PDC chief confirms plan for major change to World Darts Championship

The PDC will "hopefully" grow in size for the 2026 edition, with 128 players beginning the tournament at Ally Pally.

Since 2018, a field of 96 players has been in place. Two thirds of the field enter in the first round, with the 32 seeded players getting a bye to the second.

That setup will remain in place for the 2025 edition, which gets underway in December and holds its final in the first week of the new year as However, the size of the field could well increase 12 months later.

Matt Porter, CEO of the has been working on increasing the starting field to make the competition a straight knockout tournament. While the 2025 tournament has arrived too early for the change, there's optimism we're not too far away.

READ MORE:

READ MORE:

"Yeah, we are close to that," Porter told the YouTube channel when asked about the increase to 128 players. "It’s not there yet but we are quite close to that," he continued, suggesting "Hopefully" the change can come in for the 2026 championship.

In the most recent edition, the opening round featured 32 automatic qualifiers and 32 who came through a round or more of qualifying. The winners of those ties each met a seeded player in round two.

Just five qualifiers made it into round three of the 2024 tournament, but one of those was finalist Luke Littler. The teenager upset 20th seed Andrew Gilding in round two, also beating Matt Campbell, Raymond van Barneveld, Brendan Dolan and Rob Cross before falling to Luke Humphries in the final.

Is the PDC World Darts Championship ready to expand to 128 players? Have your say in the

Porter was also asked about ticketing for the upcoming World Championship. Tickets sold out before making it to general sale, and the CEO made comparisons with the recently-announced Oasis tour.

"If you look at Oasis and things like that, this isn't a darts problem, it's an industry problem," he said. "We had the same number of people trying to access World Championship tickets as they had trying to buy Glastonbury tickets - Glastonbury is selling 300,000 tickets, we're selling 80,000 or whatever it is.

"It's so difficult to get that process exactly right if you're a ticket company. Your has to be so advanced, and also the people that are trying to cheat that system are so advanced.

"It's very easy to throw words around like 'bots' without really understanding what they mean. Don't forget, as well, that a lot of the tickets you see on resale sites don't exist, they're people hedging - they're trying to sell a ticket for £1,000, and as soon as they sell it for £1,000 they try to buy it for £800 and make £200 profit."