‘How the hell am I gonna pay?’ – Darts star lifts lid on ‘earth-shattering’ moment bankruptcy loomed as he owed £500,000

‘How the hell am I gonna pay?’ – Darts star lifts lid on ‘earth-shattering’ moment bankruptcy loomed as he owed £500,000

Mervyn King has opened up on the terrifying moment he realised he owed more than £500,000 to HMRC — and admitted he spent years burying his head in the sand rather than confronting a debt he had no idea how to repay.

The 59-year-old Norfolk thrower, who reached the semi-final of the World Championship and was runner-up in the Premier League during a distinguished career, spoke candidly about the tax nightmare on the Tungsten Tales podcast — a story that ended with him being declared bankrupt, stripped of his assets, and left to rebuild from scratch.

The root of the problem, King explained, was a fundamental misunderstanding from the very beginning of his professional career. He believed, as many players of his generation did, that prize money was classified as winnings rather than earnings — and therefore not subject to income tax. It was only a chance comment from ten-time world champion Trina Gulliver that made him question whether he had it completely wrong.

“Very early in my career I was under the impression what you had won was earnings, not winnings,” King said. “Now winnings you don’t pay tax on. That’s the way it was — £500 here, £1,000 there during the early part of the years. It wasn’t actually until I got to Lakeside and heard the words from Trina Gulliver: ‘I hope you are paying your money and paying your tax’. I went away and looked at it.”

What he found was devastating. The bill had been growing silently for years, and by the time King fully grasped its scale, it had reached a figure that felt impossible to comprehend, let alone clear.

“I owe HMRC this amount of money,” he recalled thinking. “How the hell am I going to pay this? What do I do?”

Rather than confronting it immediately, King admitted he made the mistake of hoping his fortunes on the oche would eventually bail him out. “If this keeps going the way it is going, I will be able to sort this out down the line because it seems to be rolling now,” he thought at the time. “I was starting to win bigger sums of money. Further down the line I hadn’t, which is my fault and nobody else’s.”

He acknowledged there was nobody to blame but himself. “It was ignorance on my part and I hold my hands up to it. Okay, I didn’t have any guidance or anyone out there that says you have to do this. But it is also scary.”

The pandemic, ironically, proved to be the catalyst for change. Forced off the circuit as tournaments shut down, King finally decided to face the music. He tracked down a former HMRC employee based in Nottingham who now helps people resolve tax disputes, and together they launched a full disclosure process spanning two decades of financial records.

What followed was brutal. “We went back 20 years and they looked at everything — all account details, the lot,” King said. “I looked at the final total and, unless I find a magic wand or win the lottery, there was no way that was going to get paid. It’s impossible. So they decided they were going to make me bankrupt.”

The consequences were immediate and severe. His motorcycle was seized, his assets liquidated, his bank accounts emptied and frozen — on two occasions. “They froze my accounts twice, which put me in a lot of trouble because I had direct debits going out which weren’t being paid. I was getting recurring charges against them.”

The story, however, has a redemptive ending. King received an email on 4th March confirming he had been formally released from bankruptcy — a moment that drew a line under one of the most painful chapters of his professional life.

“Yesterday I got an email — as of today, 4th March, I am released from bankruptcy,” he said. “So great, it is over with and a fresh start. It is just making sure everything is proper now.”

More than anything, King wants his experience to serve as a warning to the generation of young players currently flooding into the sport during darts’ biggest ever boom. “I don’t want these young players to end up in the same position I was in,” he said. “If this just stops one person ending like this, then that is great.”

King, now ranked world number 122, regained his tour card in January and has been back competing at major events after two years away from the circuit.