Why isn't Michael van Gerwen competing at the 2025 Players Championship Finals?

Michael van Gerwen will be a glaring absentee at this weekend’s Players Championship Finals in Minehead, with the three-time world champion failing to qualify for the season-ending major after a dire year on the Pro Tour.

The Players Championship Finals is a tournament for which players cannot qualify through the PDC Order of Merit, the ranking on which Van Gerwen sits third. Players can only reach the finals via the Players Championship Order of Merit.

In 2025, a total of 34 Players Championship events were staged. Results from those tournaments formed the ranking, and only the top 64 players earned a place at the Finals. That means half of all Tour Card holders will be in Minehead.

Because of a packed schedule for the top stars — with the Premier League early in the year and the World Series events later on — elite players often skip floor tournaments. On top of that, Van Gerwen also had private issues to deal with, meaning he played only fifteen Players Championship events this season. Normally that wouldn’t be an issue for him: in the past three years he played ten, fifteen and sixteen Players Championships respectively and qualified comfortably each time. The problem this year was that, in the events he did play, his performances were nowhere near good enough.

Across those fifteen Players Championships, Van Gerwen was knocked out in the first round eight times. The three-time world champion reached a quarter-final only once — a remarkably poor return for the man with the most Pro Tour titles in darts history.

It is the first time Van Gerwen has missed the Players Championship Finals. Since the tournament’s launch in 2009, he had never failed to qualify. The event is also the most successful ranking major of his career: Van Gerwen has won the Players Championship Finals seven times, four more than darts legend Phil Taylor.