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Luke ‘The Nuke’ Littler, born two weeks after the first iPhone was unveiled, stormed the Professional Darts Corporation world championships last week to become, at 17, the sport’s youngest ever world champion. How Littler behaved after his win shows how different young sports stars are today. Littler didn’t celebrate by going out drinking; no hotel rooms were trashed. Instead, within hours of his quarter- and semi-final victories, he was on the video-game streaming website Twitch via phone call to his red-headed gaming friend Morgan Burtwistle – known online as ‘AngryGinge’.
Streaming is the new drinking for semi-celebs and it’s not something they grow out of
AngryGinge, 23, is one of the UK’s most popular streamers, with around four million followers across Twitch, YouTube and TikTok. Twitch allows you to observe the lives of men who spend most of their time in their bedrooms. AngryGinge’s fans can watch him playing video games, commenting on Premier League football matches and playing darts against himself – all in real time. It’s a serious profession for Morgan: he’s estimated to make up to £40,000 a month from Twitch and a similar amount from his YouTube channel, along with money from other social media platforms.
Ginge’s connection to Littler comes through his virtual football team, ‘GirthNTurf’. Littler occasionally plays in matches (on a multiplayer version of the Fifa football game), and their gameplay and banter are streamed to Ginge’s thousands of avid viewers. These streams are often tagged as ‘ADHD’, which appears to be seen as a personality type within Gen Z.
Streaming is the new drinking for semi-celebs and it’s not something they grow out of. ‘PieFace’, another member of GirthNTurf and a Littler clinger-on, is 15 years older than the darts champion, while Stephen ‘the Bullet’ Bunting – a 39-year-old whom Littler beat in the semi-final – plays the children’s video game Fortnite after he’s finished with darts practice.
Littler, a chubby teenager from Warrington, is far more media-savvy than many older players – an upside of living his life online. On one stream for the GirthNTurf team, a female voice (that turned out to be Littler’s new girlfriend’s) could be heard in the background of Littler’s microphone saying she was going to bed, followed by the inevitable schoolyard ribbing from his teammates. Littler responded: ‘If someone has screen-recorded that, it’s in the papers in the morning. Yep, well played.’ He was right about it ending up in the papers. ‘DART-THROB,’ quipped The Sun.
You can see the attraction of this lucrative online world for Littler. He is set to make millions more from sponsorship deals than from prize money, and his latest deal with Xbox is down to his love of gaming when he’s away from the oche.
But it’s hard not to think that this online living is deadly dull compared to past sporting excess. Compare Littler to someone like the snooker player Ronnie ‘the Rocket’ O’Sullivan. He too won his first professional championship in his teens, but after a win he would celebrate properly – by causing havoc across London, not by sitting in his bedroom.
That said, a more subdued atmosphere could be exactly what the darts establishment is aiming for. When The Spectator’s darts team took part in a promotional event for the PDC (we finished last), I interviewed Tom Kitchin, who was designing the hospitality menu for Alexandra Palace, where the annual darts tournament is played. I joked to the Michelin-starred chef that a darts crowd was unlikely to enjoy the fancy haute cuisine served in his Edinburgh restaurants. He was slightly affronted: haute cuisine is exactly what the darts crowd want now, he said. Gone are the days of lukewarm pies and an out-of-date packet of scampi fries.
There are rumours, too, of a move to the Gulf for darts. The 90,000 tickets for this year’s world championships at ‘Ally Pally’ sold out in just 15 minutes. Barry Hearn’s Matchroom Sport, which effectively owns darts, reckons that the world championships could have sold three times as many tickets if they had been held in a bigger venue. Given that Hearn recently moved some snooker tournaments to Saudi Arabia, there are fears darts could be heading the same way. Another reason to stay sober.
Littler is extremely talented. It’s plausible that, like Ronnie the Rocket, he’ll still be winning titles 20 years from now. Perhaps he’ll win the 2046 world championships in Riyadh. But back home all the pubs will be closed, AngryGinge will be AngryBald, and all the 60-year-old men watching the darts via his Twitch channel will still be tuning in from their childhood bedrooms.
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