At the start of the tournament it was still expected that this longest of all darts tournaments – with 128 participants now bigger and longer than ever – would wear down the reigning, only 18-year-old 2025 world champion Luke Littler. Like all world champions since 2016. Nobody has managed to defend their title in the past ten editions. Not even the former long-term dominant Michael van Gerwen.
At the end of the tournament you have to say about the 2026 darts world champion Luke Littler: His victory was never in danger.
Littler’s 7-1 triumph in the final went like almost all of his matches in the tournament. The challenger, in this case the 23-year-old Dutchman Pieter Gerard “Gian” van Veen, managed to win the first set. Most of Littler’s other opponents on Littler’s path to the final also denied the young Englishman the first set or won it. But that only motivated Littler to play at a level that no other World Cup participant could reach.
The born darter
A level that seems to reveal him as a new type of arrow athlete: the native darter. Littler began playing the sport long-term and seriously when he was a toddler, aided by the increasing popularity of darts from the 2000s onwards. His throwing style has a natural, natural quality that in many sports can only be achieved through early practice. An early practice that is missing from most of his older competitors who came to darts later.
In the final, this was reflected in the often perfectly thrown three darts, the 180, with which Littler opened the most of all legs. In the World Cup mode of arrow sports, you have to win three of these legs in order to win a set, seven of which are needed in the final to win the World Cup title. Littler’s continued initial precision forced his opponent to start throwing arrows with equal precision. No competitor could withstand this constant pressure.
Not even Gian van Veen, who stood out during the tournament as the only one who could play at Littler’s level. The young Dutchman, a studied aeronautical engineer and double Youth World Championship champ, has been on the tour for three years. His performance curve initially rose slowly but steadily, then went up steeper and steeper. At this World Cup he threw out former world champions Luke Humphries and Gary Anderson. However, it turned out that he had not yet risen to Luke Littler’s level.
The archenemies of the fans
Van Veen also couldn’t follow the young double world champion from the second set onwards. The result: Compared to van Veen, Littler got more than twice as many attempts at the small double fields that you have to hit to end a leg – which Littler managed about as confidently and casually as the average World Cup visitor orders a pitcher lager.
The alcohol-loving and mostly pumped-up crowd at Alexandra Palace, in the iconic venue for the World Arrows Championships, affectionately known as Ally Pally, caused one of the few irritations on Littler’s way to winning the title again: they booed the young world champion. Obviously an unfamiliar situation for Littler.
The darts prodigy reached the final of his debut World Cup in 2024 amid frenzied cheers and was carried to the title in 2025. At that time, however, he was surrounded by the aura of the new, the special and – despite his already impressive performance back then – the underdog. And the Ally Pally crowd loves it.
Dominance, predictability and short games, on the other hand, are among the fans’ declared arch-enemies. For the 2026 World Cup, Littler, who has only lost one World Cup match in his life, now embodies exactly this trinity of dart horrors. When ex-world champion Rob Cross was the only opponent of the World Cup to win two sets against Littler in the round of 16 and was preparing to threaten him, the audience used the power given to them to trigger uncertainty in athletes and thus drama and tension. There were boos when Littler made important throws.
