Luke Littler risks wrath of darts chief Barry Hearn with request after he told manager to ‘shut up’

Luke Littler risks wrath of darts chief Barry Hearn with request after he told manager to ‘shut up’

Barry Hearn has revealed that Luke Littler’s camp asked for a personal chef to be brought to Premier League Darts venues — and received a typically blunt response from the darts supremo that left nobody in any doubt about where the sport’s priorities lie.

The Matchroom chief, who turns 78 in June, shared the story while speaking in Sheffield on Thursday — the same evening Littler was winning Night Eight in Berlin — in characteristically deadpan fashion. Hearn pointedly declined to name the player, though made clear they were the current world champion.

“Even the darts players, even they moan. Someone said to me the other day, I won’t tell you who he was because he’s quite well known. But bear in mind he’s the current world champion. He said something about criticising the food in the Premier League venues,” Hearn said.

The request that followed apparently pushed Hearn’s patience to its limit.

“You know, ‘Can we have a chef in?’ His manager, ‘can we have his chef in?’ I went, ‘for fuck’s sake, it’s a darts tournament. What are you talking about? Shut up and drink your lager.'”

The anecdote drew laughter and perfectly illustrated Hearn’s no-nonsense approach to the sport he has helped transform — a sport that now sees its world champion potentially earning sums that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. The irony of a man on the verge of an estimated £6 million annual haul requesting a private chef at a Premier League venue was not lost on the veteran promoter.

“I don’t know what Littler is going to earn this year. Six million? Ain’t bad for a game of darts, is it?” Hearn said. “Some of the old boys, people like Phil, they look at the money. You know, Phil Taylor was throwing similar averages to Luke. Better even. But now it’s just time and place, isn’t it? How much are you worth on a specific day?”

Hearn was speaking in the context of addressing darts’ broader commercial explosion, which he described as arriving at a pivotal moment when major broadcast contracts across Sky, Germany, Poland and Scandinavia all came up for renewal simultaneously as Littler emerged on the scene.

“We did with darts. All of a sudden, three or four of our biggest TV contracts come up for renewal. And it just came at the right time where everybody’s going, ‘Oh, we can’t lose it.’ Look at the numbers. It’s about timing,” he said. “You only need one little moment, and you can just build on it from it.”

That observation speaks to the scale of the shift in darts’ commercial standing. The sport’s World Championship winner now takes home £1 million — double the prize on offer to the World Snooker champion at the Crucible. Yet Hearn’s message was that no amount of financial success changes the fundamental identity of the sport. It is still, at its core, a pub game made extraordinary, and the idea of Michelin-standard catering appearing at a Premier League venue sits awkwardly alongside that heritage.

Littler, meanwhile, will have done little to quiet the conversation with his performance in Berlin on Thursday night, where he averaged 106.36, landed two successive 170 checkouts to defeat Michael van Gerwen 6-4 in the final, and went top of the Premier League standings. If he is going to earn £6 million, at least Thursday night’s shift was fully earned — whatever was on the dressing room menu.