‘I lost my voice laughing’: Dart fans on the pantomime of watching live

Just metres away from a stage of precise sporting drama, five young men dressed as seagulls are bobbing their heads up and down in time to the raucous noise that greets each dart meeting the board.

As teenage sensation Luke Littler lands yet another 180, hundreds of people in fancy dress wave signs at the camera with their own bizarre range of messages to catch the eye of the TV audience.

And amid the noisy, party atmosphere a hapless guy destined to become viral on TikTok struggles to carry five giant pitchers of lager back to his waiting friends and sees much of their contents spill to the floor.

Welcome to Ally Pally 2025 – scene of the PDC World Darts Championship and also the most distinctive live spectating experience in the sporting fans’ calendar. Wimbledon, this is not.

“You know it’s going to be fun,” says Anna Heneghan, a 28-year-old from Harpenden who went to watch the event at London’s Alexandra Palace (to give the venue its formal name) dressed as an Average Joe from the 2004 film DodgeBall.

The frenzy around Littler last year was the main reason she went to this year’s championship, she says. “You can see on the television when you’re watching it the sort of an atmosphere that’s in the room.”

“People are just there to have a good time,” she adds.

Littler’s phenomenal rise in the sport saw him reach the final at the PDC World Darts Championship last year at the age of just 16.

Littler is playing Michael van Gerwen in Friday’s final – and if he wins, he’ll be the youngest player to take home the trophy.

Every year, darts fans from around the world – but particularly from the UK and the Netherlands – vie to get their coveted spot at the Ally Pally as the championship plays out either side of Christmas, another reason why the atmosphere is particularly festive.

Tickets can cost hundreds of pounds and some fans plan their outfits months in advance, but it’s largely not a formal event.

Spectators don their finest fancy dress: There are monks and nuns, bananas and vegetables, traffic cones and dart boards, cartoon characters and Vikings. And of course the Dutch masses who bring a large dash of orange to the proceedings.

They are given signs on which they can write jokey messages to hold up to the TV cameras. Dedicated chants are sung for each player. And regardless of who wins a match, the audience erupts into cheers.

The alcohol is flowing, too.

“People go for the atmosphere more than anything,” Charlie Murphy, a darts TikToker from Ripon, says. “They can’t really see much, you couldn’t probably see where the darts land from your seat” because the dart board is so small and far away, he says.

“You don’t necessarily have to know about darts to have a good time,” says Jessie Sale, a 25-year-old sports journalist from Manchester.

When she interviews members of the public at the matches, “some of them are very knowledgeable on the sport, and some of them absolutely don’t have a clue and couldn’t name three players,” she says.

“You look about and see people carrying a four-pint pitcher in each hand, singing, chanting, writing whatever nonsense they want on the 180 cards and basically having one big party,” Jessie adds.

Tickets have been in high demand. Barry Hearn, the president and former chairman of the Professional Darts Corporation, said that the 90,000 tickets for this year’s championship games sold out within 15 minutes.

Anna got a PDC membership so that she should buy early bird tickets in the summer, but even then it was “like a mini Oasis” in the scramble to get tickets.

In the end she bought six standing tickets at about £57 each for a weekday afternoon session.

Amanda Worthington, 62, from Hertfordshire, couldn’t get tickets through the PDC website. “Literally as soon as you logged on, the tickets were taken up.”

Instead, she bought six tickets for the quarter-final from a resale website for about £130 each. From where they were sat, her group could “just about” make out the darts, she says.

Amanda had been to the championship at Ally Pally the year before and found the experience “just phenomenal”.

This year was no different. “You do get carried along on that wave of excitement,” she says.

“I’ve got a hoarse voice at the end of it from singing and laughing.”

Like Anna, Renee Rogers, a 38-year-old CEO from Borehamwood, went to the PDC because of Luke Littler.

In the past, darts “would always be something that I would turn off and probably roll my eyes at,” she says.

But she was “hooked” watching the matches last year – and ended up booking a ticket to go to the semi-finals on Thursday. She and her husband dressed as characters from the TV series Squid Game.

“It all starts the moment you park your car,” Renee says. “You can hear the chants. You’re driving through Ally Pally and you’re seeing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles one side, Viking men the next.”

The atmosphere with chanting and booing is “like pantomime”, Renee says. “There’s not an intense rivalry of fandom like the football.”

Even if people go into the match with a favourite, they’ll cheer for everyone taking part.

Luke Bodily, another TikTok creator, says spectators will “start cheering the guy who’s about to lose to encourage him to get back in the match… They don’t want the match to end because they don’t want to go home”.

Darts is still heavily male-dominated – both in terms of players at the championship and spectators watching. But Jessie says the women’s sport has come on massively in recent years.

When she started at university, she was the only female player on its darts team. Now, some universities have dedicated women’s darts teams and Jessie says she gets messages on TikTok from girls who love the sport.

England’s Fallon Sherrock – who in 2019 became the first female player to win a match at the PDC World Darts Championship – played in the tournament for the fifth time in December.

Anna isn’t a darts player, but she says that she and her friends enjoyed watching the darts so much they’re even organising their own mini tournament.

And as for the PDC at Ally Pally? “We are already planning to go next year for sure,” she says.