Phil Taylor

Philip Douglas Taylor was born in Stoke-on-Trent on 13 August 1960. He grew up in a working-class household, left school at 16, and worked for years at a Stoke ceramics factory making toilet-roll handles for a few pounds an hour. He played Sunday pub darts with no thought of a professional career. The sport found him when he borrowed a set of darts in his local, the Huntsman in Burslem, and beat better-regarded regulars with a fluency nobody had seen from him before.

By the mid-1980s he was good enough to enter county-level matches for Staffordshire. The turning point came when Eric Bristow, the five-time world champion and already the defining face of darts, recognised Taylor's natural touch and funded his entry onto the professional circuit. Bristow is said to have given Taylor £10,000 as a stake. The investment returned itself many times over.

Taylor won his first BDO World Championship in 1990 at the Lakeside Country Club, Frimley Green, beating his mentor Eric Bristow 6-1 in the final. It was a symbolic handover: the pupil had surpassed the master. He added a second BDO world title in 1992, beating Mike Gregory 6-5 in a final still cited as one of the most dramatic in the sport's history.

In January 1993 Taylor was among the sixteen players who broke away from the British Darts Organisation to form what became the Professional Darts Corporation. The split was messy, litigious, and financially risky. For two years the PDC ran on a shoestring. But when the new World Championship settled at the Circus Tavern in Purfleet, it found an audience, and Taylor proceeded to dominate it.

Between 1995 and 2002 Taylor won every PDC World Championship. Eight in a row. The run was built on a ruthless transition game, a then-extreme scoring average in the 98-102 bracket, and a mental stability under pressure that other players simply could not match. Dennis Priestley, Rod Harrington, Peter Manley and Alan Warriner-Little all came close at various points. Taylor never lost one of those finals.

Taylor's majors record across the career dwarfs anyone else's. Sixteen Matchplays, eleven Grand Prix, six Premier Leagues, five UK Opens, two Grand Slams, two European Championships, and that is before the senior invitational events in the late career. No other player has more than half his major total.

The two strongest modern arguments against Taylor-as-GOAT come from Michael van Gerwen and, more recently, Luke Littler. Both have the scoring firepower to threaten historical records. Neither has the longevity yet, and neither has the eight-in-a-row streak. Van Gerwen's three world titles as of 2026 leave him a long way short of sixteen. Littler's one, in 2025, is the start of a case, not the bulk of it.

For the case to shift, a modern player will need to either reach double-digit world titles or deliver a period of total dominance comparable to 1995-2002. Neither looks plausible inside the next five years. Until one of those things happens, Taylor remains the answer.

Taylor retired from the full-time PDC tour at Alexandra Palace on New Year's Day 2018, walking off after the loss to Rob Cross. He has remained in the sport as a commentator, exhibition player and occasional competitor on World Seniors Darts Tour events, where he has continued to win. In 2022 he won the inaugural World Seniors Darts Championship at Circus Tavern, a symbolic return to the venue where his PDC era had begun.

He continues to live in Stoke-on-Trent, and has spoken publicly about plans to remain involved in the sport's grassroots development. The Taylor legacy is not only the records, but the route he proved existed for a working-class amateur to become an internationally known athlete.