Luke Littler shatters Michael van Gerwen’s record: five European Tour titles in just 14 tournaments

The numbers keep arriving, each one more improbable than the last. The latest comes courtesy of the Poland Darts Open and a statistic that places Luke Littler’s early career in a category of its own, even by the standards of the man who spent a decade defining the European Tour.

With only fourteen tournaments played on the PDC European Tour, Littler has become the player who needed the fewest events to capture five titles — comfortably shattering the previous record held by Michael van Gerwen, who required 21 tournaments to reach the same landmark. The full picture is even more striking when set against what the rest of the sport’s recent elite required:

14 – Luke Littler 21 – Michael van Gerwen 30 – Luke Humphries 48 – Peter Wright 57 – Gerwyn Price 77 – Michael Smith 83 – Dave Chisnall

To frame what that means: Humphries, the reigning world No. 2 and a former world champion, needed more than twice as many appearances as Littler. Wright and Price — both world champions themselves — needed more than three times as many. And van Gerwen, the man who effectively owned the European Tour for years and remains its all-time leading title holder, needed half again as many as Littler to reach the same point.

The fifth title came in Kraków last Sunday with Littler’s 8-4 demolition of Gian van Veen in the Poland Darts Open final — a performance built on a 108 average, seven maximums and the kind of controlled, relentless finishing that has become his calling card on the big stage. It was his third consecutive European Tour title, adding to victories at the Slovak Darts Open and the German Darts Grand Prix earlier in the season, and continued a trajectory on the tour that no player in its history has managed to replicate.

What makes the record particularly telling is what the European Tour demands. Unlike the World Series, which features a small, hand-picked field of elite players, the European Tour pitches the full pro tour field against each other across a longer format, requiring not just excellence in the final but sustained quality through multiple rounds over a weekend. It is where careers are built and sustained, not just announced. Reaching five titles in 14 appearances means Littler has been not merely competitive but dominant at virtually every event he has entered.

For context on van Gerwen’s own journey: the Dutchman went on to become the tour’s record holder with a total of victories that no one else has come close to, building his legacy across years of sustained dominance. But in his early appearances on the circuit, before his engine was fully in gear, his rate of success did not approach what Littler has produced from the beginning. The 19-year-old has not had a warm-up period, a learning curve, a getting-to-know-you phase with the format. He has simply arrived and won.

There is one gap that still eludes him. Littler has so far been unable to crack the European Championship, suffering a second-round defeat to James Wade in Dortmund last October. It is the one major European title that remains absent from a collection that already includes two world championships, the Premier League, the World Matchplay, the Grand Slam and the World Masters. If the Poland record is any guide, that particular absence may not last much longer.

For now, in terms of what has been achieved on the European Tour alone, the question being asked is no longer whether Littler can match van Gerwen’s career output on the circuit — it is how quickly, and by how much. He is 19 years old. He has played 14 events. And he has already rewritten the record books that the greatest player of his generation spent years establishing.