"We'll put a lot of smiles on a lot of darts players' faces" - Barry Hearn teases blockbuster March announcement from PDC

The PDC announced last week a new TV deal with Sky Sports. This will earn them a whopping £125 million over a five-year period. And PDC chairman Barry Hearn hints that an even more high-profile announcement is coming.

Hearn realizes that darts is wildly popular at the moment and is keen to capitalise. "We’re on fire, there’s no other way to describe it,” Hearn told talkSPORT. “We’ve announced a new five-year deal with Sky which I’m very pleased with and we’re going away now for four or five weeks with a pile of money in the bank and thinking about what to do with it. In March we’ll be making an announcement that will put a lot of smiles on a lot of darts players' faces.”

Not only in the UK is darts on the rise either. "We're investing a lot all over the world, Southeast Asia, in China, in the Chinese Premier League," he explains. "What people don't see is the hundreds and hundreds of tournaments that we're supporting one way or another to make sure this game becomes truly global. And as it sifts through, it goes to the TV companies and they say, well, we've got to have that. So you're boosting your income all the time. And as I say, we're going to make a massive increase in prize money coming up, which we'll announce soon. And I think that's just the first stage of us overtaking a lot of other sports."

Hearn is now 76, but continues to enjoy doing all this work. “This is the most fun thing I’ve done in my life, I’ve done a lot of fun things but watching this game explode and not just gain popularity but a change of perception,” he added. “I have to give Luke Littler a lot of the credit for that because he’s brought a new audience in as well, the mums and the youngsters, the kids."

“It’s nice when a plan comes together,” he continued. “We’ve always had a dream of what we can do. It’s taken 20 years to get there and now we’re going to push on globally and the top players are going to be multi-millionaires. But they’re ordinary (people), the fans can relate to them. I think this is a worry for football that some of the players are unrelatable and that’s not good for the long run."