World Darts Championship History: From a Nightclub to Ally Pally

The World Darts Championship is one of the strangest success stories in British sport. It started in a Nottingham nightclub, it spent a decade with two rival world champions, and it now sells out a London theatre for two weeks every January with people in fancy dress. The journey from one to the other is genuinely worth knowing, especially if you're thinking of watching it live.

1978: a nightclub, and the first champion

The first BDO World Darts Championship was held in 1978 at the Heart of the Midlands club in Nottingham, and it was won by Leighton Rees. That's the honest starting point of professional darts as a world championship sport — not a stadium, not a television arena, but a club.

For most of the 1980s, that format worked well enough. The BDO ran the sport, the World Championship got itself onto television, and darts became a genuine late-night favourite with British audiences.

The split: when darts had two world champions

Then the sport broke in half, and it's the single most important thing to understand about darts history.

In the early 1990s a group of leading players broke away from the BDO over how the sport was being run and who was getting paid. The breakaway formed the World Darts Council, which staged its first separate world championship in 1993. The WDC later became the Professional Darts Corporation, whose championship began in 1994.

The result was a decade of something quite unusual in world sport: two organisations, each running its own world championship, each with its own world champion. Nobody could point to one undisputed best player in the world, because there were two titles on the table.

The PDC eventually won the argument — not on the scoreboard, but on money and television. It pushed prize funds up, brought in the big production values, and the biggest names ended up playing there.

From the Circus Tavern to Ally Pally

The PDC World Championship spent its early years at the Circus Tavern in Purfleet, a venue that suited the sport's rougher edges very nicely. Then in 2008 it moved to Alexandra Palace in north London, and that's when it properly became an event.

Alexandra Palace gave the tournament something a pub or a tavern never could: a theatrical, two-week, ticketed spectacle with a walk-up atmosphere, fancy dress, and a crowd that treats the whole fortnight as its own festival. The move is a big part of why darts went from a late-night broadcast to something people queue for.

The most titles

Phil Taylor sits at the top of the PDC's world championship history with a record 14 titles. It's one of those numbers that sounds made up until you check the list of years and see it spread across nearly two decades.

• Phil Taylor holds the record with 14 PDC World Championship titles.
• The PDC championship has run from 1994, and has been at Alexandra Palace since 2008.
• The first world championship, run by the BDO, took place in 1978.

We've kept the BDO's own champions out of the record table here. Their title counts are widely reported but we couldn't verify them against a dedicated archive, and we'd rather leave a gap than print a number we can't stand behind.

The youngest champion

Luke Littler won the 2024/25 World Championship at the age of 17, taking the title on 3 January 2025. That's the youngest world champion the sport has produced, and the run to it is one of those things people who were there will keep telling you about.

That 2024/25 title is the most recent completed world championship we've been able to verify for this article. The tournament runs every winter, so anything after it needs checking against the PDC's own results before you quote it.

Why darts suits a group

Darts is one of the few sports where the crowd is the entertainment. Fancy dress is encouraged, the rounds are short, there's a bar, and nobody minds if you've had a few. For a group that's exactly the right recipe — and it's one of the days out people come back from talking about.

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