Phil Taylor once looked untouchable. Sixteen world titles. Sixteen World Matchplays. A run of nine successive majors that felt like it belonged to another planet.
Luke Littler is 19 years old and five tournaments away from doing something The Power never managed.
That is not hype. That is the calendar staring him in the face.
The Nuke has already stacked seven majors in a row: Grand Slam, Players Championship Finals, World Championship, World Masters, UK Open, Premier League, World Matchplay. Taylor’s best mixed run of ranked and unranked titles stopped at nine. Win the next three and Littler hits ten. Nobody has ever done that.
The next three sit right there: World Series Finals this weekend in Amsterdam, then the World Grand Prix, then the European Championship. After that come the Grand Slam and Players Championship Finals. Five events. One kid. A record that even the greatest player the sport has produced never touched.
This is why the story matters.
The Streak That Should Not Be Possible
Littler has not lost a major since James Wade dumped him out of the European Championship last October. Since then he has been ruthless. He defended the world title 7-1 against Gian van Veen. He smashed Gerwyn Price 18-9 in Blackpool while averaging 111.04 for the tournament and 111.53 in the final, wiping out Taylor’s old Winter Gardens marks.
He is world number one by more than two million pounds. He is still a teenager.
People keep talking about sixteen world titles as the only measuring stick. Fair enough. Taylor’s number is ridiculous. Littler himself has never pretended otherwise.
After he won the second world title he said: “Obviously it’s so far away. 14 to go, another 15 or 16 years I’d say. If it happens it happens. I’ll be around for a very long time and I’m here to win. Who knows if I could reach it? If I get five or six I’d be happy.”
That quote is honest. It is also beside the point this month.
The feat in front of him is shorter, sharper, and historically cleaner. Ten majors on the spin. Taylor never got there. Michael van Gerwen’s best mixed run was seven. Littler is already level with that and still rolling.
Why This Run Hits Different
The field is deeper than anything Taylor faced in 2008 and 2009. Boards are better. Prize money is bigger. Social media never switches off. Every time Littler walks on stage the entire sport is watching to see if the kid finally blinks.
He has not blinked.
Commentator Paul Nicholson, the man who actually ended Taylor’s ranked-major streak in 2010, put it better than most: “People always assume Luke Littler has to win 16 world titles to overtake Phil Taylor, but I don’t necessarily agree with that. For me, it’s about what you achieve against the standard of opposition in front of you and the pressure you’re under.”
He went further. If Littler keeps winning every ranked major through 2027 and into the 2028 World Championship, Nicholson said he would call him the greatest player the sport has ever seen.
That is not recency bias talking. That is a bloke who lived through Taylor’s peak looking at the current evidence.
What Five Tournaments Actually Means
This weekend is the first test. The World Series Finals in Amsterdam. Michael van Gerwen, last year’s champion, is already out. Littler opens against Danny Noppert. Win that and the Grand Prix in Leicester becomes the next checkpoint. Then the Euros, the one major he still has not won.
If he takes all three he will have ten successive majors. If he also grabs the Grand Slam and Players Championship Finals he will have completed a calendar-year haul that Taylor and Van Gerwen both came close to but never quite sealed.
Taylor won every ranked title available in 2009 but lost in the Premier League semis. Van Gerwen won nine majors in 2016 but went out early at the Worlds and lost the Champions League final. Littler has a shot at the lot.
That is the difference. Not sixteen worlds in twenty years. Ten majors in a row, right now, against the strongest generation the game has ever produced.
The Bigger Picture
None of this means Taylor is suddenly second-best. The Power’s longevity remains the gold standard. Sixteen worlds. Decades at the top. Records that still look insane on paper.
But darts has changed. The Nuke changed it. He pulled in new fans, new money, new pressure. He also raised the scoring floor so high that 105 averages now look ordinary when he is in the building.
He still has holes. The European Championship remains the missing ranked title. The Players Championship Finals require him to actually turn up to enough floor events to qualify. He has skipped most of them this year because he is chasing the big ones.
Those are real obstacles. They are also the only ones left.
Five tournaments. That is the gap between what Littler has already done and a line in the record books that Phil Taylor never crossed.
If he does it, the GOAT conversation stops being theoretical. If he doesn’t, the streak still stands as the most dominant run of this era.
Either way, the next two months will tell us more about this kid than another five years of “will he get to sixteen worlds” debates.
So what do you reckon? Does ten on the spin already put him in rare air, or does he still need the sixteen-world mountain before anyone dares mention him in the same sentence as The Power?