Did the BDO/WDF Become Weak—or Did the PDC Become Exceptional?

 

For many darts fans, the answer will seem obvious.

The PDC World Championship is regarded as the pinnacle of the sport. It has the biggest names, the greatest financial rewards and a level of global attention that the old BDO World Championship—and its successor, the WDF World Championship—cannot match.

But has the standard of performance at the BDO and WDF championships really been as far behind as many people assume?

I have been analysing World Championship standards across nearly 50 years of darts using one simple measure: the average of the ten highest individual match averages recorded during each championship.

This is not a measure of the strength of the entire field. It does not account for prize money, tournament depth, the number of professional players or the difficulty of winning the title.

What it does attempt to capture is the peak performance level reached at each championship.

Rather than judging a tournament solely by its champion or final, it considers the ten best individual displays produced across the event. The same player can therefore appear more than once if they recorded several of the championship’s leading averages.

The results produced some surprising findings. In my view, they challenge some of the assumptions regularly made about the relative playing standards of the two World Championships.

The First Surprise: The BDO Was Consistently Strong

When fans discuss the BDO’s golden years, names such as Eric Bristow, John Lowe, Jocky Wilson and Bob Anderson immediately come to mind.

There is often a perception that this period represented a significantly higher standard than anything seen in the WDF game today.

The data does not entirely support that conclusion.

The average of the BDO’s ten highest match performances reached 97.23 in 1985 and regularly sat in the mid-90s throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

The 1985 tournament included several exceptional displays. Keith Deller became the first player to record a three-dart World Championship average above 100, producing 100.30 despite losing his quarter-final to John Lowe. Lowe averaged 97.83 in the same match, while Bristow recorded 99.66 in his semi-final.

However, strong top-end performance levels were not confined to that celebrated era.

The BDO’s figure reached 98.57 in 1999, 99.34 in 2002 and 97.45 as late as 2015. The modern WDF World Championship returned figures of 93.39 in 2024 and 95.14 in 2025.

There are naturally fluctuations from one year to another, but the overall picture is one of considerable consistency.

The more I examined the numbers, the harder it became to support the idea that the leading standard at the BDO—and later the WDF—had simply collapsed.

The Split Did Not Create an Immediate Gulf

Another common assumption is that the 1990s split immediately transferred virtually all of the game’s quality to the newly formed organisation that eventually became the PDC.

Again, the data presents a more nuanced picture.

The first PDC World Championship was held in 1994. Fourteen years later, the difference between the championships’ leading performances was still surprisingly small.

In 2008, the BDO World Championship recorded a top-ten performance average of 95.31. The equivalent PDC figure was 96.29.

The difference was less than one point.

That does not mean the two organisations were identical. By then, the PDC had developed a stronger commercial position and was attracting many of the sport’s leading professionals.

Nevertheless, if we look specifically at the ten best match performances produced at the two World Championships, there was still remarkably little between them.

Even well over a decade after the split, the highest level reached on the two stages remained broadly comparable in certain years.

The Turning Point Arrived in 2009

If there is one year when the PDC begins to pull decisively away using this particular measure, it appears to be 2009.

The average of its ten highest match performances increased from 96.29 in 2008 to approximately 104.02 in 2009.

That is an extraordinary single-year rise.

When we look beneath that figure, one name appears repeatedly: Phil Taylor.

Taylor produced a 110.94 average in the final, 108.80 in his quarter-final, 103.44 in the semi-final, 102.57 in the second round and 101.63 in the last 16.

Five of the tournament’s ten leading match averages belonged to the same player.

Raymond van Barneveld also contributed several three-figure performances, including a 106.68 in the quarter-finals and 101.18 in the final.

It is difficult to believe that the sudden increase and Taylor’s dominance were unrelated.

The PDC had undoubtedly developed a stronger collection of leading players, but its 2009 figure was also heavily influenced by one exceptional individual producing five elite performances within the same tournament.

That raises an important question about how the data should be interpreted.

Was the widening difference purely evidence of the PDC’s greater organisational strength and depth? Or was it partly caused by arguably the greatest player of all time dragging the championship’s peak numbers upwards?

The answer is probably a combination of both.

The Taylor Era Changed the Comparison

Between 2009 and 2013, the PDC consistently outperformed the BDO using this measure, often by a margin of between six and ten points.

By this stage, there was no realistic doubt that the PDC had become the stronger championship.

However, something important can be overlooked when that period is described simply as the decline of the BDO.

The BDO was still generally producing top-ten performance averages in the low-to-mid 90s. That was broadly consistent with much of its previous history.

Its standard had not necessarily collapsed. Instead, the PDC had accelerated away from it.

Taylor played an enormous role in that change, but he was not operating entirely alone. Van Barneveld, Adrian Lewis, Gary Anderson and other leading professionals helped create a championship in which three-figure averages became increasingly common.

The comparison had changed.

The BDO was often delivering similar leading standards to those it had produced for decades. The problem was that maintaining those standards was no longer enough to remain close to the rapidly improving PDC.

Then Came Michael van Gerwen

If Taylor accelerated the separation between the championships, Michael van Gerwen helped take it to another level.

The biggest gap in this dataset occurred in 2017.

The ten highest PDC match averages that year produced an average of approximately 107.07. The BDO equivalent was 95.88—a difference of around 11.19 points.

Van Gerwen’s 114.05 against Raymond van Barneveld in the semi-final remains the highest match average ever recorded at a World Championship.

Remarkably, Van Barneveld averaged 109.34 in defeat.

Van Gerwen also averaged 108.06 in the final and 105.24 in the second round. Gary Anderson contributed performances of 107.68, 105.90 and 104.93, while Cristo Reyes, Peter Wright and Darren Webster also appeared among the championship’s ten leading averages.

This was no longer simply one extraordinary player dominating the list.

Van Gerwen was setting a remarkable standard, but numerous opponents and fellow contenders were also producing averages that would once have been considered exceptional.

The PDC had reached a level of scoring that had never previously been seen across a World Championship.

Importantly, though, the BDO’s figure of 95.88 was not particularly unusual when viewed against its own history. It sat comfortably within the range produced during many earlier championships.

Once again, the story appears to be less about the BDO suddenly becoming much weaker and more about the PDC becoming extraordinarily strong.

What About the Modern WDF Championship?

The BDO World Championship ended after the 2020 edition, with the WDF staging its first World Championship in 2022.

The modern tournament is sometimes dismissed as a shadow of the old Lakeside championship. Its prize money, profile and playing depth cannot currently match the PDC, but the leading performance figures are more competitive historically than that description might suggest.

The 2024 WDF World Championship produced a top-ten average of 93.39. That increased to 95.14 in 2025.

The latter figure is clearly below the level of the modern PDC World Championship. However, it is comparable with numerous BDO championships staged across the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

That does not prove that the present WDF field is as deep as the strongest BDO fields.

A top-ten average cannot tell us how strong the 30th, 40th or 50th-best player in a tournament might be. Nor does it measure how many serious title contenders entered each event.

It does, however, show that the modern WDF World Championship is still producing leading match performances within the historical range associated with Lakeside.

In other words, the peak standard is not necessarily far removed from the BDO championships remembered so fondly by many supporters.

The major difference is that the WDF now exists alongside a PDC that has reached an unprecedented level.

Measuring Peak Quality Rather Than Complete Depth

This distinction matters.

If the question is which championship currently has the stronger overall field, the answer is unquestionably the PDC.

The leading players in the world compete there, the prize money is vastly greater and the depth of professional quality extends much further through the draw.

The results of this analysis should not be used to argue otherwise.

But if the question is whether the BDO and WDF World Championships have always been dramatically weaker at their highest performance level, the answer becomes much less straightforward.

A comparison of the ten best match averages suggests that the peak level remained relatively close for many years after the split.

When a major gap eventually emerged, it was not caused solely by the BDO suddenly losing all of its quality. It also coincided with the PDC producing Taylor at his most dominant, followed by Van Gerwen and an increasingly powerful group of full-time professionals.

That is a substantially different story.

The Littler Factor

Many people believe that Luke Littler’s emergence could push the PDC even further ahead.

That may happen in future, but the data suggests that the separation has not yet grown significantly beyond the peak of the Van Gerwen era.

The PDC advantage was approximately 11.19 points in 2017. According to my dataset, the difference in 2024 was 11.09.

For now, the modern era led by Littler and Luke Humphries appears to be maintaining the extraordinary standards reached during Van Gerwen’s peak years rather than extending the gap dramatically.

Littler could still have a huge long-term influence on the sport. His emergence may inspire greater participation, raise expectations and push his leading rivals to improve.

However, the PDC was already operating at an exceptional level before his arrival.

Going into this project, I expected to find clear evidence that the BDO—and later the WDF—had steadily weakened over time.

Instead, I found something rather different.

The leading standard at the BDO and WDF championships appears to have remained surprisingly consistent across nearly five decades.

The strongest performances have generally fallen within a relatively narrow range, whether they were produced during the eras of Bristow and Lowe, Martin Adams and Ted Hankey, Jim Williams and Scott Mitchell, or the present WDF generation.

There have been stronger and weaker individual editions, but the data does not show a simple, continuous collapse.

The much clearer movement has occurred within the PDC.

From 2009 onwards, driven initially by Taylor and later by Van Gerwen, Anderson, Humphries, Littler and a much deeper group of elite professionals, the PDC World Championship accelerated to levels never previously seen in darts.

That does not make the two championships equal.

The PDC World Championship is comfortably stronger overall, and its depth extends far beyond the handful of leading performances examined here.

But the figures do challenge the idea that the BDO/WDF World Championship became dramatically weaker than everything that came before it.

Perhaps the better question is not simply whether the BDO and WDF became weak.

Perhaps it is whether the PDC became exceptionally strong.

The evidence suggests that it did.