UK pay-TV giant Sky Sports has reportedly signed a bumper new £125 million ($151.9 million) media rights deal with the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) off the back of another highly watched World Championship.
According to the Telegraph, the rights fee will be split over a five-year term from 2026 onwards and will see Sky retain the rights to the annual PDC World Championship, as well as its Premier League Darts, Darts World Matchplay, and World Cup of Darts.
Sky, which has been the PDC’s broadcaster since the body’s establishment in 1993, has beat out streaming players such as Netflix and Prime Video, both of which had supposedly been circling for the rights.
Earlier in the year, PDC chair Barry Hearn warned Sky that it would need to “up the ante” to secure rights in the future, telling the Telegraph that he valued a new deal at approximately £45 million per year, over three times more than the existing contract.
Although this new deal is short of that figure, £25 million a year, it is still more than double the £12 million per year that the body is currently receiving.
It has also been reported that the value of this new renewal could increase throughout the deal, which will run through the 2030 World Championship, should the tournament continue to grow in profile and popularity.
Hearn has suggested that some of the expanded media rights money may go towards growing the overall prize pool for the World Championship, where the winner currently takes home £500,000, but may soon earn as much as double.
The final of the 2024-25 edition drew another high average viewership owing to the heroics of teenage sensation Luke Littler.
The final, which saw Littler beat the legendary Michael van Gerwen 7-2 at London’s iconic Alexandra Palace, drew a peak viewership of 3.1 million on Sky Sports.
Although that figure fell below the record 3.7 million that tuned into the 2024 final, which saw Littler fall to rival Luke Humphries, it still represented a major draw for the sport and an indicator of its growth and the public interest in Littler in particular.
It is still the second most-watched darts final on Sky, with the record before last year’s final being Littler’s semi-final win over Rob Cross, at 2.32 million.
The tournament as a whole, which ran from December 14, 2024, through January 3, 2025, did, however, see an overall uptick in viewership across its seven rounds.
Viewership up to the semi-finals averaged 471,000, a growth of 39% year-on-year (YoY) on the 2023-24 edition, with the semi-finals together averaging 1.5 million in viewership.
While last year’s semi-finals drew more viewers, it shows that the initial rounds of the competition have become more of a draw as darts’ popularity has grown over the past year.
