Quest For Q School | Q4QS Statistical Research
Luke Littler has changed the way people think about age in professional darts. Here is a player who reached the very top of the sport before most people have even worked out what they want to do for a living.
And he isn't alone. Players such as Josh Rock and Gian van Veen have emerged through the professional ranks, while younger talents like Mitchell Lawrie suggest there could be plenty more to come.
But it got me thinking.
Is professional darts genuinely getting younger, or have a handful of exceptional young players simply made it look that way?
I decided to investigate using 19 years of PDC world rankings, examining the top 20 players in every year from 2007 through to 2025.
That's 380 ranking positions across 19 annual snapshots. I matched the players with their dates of birth and examined how the average age and the balance between different age groups have changed.
The results were quite revealing.
The PDC top 20 is getting younger
In 2007, the average age of a player in the world's top 20 was 38.70 years.
By 2025, that figure had fallen to 35.15 years.
That's a reduction of 3.55 years.
However, the really interesting part is what happened between those dates.
| Year | Average age | Players aged 40+ |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 | 38.70 | 11 |
| 2010 | 39.65 | 11 |
| 2015 | 39.80 | 11 |
| 2020 | 40.50 | 11 |
| 2021 | 37.20 | 7 |
| 2022 | 37.10 | 6 |
| 2023 | 36.90 | 5 |
| 2024 | 36.55 | 5 |
| 2025 | 35.15 | 5 |
For much of the period, the average age fluctuated around 39 or 40.
Indeed, as recently as 2020, the world's top 20 averaged 40.5 years old.
Then something changed.
The average has fallen in each of the five subsequent annual snapshots. By 2025, the top 20 was more than five years younger on average than it had been in 2020.
So this doesn't look like a steady decline spanning the whole 19 years. It looks more like a relatively stable period followed by a substantial recent change.
It's not just about the teenagers
Perhaps my favourite finding concerns players in their thirties.
When discussing younger players, it's tempting to concentrate entirely on teenagers and those in their early twenties. But they are only part of the story.
Look at how the top 20 was divided into age groups in 2007, 2020 and 2025.
| Age group | 2007 | 2020 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 25 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| 25–29 | 0 | 2 | 2 |
| 30–39 | 7 | 7 | 10 |
| 40 and over | 11 | 11 | 5 |
| Total | 20 | 20 | 20 |
Back in 2007, more than half of the top 20 were aged 40 or older.
Even in 2020, the same was true.
By 2025, there were only five.
Meanwhile, players aged 30–39 now account for half the world's top 20.
That suggests something more significant than a few teenage prodigies suddenly appearing.
The age profile of professional darts is changing across an entire generation.
Players in their thirties are increasingly occupying places that, historically, were more commonly held by players in their forties and fifties.
And at the same time, more players under 30 are appearing alongside them.
Are players breaking through at younger ages?
I also looked at players entering the top 20 between successive annual ranking snapshots.
The findings support the wider age trend.
| Period | Top-20 arrivals | Average arrival age |
|---|---|---|
| 2008–2014 | 26 | 39.65 |
| 2015–2020 | 22 | 36.82 |
| 2021–2025 | 17 | 32.76 |
The average age of an arriving player has dropped by almost seven years between the earliest and latest periods.
In 2008–2014, only three of the 26 arrivals were under 30.
In 2021–2025, seven of the 17 arrivals were under 30.
There is an important qualification here: these figures include players returning to the top 20, not just players making their first-ever appearance. They also use annual snapshots, so a player who briefly entered and left between snapshots would not be captured.
Nevertheless, the direction is striking.
The changing age of players entering the elite appears to be one of the main reasons the overall top 20 is getting younger.
Is the Development Tour making a difference?
This is where the investigation becomes particularly interesting.
The PDC Youth Tour began in 2011, developing into the Development Tour we know today. The Junior Darts Corporation also helped create a more structured competitive environment for younger players.
Could these developments be contributing to the changes we are now seeing?
There are certainly some compelling examples.
Michael van Gerwen won a PDC Youth Tour event in 2011 and appeared in our 2012 top-20 snapshot.
Luke Humphries won Development Tour events in 2017 and appeared in our top 20 in 2021.
Josh Rock enjoyed Development Tour success in 2022 and was in the top 20 by 2024.
Luke Littler won Development Tour events in 2023 before entering the top 20 in 2024, aged just 17.
Gian van Veen is another example of a player progressing through the youth system into the world's elite.
However, not everyone follows the same path.
Martin Schindler and Mike De Decker both had Development Tour success several years before reaching the top 20.
This tells us that the route from promising youngster to established professional is far from identical for everyone.
It also suggests that the development system may be helping to produce a larger pool of potential elite players, rather than simply making every player progress faster.
Our research has established a connection between some top-20 players and the Development Tour. It has not established that the Tour caused the overall decline in age.
That is an important distinction.
What do the Development Tour rankings tell us?
I've also started collecting the final Development Tour rankings for 2020–2025.
They contain plenty of familiar names.
Ryan Meikle topped the 2020 rankings, Nathan Rafferty headed the 2022 list, Gian van Veen led in 2023 and Wessel Nijman finished first in 2024.
Luke Littler was second in the 2023 standings, while Josh Rock was second in 2022.
But here's the question I find particularly interesting.
How many Development Tour players actually go on to become established members of the world's top 20, 32 or 64?
And is that percentage increasing?
We shouldn't judge the 2024 or 2025 Development Tour players too quickly. Many have barely begun their professional careers, while the earlier generations have had years to establish themselves.
A future Q4QS study will compare different Development Tour generations over equivalent periods, looking at how many reach the professional elite and how long it takes.
That should help us understand whether the youth development system is genuinely improving the progression rate.
Will the PDC top 20 continue getting younger?
The obvious next question is whether this trend will continue.
I think there are reasonable grounds to suspect it might, although I wouldn't expect the average age to keep falling at the extraordinary rate seen since 2020.
After all, today's young stars will eventually get older themselves.
Luke Littler will be 28 in 2035. A player can spend more than a decade near the top of professional darts and still be relatively young compared with some of the established stars of previous generations.
But maintaining a younger top 20 requires a continuing supply of talented newcomers.
If the Development Tour, JDC and wider junior darts structure continue producing players capable of competing at the highest level, the balance could shift further.
A cautious illustrative scenario would put the average top-20 age somewhere around 34–36 by 2030, with a similar or slightly younger profile by 2035.
That isn't a formal prediction. We would need a more detailed model of player progression, retirement and ranking turnover to produce one.
For now, the historical evidence is strong enough to say that the PDC top 20 has undergone a substantial change in its age profile.
It is not strong enough to guarantee that the same rate of change will continue.
Has darts entered a new era?
I began this investigation wondering whether Luke Littler was simply an extraordinary exception.
And, of course, he is an extraordinary talent.
But the figures suggest that something much broader is happening.
For much of the period between 2007 and 2020, the world's top 20 remained dominated by players approaching or beyond 40.
Since then, the balance has changed considerably.
Players in their thirties now make up half the top 20. There are fewer players aged 40 and over, and the players arriving in the rankings are generally younger.
Perhaps the biggest change isn't that darts has suddenly become a sport for teenagers.
It's that players no longer appear to need quite as many years of professional experience before they can establish themselves among the world's best.
Whether this represents a permanent structural change or an exceptional generation is something the next decade should help reveal.
And that is why I'll be following the Development Tour generations particularly closely.
The players who could shape the PDC rankings of 2030 and 2035 may already be playing in those competitions today.
Research notes and sources
This article uses 380 PDC top-20 ranking positions from 19 annual snapshots between 2007 and 2025. Player ages were calculated at the dates of those snapshots, generally in November, rather than on 31 December.
Birth dates were cross-referenced against historical player records and Wikipedia. Annual arrivals were identified by comparing consecutive top-20 snapshots. All age comparisons are descriptive; they do not establish causation.
Research and analysis were undertaken for Quest For Q School (Q4QS), with AI assistance in data processing and drafting.
Sources:
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