He’s the 17-year-old whose winning streak at the World Darts Championship made headlines, turned people on to the sport and secured him a spot in its lucrative Premier League. Britain’s newest sporting prodigy talks to Martin Samuel.
Luke Littler is talking me through his bedroom. “There’s a desk,” he says, “On my desk is my Xbox, monitor, speakers. Then I’ve got a drawer with darts, flights and stems. I’ve got trophies under my bed, trophies on my windowsill. And on top of my drawers, where all my deodorants are, I’ve got some more trophies.” He pauses. “Pretty much it.”
But Luke’s a teenager. Turned 17 on January 21. Is it a teenager’s bedroom, Luke? Do you keep it tidy, or are there three days of tracksuit bottoms draped over the back of the chair, T-shirts strewn across the floor? Is your poor old mum always picking up after you?
“My mum will clean it,” he says. “I don’t expect her to clean it, but if she can, cheers.” Later, Lisa, his mum, appears to suggest in an uncomplaining way that there is a bit more skivvy work than her son is letting on but, when Luke has finished with his clothes from the photoshoot, he comes out of the changing room with them all restored neatly to hangers and politely hands them back to Hannah, our stylist, to put on a rail. Maybe he’s not so different to the average teenager after all, a lot more obliging out of his home environment, like Kathy Burke’s obsequiously polite Perry to Harry Enfield’s surly Kevin. “Yes, please, Mrs Patterson. Yes, please, thank you …”
Where Littler differs from most teenagers – all teenagers in fact, every last one on the planet – is that he’s a genius in his chosen field. Darts. Not only does no boy of his age play darts as well as Littler, no boy of his age ever has. Very few adults too. Since the age of 14, Littler has redrawn what was thought possible for a player of his years, culminating in a run to the PDC World Darts Championship final at the age of 16. That his defeat by world No 1 Luke Humphries – whom he has played several times since and beaten every time – was considered something of an upset shows the exceptionality of his achievement. He followed that by making his World Series of Darts debut at the Bahrain Masters, which he won. On his way, he became the youngest player to complete a nine-dart finish, the shortest route from 501 to zero. He then achieved that same feat again at the Players Championship last week, en route to his first ranking tournament victory.
In a world of hyperbole – the renowned darts commentator Sid Waddell once compared Eric Bristow to Alexander the Great and suggested Phil “The Power” Taylor would have seen off the Norman invasion single-handed – Littler is the real deal. He genuinely is a phenomenon. He genuinely is a superstar. And in the final week of the World Championship, he became a household name. Littler is credited with the current boom time on the oche: participation up hugely, a 204 per cent increase in ticket sales, significant coverage in national newspapers for every competition in which he features.
How many times a day does someone say you’ve got them into darts? “Loads,” he says, with a precision that rather contradicts the presumption of a mathematical mind. “It’s just been crazy. I try to check my Instagram requests to see if anyone’s messaged me, but it’s just full of people saying, ‘I’ve got a dartboard, I’ve got a dartboard’.” Before we leave later in the day, the mother of Alana, our hair and makeup person, will tell Luke’s mum something very similar.
“When you go out for meals and you can hear people saying, ‘Look, it’s him. He’s over there,’ it does feel strange,” he says. “But then people just want pictures or autographs. So it’s not too extreme.”
And Littler likes to engage. A few days before we meet, he sat live-streaming on TikTok for several hours, just signing merchandise and answering questions. Jude Bellingham, his youthful equivalent in English football – although three years older – won’t be doing that. Littler rouses the crowd at events too, and they sometimes get carried away and heckle as his opponents are about to throw. “Mike [Michael van Gerwen, world No 2, three-time world champion] said everyone’s following me, everyone wants me to win,” Littler shrugs. “So they’ve just got to get on with it. If my opponent wants to think about what I’m doing, then that will mess his head up, because he’s thinking about me as well as his scores.”
It helps the boom that everyone thinks they can throw a dart. Like Littler, the sport is accessible. Every Olympics brings the forecast of a cycling renaissance, but cycling’s tough. Winter sets in, hills appear. It’s hard being Bradley Wiggins. The first swing of a golf club is unlikely to make anyone feel like Rory McIlroy; a net is a greater obstacle to a novice tennis serve than it ever looks at Wimbledon. Yet given a dart and board, we all presume a chucker’s chance. Not to play like Littler, but to get some numbers going.
In the late 1980s, Martin Amis was promoting his book London Fields, which features a bit of darts. On his Last Resort chat show, Jonathan Ross set Amis up with a dartboard. Amis thought he was quite good. The resulting footage suggested otherwise. Harry Maguire, the Manchester United defender, may think he’s handy too. When Littler was a guest at Manchester United – the team he supports – recently, Maguire scored 171 in a challenge, only to be beaten by Littler’s 180. But Maguire threw nine darts for his score, Littler three.
Not that London Fields is coming up in conversation any time soon. At 17, dressing up for The Times is the boring part of his day, balanced against the promised excitement of meeting some YouTubers later that afternoon. Charlotte, his publicist, explains the dichotomy. “He doesn’t know anyone that we know, and we don’t know anyone that he likes either,” she says, after an observation that he went to the same school, Padgate Academy in Warrington, as television and radio presenter Chris Evans is met with a blank look and a muttered, “Who?”
We could have passed a very pleasant few hours tossing names at each other and bonding over mutual incomprehension. Luke, who the hell is JaackMaate? A previous interviewer had raised Emma Raducanu as a comparable teen sensation and was met with a baffled stare. No shame there. The names on TikTok and YouTube that fascinate Littler would be an equal mystery to the majority reading this now. His walk-on music – darts players enter like boxers these days – is Greenlight by Pitbull ft. Flo Rida and LunchMoney Lewis. Of course it is. He chose it after a trip to WrestleMania 33 with Anthony, his father. Of course he did.
So that’s the gulf. Sometimes, it’s laugh-out-loud funny. After his World Championship heroics, for instance, in a desperate and not at all populist lunge for reflected glory, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Lucy Frazer was waiting to meet him back at his hotel. The following conversation ensues:
Charlotte: “You remember, Luke, you met her at the hotel. When we came back from the BBC and met her in one of the rooms.”
Luke: “What, the practice room?”
Charlotte: “Yes.”
Luke: “Right, yeah.”
Me: “Did you know who she was?”
Charlotte: “I must admit, I didn’t know who she was.”
Luke: “I just thought I was going for another interview.”
Charlotte: “He just gets rolled around, doesn’t know what’s going on, the poor guy. The prime minister wanted to meet him too.”
Me: “Were you bothered about meeting the prime minister, Luke?”
Luke: “Not really. I don’t really know what goes on with the prime minister, or whoever’s involved, really.”
Ah, not to worry, Luke. He’s just a bloke who meets darts players these days, in the hope one of them might vote for him. Luke’s too young to vote, of course, but having senior ministers hanging around his hotel in the hope some of his magic will rub off on them rather typifies the madness of modern politics, and of the world Littler now inhabits.
Whatever the future holds, his will remain one of the feelgood stories of 2024. Given that he won the Irish Open at 14, his was probably one of the feelgood stories of 2021, 2022 and 2023 too. It’s just that only darts aficionados knew about it back then.
So how do you get to be as good at darts as Littler? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall in the old joke. Practise, practise. During lockdown, he did nothing else. There is an app called Scolia that records the scores of darts players at home and 13-year-old Littler’s numbers were so good that some in the community thought he was cheating. “I was doing four, five hours a day, every day,” he recalls. “Nothing else to do. Started getting into different computer bots. The fella that organised competitions locally would do them online at weekends. You paid your tenner to enter. I won, and a few people said I was cheating. ‘Can he prove it when we all come back?’ they said. I was getting better and better and then we came out and it was back to normal. All of the people, out from their kitchens and bedrooms, into the pub and the darting world. And I proved it, didn’t I? I don’t get why I would cheat. If you’re that good, you don’t really need to.”
Want to know how good he is? Littler hasn’t even stopped growing yet. His opponents, the adults, the world champions, the No 1s, are men. They know their size, their height; their rhythm and method never change. Littler will get taller; his angles will alter. Not that he cares. He practises, he says, in bare feet, even though he wears shoes to compete. So he makes a height adjustment every time he plays and it does not seem to matter. His talent is a combination of repetitive behaviour – the lockdown marathons that honed his talent – and preternatural ability, an innate sophistication faced with a dartboard.
He was a prodigy, throwing darts in his nappies with relative accuracy, graduating to a real board at 4 – he used a stool to retrieve his arrows – then beating much older boys from the age of 9 when he joined St Helens Darts Academy. Soon after, he began competing against adults. At 12, he reached the final of a local club competition in Widnes with £500 (NZ$1038) prize money – and lost. He remembers crying. Because of the defeat? “No,” he shoots back. “Because of the 500 quid.”
So, picture that, for a minute: the 12-year-old Littler, in a pub or a club, surrounded by men, playing as an equal. This may be why, when he takes to the stage in the World Championship or the Premier League, Littler never looks fazed or intimidated. He’s known this pretty much all his life. He’s known adult attitudes, adult surroundings, adult language and emotions. Did it make him grow up quicker?
“I think it did,” he admits. “When I first joined a team, I was the youngest there, playing against men. But that became me, week in, week out. Widnes was one of the big competitions – 500 quid for the winner. All the others were £150, £160, but that was the big one and they got all these entries. Everyone wanted in. All men. They don’t like being beat by a kid.”
It annoyed them?
“Yeah.”
And you could tell that?
“Mmm. But that’s OK. They shouldn’t have to change their behaviour for me. And darts came from the pubs.”
It raises the question of what a 12-year-old would have done with £500 had he triumphed. “So that’s what, 2019?” he muses. “I think I was playing Fortnite then. I would have bought skins on there or summat.”
Translation: Fortnite is an online video game platform developed by Epic Games in 2017. It is available in six game modes that otherwise share the same general gameplay. The most popular version is Fortnite Battle Royale in which up to 100 players fight to be the last standing. Skins are outfits and cosmetic items that can be added to your Fortnite character, at a cost. Currently, there are 1800 of them.
Clear? Right, on we go. Littler wouldn’t spend his money on Fortnite skins these days. He’d buy packs on Fifa. Come on, it’s four years later, not 40. That’s what he said he would do with his World Championship prize money, £200,000 ($415,000). So what’s your Fifa team looking like, Luke? Now we’re on common ground.
“My ultimate team? That’s what I spend my money on,” he says. “Petr Cech, he’s good …”
He’s Chelsea, Luke. Aren’t you supposed to be a United man?
“This’ll go down well, then: Kompany [Manchester City] and Van Dijk [Liverpool] at the back. Trent [Alexander-Arnold, also Liverpool] at right-back. Zola [Chelsea], Thierry Henry [Arsenal], Kane [Tottenham Hotspur], Essien [Chelsea again – Luke, they’ll never let you back into Old Trafford]. You’ve got to spend money to get that team,” he concludes proudly. “That’s what I’ve always done. When I win money, I just treat myself, buy some packs, get some good players.”
By the end of this explanation, even Charlotte, a Manchester United fan, looks a little betrayed. He’s sensitive enough to notice, bless him. “Be fair,” Luke protests of his former darts opponent, “Maguire’s got about 40 pace. Sprint speed.” Charlotte looks perplexed. “Not quick,” Luke confirms.
The world he occupies and the one in which we all now live means that teenage enthusiasms for famous footballers can be twisted into snubs and slights or blown out of all proportion. This is pretty much what happened around Littler and kebabs during the World Championship. A throwaway line and a Facebook photograph of a late-night snack grew into such a national obsession that I am gently warned off kebab-related lines of inquiry in this interview. Just one? A lesson in the madness of fame, perhaps?
“It was just stupid, really,” says Littler. “I won my game, got back and it was, like, 12.30am and I’d had nothing since 3pm. That was literally the only place open. And my manager put it on Facebook and that’s when the whole world went crazy.”
Littler’s manager is Martin Foulds of ZXF Sports Management and, still, Prestige Building Supplies, Rochdale. He started off looking after world No 4 Nathan Aspinall and was made aware of this Warrington wonderkid who was then 13. Foulds would post a snap of Aspinall’s late-night snack of choice and garner a handful of likes. One gets the feeling he’s learning on the job as much as his client.
As Luke poses for his pictures, Foulds and Luke’s family try to get organised for the next Premier League tournament in Berlin. Flights are being booked on mobiles, baggage limits checked and explained. For all Luke’s renown, this is still darts. When Wayne Rooney broke into the Everton team at 16, he would immediately have inherited a regiment of club fixers and organisers for him and his family. Not so long ago, football clubs kept players’ passports under lock and key, only returning them for family summer holidays. Clubs find houses, buy cars, arrange doctors for sick kids: one telephone call resolves any problem. Darts isn’t like that. It’s blessing and curse.
“In the football world, I think they’d still have a takeaway,” says Littler, “but it’s not seen as a good thing. Darts players get what we want, really. It’s just about looking after yourself on tour. Soon as I got my tour card, my manager sat me down and said when you finish it could be 11 or 12, it’s literally all fast food, burgers or whatever. So I’ve got to look after myself, eat before I play. And when I’ve finished, even if I stay up to whenever, I just won’t eat. This is my new way of living. I love darts, and it’s going to be like this for 10, 15 years.”
Making Luke an ancient 32. There’s no doubt the life of a prodigy can exhaust very quickly. Littler’s been close to professional since he was 14. When the Alexandra Palace crowd chanted about him having school in the morning, it was rather ironic. By his own admission, he didn’t engage in formal education. He was off playing darts. “I was never really in,” he says. “When I was, I just got on with what I had to do; didn’t get involved with anything else. At the beginning they were a bit thingy with it, because I was having so much time off, but we were like, ‘He’s having time off because he’s doing well and winning youth titles. He’s getting to men’s titles and winning them as well.’ Then they got their head round it, and back end of last year I just went off to the development tour.” And GCSEs? “I did my sport. I got a pass in sport. That’s it. Just sport.”
Not even sport, really. Just darts. Then again, what’s a World Championship final at 16 if not an A*? And when Littler does talk darts, that’s when the puppy fat slides away and the lean, mean darting machine appears. “A robot”, four-time world champion Raymond van Barneveld called him. No wonder those adults in the pubs of Cheshire were snarling. Littler speaks of his career and the opposition with anything but childishness.
“All these players have been on top for many years – this is my first,” he says, suddenly serious. “In years to come, I’ll be used to the circuit, used to going to this place, that place. People say you learn from your losses, so this is what I’m going to be doing now. Playing against these guys every week. People are going to think I’m the guy to beat but, to me, that was only what it was like on the junior darts circuit. Whenever I did lose, it was a big shock.
“Probably all of them have been saying to themselves, ‘I’m not getting beat by a kid here.’ But they have been. These players have been on top for many years. Going into this season, there’s a lot of them defending prize money, so they’ve got to get so far in a tournament just to keep their world ranking up. Whereas if they go out first round, they’ll drop down, and that’s how I shoot up.” And he smiles as he says it, but it’s not the smile of a kid any more.
So, downstairs from his bedroom, Luke is describing the lower floor of the Warrington house. “There’s a big windowsill and a little windowsill and they’ve all got trophies and when you go down, as you come in the house, there’s a set of drawers with just trophies on it, and in the living room there’s trophies on the floor. Then I’ve got trophies in boxes in drawers. So, literally, no room.”
He’s going to need some house, I say, if he carries on like this. Play to the same age as Phil Taylor and his farewell appearance at the World Championships will be in 2065. Littler, 17, digests this information. “I’ve been playing a long time in the juniors, in the old British Darts Federation,” he says. ”I might just do 10 or 15 years and retire, if I’ve had enough.” A lot of old men will be very pleased to hear that.
Written by: Martin Samuel
© The Times of London
