Phil Taylor or Michael van Gerwen, who is the greatest darts player of all time

[Nadir Wolfhound]

Darts has produced two names above all others when the greatest of all time conversation comes up, and the gap in raw trophy count between them remains one of the most one sided statistical arguments in professional sport. Phil Taylor, known throughout his career simply as The Power, won a combined 16 World Championship titles across his career, 14 of them in the PDC era after the sport's split from the BDO, a level of sustained dominance across close to two full decades that effectively defined an entire generation's understanding of what elite darts actually looked like.

Michael van Gerwen, by contrast, has won three PDC World Championship titles, in 2014, 2017 and 2019, alongside a genuinely enormous haul of other major PDC titles across his career including multiple Premier League and World Matchplay victories, and for a long stretch was widely regarded as producing a higher average standard of consistent scoring and finishing than even Taylor managed during large parts of his own reign at the top of the sport.

The argument for Taylor essentially rests on the sheer weight of that World Championship total being genuinely unmatched and unlikely to ever be seriously challenged again given how much deeper and more competitive the modern PDC field has become. The argument for van Gerwen leans more on the idea that he has been forced to sustain his own excellence against a far larger, more consistently high quality pool of rivals than Taylor faced during large stretches of his own reign. Which one actually deserves the greatest of all time title in this sport?