At the back of a corridor of fans, while he awaited his stage walk, Luke Littler was doing selfies with anyone who could lean far enough to get their phone in his face. That’s how relaxed he is. Or how much fun it seems.
This was Thursday night at the Premier League Darts in Newcastle’s Utilita Arena and it only required Littler to go 2-0 up in his first-round match for the sell-out crowd to be singing his name. That’s 8,000 people dressed as jockeys, bakers and traffic cones all walking in this Littler wonderland.
In other words, it is seven weeks since Littler, then aged 16, reached the PDC World Darts Championship final at Alexandra Palace and the noise hasn’t died down. In fact, it grows whichever oche he is gracing. The Premier League Darts has had record sales; just for instance, the O2 arena has never been sold out for the darts before, but it is now — and that’s for an event in late May.
So I’ve come to Newcastle to try to discover what it looks like being the boy at the centre of all this. You could say his life’s been turned upside down. He may argue it’s been turned the right way up.
He is certainly doing what he only ever wanted. What he probably didn’t factor in was being the biggest name in the sport, its marquee selling point, the subject of a hundred and one publicity demands and interview requests.
There is, you may reasonably suggest, an essential hypocrisy here, in a column about the sudden invasion of fame on a young man in a newspaper where we are not only putting him on the back of the sports section today but also have a cover interview with him in our magazine.
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Yet Littler is the person that everyone wants a piece of. Since Alexandra Palace, he signed endorsement deals with the fashion retailer boohooMAN and Target Darts, the latter “believed to be a multimillion-pound agreement”. I’m not sure about that, but his sport isn’t holding back on squeezing the most of him too.
This event, the Premier League, stretches for 17 nights over 3½ months; the world’s top four qualify, four more are invited and the organisers didn’t need to invite Littler but, of course, they did. Likewise, he could have said no, but he didn’t. And it’s the same for World Series events, everyone’s just saying yes. It’s not clear who’s going to say no.
Interestingly, the people questioning this are his opposition. Here in Newcastle, he was knocked out at the semi-final stage by Michael van Gerwen, the three-times world champion from the Netherlands. At the end of the night, Van Gerwen made a very parental plea.
“How much pressure the press and everyone puts on his shoulders is insane,” he said. “I don’t think it’s fair on him. Let him enjoy his life, let him do his own thing. If you keep doing this, I’ve seen a lot of kids in his position drift off. I don’t think that’s good for the sport.”
Van Gerwen’s is not a lone voice. At the World Championship, Gary Anderson, a two-times world champion, turned on the media, saying: “He [Littler] has done well, but what happens if it goes Pete Tong now? You boys have ruined it, haven’t you?”
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• Martin Samuel interviews Luke Littler: ‘I may retire at 27. If I’ve had enough’
Anderson then name-checked Josh Rock as “another youngster that all you press and everything else have absolutely destroyed”, which seems a bit harsh on Rock, who went from unknown chicken farmer to shooting star in 2022 but is still ranked No 21 in the world.
A better example might have been Kirk Shepherd, a sheet-metal worker from Kent, who, before Littler, was the youngest World Championship finalist (21) in 2008. In his words, he “went a bit doolally” thereafter “and got carried away by it all” and within four years was living solo “in a flea-ridden one-bed flat”.
Every sport — every walk of fame — has its cautionary tales. The doubt here is whether darts is geared to heed the caution. Would Sir Alex Ferguson have let one of his Manchester United kids do a magazine cover shoot? Never.
The key differences here are that darts is an individual sport and it has never seen anything like the Littler phenomenon. In Littler’s favour is the fact that he wasn’t a chicken farmer from nowhere; he’s been winning events against older competitors since he was 14, so you could say he’s been groomed for this.
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You could also say that nothing could prepare him for it. Darts is a relentless occupation; Littler may well play 100 nights this year. Before Newcastle, he was doing three nights in Leicester. Next week it’s Exeter and then Butlin’s in Minehead and, at every one, he is the game’s new gimmick, its star draw.
On the evidence of a Thursday in Newcastle, it just looks great fun, he seems happy and the level of his performance hasn’t dropped. But this is the strangest of social experiments and how high or low he’ll be after four years of it, really no one can tell.
RFU owes us a soulful, new Twickenham after selling off body parts
What is Twickenham really worth? This was a question we didn’t expect to be considering until this week when The Times broke the news that the RFU had been considering selling off the stadium and entering a co-ownership agreement at Wembley.
What is Twickenham worth? Well, first, the RFU’s conclusion, in its “Twickenham Masterplan” report, was that the deal didn’t stack up financially. But then it also raised the question: what is Twickenham worth to us emotionally?
The answer will be different for each individual. We all fall in love differently, thank God. My heart always quickens when I’m back ringside at Centre Court; the Principality Stadium always feels the ultimate rugby experience; I love the simplicity and conviviality of the Richmond Athletic Ground. I can’t imagine these being touched; they kind of feel sacred. Twickenham has its incredible history and, for sure, there will be many whose heartbeat quickens at the sight of the old concrete monolith and feel this is touchable too. But that’s all subjective.
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The conflict here is that it is a national stadium that isn’t any longer accessible to the nation. Kick-off times for both England’s Guinness Six Nations games this year are late afternoon. That means travelling and getting home, even from Birmingham, is problematic. Increasingly Twickenham is for the home counties.
Furthermore, the RFU has long worked a model that prices out many. The thinking essentially is that if you charge high numbers, you may be pricing out potential customers, but the payback is that you then have more to reinvest into the game. This game plan, however, becomes less convincing when the high pricing becomes a necessity to get the RFU back in the black rather than to grow the community game.
At least this whole debate starts from a good place. When the RFU (in the form of the Six Nations) agreed a deal with CVC three years ago, the intention was to invest in the game to grow it. The Twickenham Masterplan is a reflection of that: to generate income to plough back into the game by developing Twickenham as a facility. Good intentions, maybe, but when will the game actually see the fruits of any such investment?
In 2018, Twickenham opened its new East Stand packed with whopping hospitality opportunities. The initial £54 million bill for this had ended up nearer £70 million. The rebuild was eventually achieved by exchanging 40 per cent of the catering profits with Compass for the price of £95 million.
That deal wasn’t far from the CVC deal whereby CVC paid £90 million for 14 per cent of the RFU’s commercial income. In other words, the RFU is in the habit selling off bits of assets to make investments to encourage long-term return.
In a similar vein, after cost-cutting measures led to every single RFU community coach and rugby development officer being made redundant in 2020, the RFU’s staff numbers have increased by 17 per cent in two years (though not with rugby development personnel). At some point, are we also going to see these decisions reflected in the growth of the game?
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Also of interest in the Twickenham Masterplan was the fact that 11 different consultants and advisers had been hired for 13 different sets of assessments. The RFU wouldn’t share the costs of these pieces of work; maybe, again, there will be a return on all this somewhere down the line, though the immediate conclusion of the masterplan was that, actually, it all cost too much and the RFU couldn’t afford it.
Again, maybe all this long-term prospecting is smart management. For now, it just seems that the RFU is selling off its body parts to achieve smaller percentage returns — and even then it seems a very long way off before anyone cashes in, before regional development officers are back in work, before the community game really benefits, or before a new generation can fall in love with a new, improved Twickenham.