"It was just so viewable, and it came at a time when the country and the world probably needed a bit of darts!

"We needed some return to normality over Christmas, and the darts gave us that because it was always there for us, 120 hours of live broadcasts going to 130 countries around the world.

"We had great drama, great storylines, great emerging talents, great failure, great celebrations, the tears of defeat.

"Of course we missed the crowds and we look forward to welcoming them back as soon as possible, but did it affect the standard of what we actually put across on television? Not at all, and that's a compliment to the players."