Riding the Luke Littler darts wave, with Target Darts

A combination of accessibility and careful planning is behind the rising support for darts, according to Target Darts CEO James Tattersall. 

Target Darts is at the heart of the sport, manufacturing the kit used to play as well as acting as talent management for many of the top players, such as Luke Littler, Beau Greaves, Rob Cross, Raymond Van Barneveld and more. Tattersall’s experience of the growth in interest over the past several years has given him insight into how the sport has done it, and he discussed this in the latest episode of the Broadcast Sport Podcast. 

You can listen to the full conversation below, where Tattersall explains how the company has positioned its content to keep the sport growing as well as benefit itself, how darts players should be making their own content, and plenty more, including where the players’ nicknames come from.

Accessibility is key for Target Darts, perhaps in a way that more physical sports are unable to match. Tattersall said: “There’s an honesty about darts. It’s a sport that’s grown up, and it’s normal people. 

“For us, darts is about people, it’s about community, it’s about bringing people together. So, a lot of what we’re doing is around product, is focused on the technology and focused on what goes into it and why our product is the price that it is and what it will do for you.

“Then we show, what darts does for community, why it’s good to play darts, and why it’s good to be involved in darts.

However, this doesn’t mean that the company and players are able to just turn up and play, without a thought for image and how they will come across. As Tattersall explained, there is a lot of work that goes into making a splash with the wider public: “The young players are so social media savvy and are so aware of brand, more so than I am almost, it’s crazy. They live on social media, youngsters today, so a lot of the work’s done from that perspective. They want to self-present. 

“What we work very hard on is how we work with the players to help brand them and help to build their brand. The example I like to use is when Luke Littler got to Ally Pally [Alexandra Palace, the host of the Darts World Championship] for the first time, he was relatively, outside of the darts industry, an unknown, but in the darts industry he was known.

“He turned up there with a logo and a darts shirt that was branded with the purple and the yellow and The Nuke. All of that positioning, all of that work was done so that when that moment happened and that opportunity ignited, those press images from being on the stage at the World Championship looked the part.

“He looked like a world champion dart player. It wasn’t just some lucky kid that had turned up and made it all the way into the final.”

You can listen to the rest of the conversation, as well as all other episodes of the Broadcast Sport Podcast, below. You can subscribe to hear future episodes of the show on all major podcast platforms.