"There wouldn’t be any more than that. No” - Matt Porter rules out bringing PDC majors to Saudi Arabia after successful World Series debut

Last month, the Saudi Arabia Darts Masters was played for the first time in history. A milestone for the sport, once again showing how far professional darts has grown in recent years.

Still, the tournament in Riyadh was anything but a standard event. The atmosphere, the setting, and the crowd differed greatly from what players and fans are used to at, for example, the Premier League Darts or the big Euro Tour events.

According to Matt Porter, CEO of the PDC, the tournament was above all a valuable learning experience. “It was obviously an interesting, interesting place to do an event for the first time,” Porter told Metro. “Different to our other events, the crowd was obviously a little bit more restrained, but nevertheless, they enjoyed it. There was a lot of local interest. We were very well looked after. It went as well as we’d have hoped.”

The Saudi Arabia Darts Masters was part of the World Series of Darts and was played in a region where darts is still very much developing. You could sense that not only in the atmosphere in the stands, but also in the way players had to adapt to the conditions.

Porter emphasizes that not every player handled that new environment the same way. “Each of the players would have taken to it differently. They knew what to expect. And obviously they get the chance to go out and play on the stage before the crowd come in so they could see the size of the arenas, perhaps not as big as they’d been used to in other events.”

The venues were smaller than at some major PDC events in Europe or the United Kingdom, but that didn’t pose a problem, according to Porter. “They’re playing exhibitions in those sort of size arenas and they’re perfectly capable of adapting. Some can adapt more easily than others.”

Still, the success of this debut inevitably raises the question: will we see more darts in Saudi Arabia in the future? Porter remains notably level-headed. “I think one event in any sort of developing country is right. So no, there wouldn’t be any more than that. No.”

That stands in sharp contrast to the words of Matchroom president Barry Hearn, who dares to dream big when it comes to the sport’s financial future. Speaking to The Sun, Hearn made it clear the bar is far from reached. “I look at darts now and I think, OK, we’ve done well — £25million prize money, £1m for the winner,” said Hearn. “So the next target is to get to £100m prize money with £5m to the winner.”

Porter responds with nuance but ambition. “I think the key thing is that you never rule anything out. Who’d have thought 10 years ago we’d be paying £1m to the winner of the World Championship?”

According to the PDC chief, growth is a gradual process. “As the sport keeps growing, then we’ll keep delivering across not just the world championship, but every other event. We’ve raised prize money across the board for this year. £25,000,000 in total. One day it’d be great to get it to 50 million, 75 million, 100 million. All we can do is just keep growing it and the market will react and tell us to the level that we can get to.”

One of the key pillars of that growth is the huge influx of young talent. Porter even calls it a “scary” development. “The talent base is frightening. The number of teenagers who are throwing 100 averages, 9 dart finishes is remarkable.”

According to Porter, darts has clearly become a young players’ sport. “And it’s definitely a young person’s sport now and I think you’ll see that with the emergence of more talent from the JDC and the Development Tour over the coming years.”

To monitor that development, the PDC keeps detailed statistics. “We have a fascinating spreadsheet, which I enjoy looking at every year, which shows the average age of our players, not only our tour card holders, but then our top 8 top 16, top 32, top 64, etcc. And it just drops every year.”

The reason is simple, he says. “It’s a sport that young people are coming into because there’s a genuine career path and it’s a sport that they, you know, they can get into from any background, wherever they’re from. There’s very few barriers to entry and that means that natural talent is really the only, only denominator.”

Porter has now worked for Barry Hearn and Matchroom for 25 years. There’s rarely time to look back extensively, he admits. “Every day is a different challenge," he said. "We’ve grown so much and so organically, you kind of take it in your stride, but the schedule is so relentless that there isn’t really always time to sit back and reflect.”

Still, he can’t deny the huge development. “It’s been an amazing journey. This is my 25th year working for Barry and if I look at where we are now as a company compared to where we were in 2001, it’s a remarkable transformation.”

According to Porter, the success is mainly thanks to the players and the events themselves. “I think it’s testimony to the events and the players who played in them, that they’ve been so popular with fans and that’s enabled us to get to this stage.”

He emphasizes there hasn’t been any radical reinvention. “We haven’t reinvented the wheel, we’ve just delivered products that the people want to engage with and enjoy. And at the moment, that’s going really well.”