By James Regan
Professional darts can be a really difficult sport to earn a living in, after the release of the 2024 PDC calendar it’s not good news for some.
From this moment onwards The Player Championships will be a mid-week event, previously being hosted on the weekends.
Roughly a third of players on the PDC tour have jobs alongside darts, this potentially means for those going to events throughout the week is going to be a challenge.
After speaking with Matthew Porter, PDC CEO he said:
It will prevent challenges for some of them, you know, but ultimately we’re running a professional sport, not a semi professional sport.
We have a semi-professional tour, so If you want to be a full time professional player, then these are the kind of commitments that have to be made.
There isn’t another sport in the world that is played at the professional level exclusively on weekends.”
Matthew on people who have jobs and are on the tour:
There might be people out there who have jobs, but those people might be self-employed. They might work from home. They might actually work at weekends and for the events to be in midweek suits them better.
You’re going to get some players who have got a Monday to Friday job who this won’t be necessarily convenient for, but if they’ve got a tolerant boss or a flexible working pattern, then they can work around it.
You can’t accommodate everyone when you’re dealing with 128 individuals. You can’t accommodate every individual circumstance, it’s just not possible.”
Matthew is keen for the PDC to continue growing as it has done for the past 20 years, and is focused on keeping that development:
“The bigger picture for the sport is to move the pro tour events to midweek. It’s better for professional players and it’s better for the sport, because it frees up weekends which enables us to then in the long run increase the amount of content that we can deliver to fans at weekends.”
The player championships continue today as we are into the round of 16 players who remain.
