World Darts Championship will be bigger than ever next year; doubt over future at Ally Pally

The upcoming World Darts Championship has 96 participants, but that is going to change in the future. Barry Hearn has announced that the field of participants for the 2025/26 edition will include as many as 128 players.

The former PDC chief and Matchroom chairman also suggested that Alexandra Palace, where the tournament has been held since 2007, could be replaced by a larger venue to take advantage of the sport's skyrocketing popularity. This is mainly caused by the rise of teenage sensation Luke Littler, who has attracted a whole new audience to the sport of darts.

By increasing the number of players by 32, quite a few matches and tournament days will be added to the Darts World Cup. Speaking with Jeff Stelling on talkSPORT, Hearn revealed that 90,000 tickets for this year's World Championship were purchased "in 15 minutes" and he claimed that nearly quadruple that could have been sold.

"I asked my people in head office, 'Tell me, how many could I have sold?' They said, somewhere over 300,000. Now that puts a different emphasis on it," he said. "Same as when we moved from the Circus Tavern all those years ago, now I’m looking at Alexandra Palace. And I’m saying, well, it only holds 3,500. I have to grow all the time. If you ever get complacent you go backwards."

"So, next year we will go from 96 to 128 players. We will add four more days, which is eight sessions, which is another 25,000 tickets. Sooner or later, I should be looking and saying: 'Do you know, like with snooker, I need a bigger venue'. I mean I can sell out any arena in the world. But can I do it for 30 or 40 sessions?

The 2025/26 World Darts Championship will be the 33rd in the history of the PDC. The very first edition of the PDC World Cup was in 1993/94 with 24 participants, held then at the Circus Tavern in Purfleet. Dennis Priestley then became the PDC's first world champion and earned £64,000 in prize money at the time. The 2024 world champion, Luke Humphries, earned half a million pounds from winning the world title in 2024.

It shows the extent of the sport's explosive growth into the mainstream, and Hearn is understandably keen to continue to capitalize on this amid a huge spike in popularity following the rise of teen sensation Littler. A record 4.8 million people watched via British channel Sky Sports as Humphries defeated Littler in the final.