‘I played Luke Littler before he was famous – his record will never be broken’

Luke Littler became the youngest ever world darts champion when he beat Michael van Gerwen in the 2025 final but one amateur player got a sense of The Nuke’s quality even earlier

What would you do if you turned up to a darts tournament at your local club, made it through the first round, and then saw Luke Littler’s name drawn out as your next opponent. That’s the fate that befell Dan Stapleton, an amateur player who lives in North Wales, when he made the short trip to Chester in 2023.

This was pre-world title Littler, of course. The Nuke had recently turned 16 when he went up against Stapleton, but had already been making waves some nine months out from what would be an explosive PDC World Championship debut.

“It was just a Riley’s in Chester,” Stapleton says when recalling his meeting with the 2025 world champ. “It’s about 20 minutes from me and I know that he’s that far either, he’s 20 or 25 minutes the other way.

“I’d actually unknowingly played in the same tournament as him about a year before as well. Actually I was practising with him before (that 2022 tournament) – I didn’t interact with him or anything because, you know, I’m not being funny, it was a 15 year old boy, why would I go up to him? But like I sort of vaguely knew him as a name

“When I saw him the day that I played him, I remember we literally turned up at the same time. He must have been dropped off or he got the train like I had. And then I saw him coming in and by that point he was starting to get real buzz. Even the year before when he was 14, 15, he was hitting nine darters and stuff on the WBF tour.”

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They were kept apart in the group stages, with Littler playing well but not to the point that he looked unbeatable. Still, the teenager won his group, Stapleton finished second in his, and a round of 16 clash was on the cards.

“I think three or four went through the group, and I was thinking, well, ‘I’m not going to play Littler, because Littler won the group’. And then they did the draw and it was me against him,” Stapleton says.

“I remember going up to the guy running it and saying, like, ‘cheers for that. how has that happened?’ Normally when someone’s first, if you’ve got three or four people going through, you’d have thought that they’d play the third or fourth players in that group. So I remember I was a bit gutted, but I was also excited to play him.”

Now that Littler has become more of a household name, fans have become accustomed to the fact that he’ll take his game seriously regardless of the level of competition. He played the World Youth Championship in October and posted a 107 average in his semi-final but still came up short against Beau Greaves.

That will to win any and every tournament was the same in early 2023, as it turns out. Littler averaged 88.41 against Stapleton en route to a 3-0 victory, the highest average of any player in the round of 16, punishing his opponent for missing what it turns out would be the first and last chance he’d get to threaten an upset.

“He completely relishes (even the smaller tournaments),” Stapleton adds. “Even when he played me, I think he must have known he was almost certain to win it that day, even though there was a really good standard of players there.

“I actually looked at the averages recently because I haven I haven’t looked back at that game. All I remember is that he won the first leg quite easily with throw and then I had the throw in the second leg and he raced ahead of me, but then I caught up and I actually missed two darts to make it one-all.

“I missed double 16 and double 8 because obviously I just bottled it to be honest with you. And then I had nine more darts. He won that leg and then he won the next leg and he hit an 11-darter and I was just like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s great, yeah’.

“It was his best average that day apart from maybe the final. I think his first nine average was something like 111. It’s just like ‘Cheers. I’m just some amateur player trying to get by and you’ve produced this against me’.”

It’s easy to say with the benefit of hindsight, but Stapleton always expected Littler to hit the heights he has, even if a world title at 17 is stunning by anyone’s standards.”I always thought he’d be a world champion eventually because like, no one could be that good at such a young age without,” he says.

“I think (Michael) van Gerwen was 24 or 25 (when he won his first PDC world title, and then even the BDO, like I think Jelle Klaasen was, what, 21, 22?. So yeah, (Littler’s) just absolutely smashing it and I just can’t in a million years see that being broken.”