The BDO insolvency in September 2020 wasn’t a surprise to anyone who’d been paying attention. It still landed like a punch. Forty-seven years, dissolved by Creditors Voluntary Liquidation, with the directors not even bothering to show up to the meeting where players were supposed to get answers about their outstanding prize money. Not with a grand farewell at Frimley Green — with a no-show in an accountant’s office.
The BDO Collapse
The BDO World Darts Championship had been in structural decline for years. After the BDO–PDC split in 1993, the organisation slowly lost its top players, its TV deal, and eventually its credibility. The 2020 world championship — the final one, as it turned out — paid the men’s winner Wayne Warren just £23,000. That’s not a typo. The same title that had carried a £100,000 winner’s cheque in previous years. Warren was 57 years old and played out of his skin to win it. He deserved more than the sport could give him.
The counties left en masse in September 2020, joining the UK Darts Association. The commercial arm folded. Prize money went unpaid. And that was that — the organisation that had run the sport at grassroots level for nearly five decades was gone.
For players who’d built their careers on the BDO circuit, who’d never made the jump to the PDC, it wasn’t just an inconvenience. It was the floor falling out.
The WDF Steps In
The World Darts Federation had always existed alongside the BDO — it’s the international governing body, the umbrella organisation that oversees darts globally, including the World Masters and Olympic pathway events. When the BDO collapsed, the WDF was the logical body to pick up the pieces. They announced plans for a new world championship to launch in 2022.
The WDF isn’t a British organisation running a British event. It’s a global body, affiliated with the International Olympic Committee, responsible for darts across more than 70 nations. That shift in character matters. The BDO was, whatever its faults, deeply rooted in British county darts — pubs, social clubs, regional leagues. The WDF world championship is built on international rankings, open to players from across the world in a way the old structure never quite was.
Whether that’s better or worse depends on what you think the world championship is for.
The New Championship: Format and Venue
The WDF made one decision nobody could argue with: they brought the world championship back to Lakeside Country Club in Frimley Green. The 2022 inaugural edition was held there, and the tournament has stayed at Lakeside every year since. That continuity — the same bar, the same oche, the same slightly cramped atmosphere — is the single biggest thing the WDF got right from the start.
The format runs both a men’s open tournament and a women’s championship concurrently, alongside youth events. Best-of-sets format in the men’s draw, with later rounds going to first to six sets. Prize money for 2024 and 2025 sat at £221,000 total across all competitions — the men’s champion taking £50,000, the women’s champion £25,000. That women’s figure is the highest prize available for a women’s darts tournament anywhere in the world. That’s not nothing.
Compare it to the old BDO men’s pool of £300,000 and you can see the gap. The WDF is operating with less money. A lot less. The PDC world championship at Alexandra Palace distributes £2.5 million. Keep that number in your head.
Early Champions
The first WDF world champion was Neil Duff, from Northern Ireland, who beat France’s Thibault Tricole 6–5 in a deciding set in the 2022 men’s final. Duff had been a solid BDO-circuit player for years, never quite got his moment — and then Lakeside gave him one.
The women’s 2022 title went to an 18-year-old from Doncaster called Beau Greaves, who beat Kirsty Hutchinson 4–0 with an average of 92.02 — a record for a women’s world championship final. Greaves came back and won in 2023, defeating Aileen de Graaf 4–1, then claimed a third consecutive title in 2024 against Sophie McKinlay. Three in a row. In the men’s draw, Andy Baetens took the 2023 title, beating Chris Landman 6–1, before Shane McGuirk became the first world champion from the Republic of Ireland in 2024 — beating Paul Lim, who was 68 years old and still making world championship finals, which is a sentence that will never stop being remarkable.
The 2025 championships saw Jimmy van Schie win the men’s title 6–3 against Mitchell Lawrie — 15 years old, who had become the youngest player ever to win a match at the event in the same tournament. Deta Hedman claimed the women’s title, 4–1 over Lerena Rietbergen. Hedman is 58. Greaves had finally been beaten. The WDF has its rivalries now, its storylines, its emerging names.
What It Can and Cannot Replace
Here’s the honest version.
The WDF World Championship has done more than most people expected. It’s kept Lakeside alive. It’s created genuine champions — Duff, Greaves, McGuirk — who deserved a world stage. The women’s prize money is the best in the game. Lawrie at 15 suggests the pipeline isn’t empty.
But there are things it can’t recover. The BDO in its prime — not the shambling, underfunded version of its final decade, but the one that produced Bristow and Lowe and van Barneveld — carried a weight in British sport culture that the WDF championship doesn’t have and may never have. The TV coverage isn’t there. The prize money is a fraction of the PDC’s. The best players in the world — Littler, Wright, van Gerwen — are at Alexandra Palace in January, not Frimley Green.
What the WDF championship is, right now, is real. A genuine world title, contested by players who’ve earned it, held at the same venue where Bristow lifted the trophy. It isn’t what Lakeside was at its height. It isn’t trying to be the PDC. It’s a third thing, still finding its shape. The venue is still there. That counts for something, even if it doesn’t quite fill the hole.
