Matt Porter doesn’t tend to do things for the sake of doing them. In a recent interview with Online Darts, he was quizzed on the business side of ongoings in the PDC.
Quality over Quantity
Asked about darts eventually staging two events at once in different cities, the PDC’s chief executive was clear that the sport isn’t quite there yet, and won’t force it before it is.
“It’s not a breakthrough moment if you do it and you’ve got empty seats everywhere,” he said. “I’d rather have quality over quantity any day of the week.”
Backing America
That instinct runs through Porter’s take on the sport’s business direction, not least on Matchroom’s recent sale of a minority stake to Bruin Capital, the US investment firm that paid for a 15% share of the group at a valuation north of £1 billion.
Porter confirmed the deal is squarely aimed at unlocking the American market. “North America is an area where not just darts but also nineball and boxing already have a foundation in the US,” he said.
“They just haven’t been developed and commercialised to the full extent of their potential.”
Bringing in a partner with specialist local knowledge and resource, he added, is about turning that foundation into growth.
World Series of Darts watch
That growth is already showing in the World Series, where Porter singled out Madison Square Garden as this year’s standout. Some venues, he suggested, have reached their ceiling. Wollongong and Copenhagen among them, both capped by four, to four-and-a-half-thousand seat arenas.
But MSG delivered a genuine step up, helped the travelling football fans as well as rising numbers of Americans through the door.
Growing it right
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Even so, Porter was cool on the idea of simply parachuting a World Series event into a new US city. Asked directly about Miami or New York, he ruled it out for now.
“I’d always rather grow it organically from the bottom up,” he said, pointing to youth development through the CDC and JDC as the more durable route. A Canadian date remains off the table too, for a more mundane reason. No broadcast partner has shown interest.
Netflix’s different game
Netflix’s forthcoming “Beat Luke Littler” show got a similarly measured response. Porter was careful to draw a line between it and the PDC’s own tournaments.
“This isn’t a tournament, this is an entertainment spectacle,” he said of the format, in which 20 contestants selected from open auditions in London and Manchester will get one leg to beat Luke Littler for £501,000, with Gary Lineker hosting.
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He wouldn’t be drawn on whether more Netflix darts content could follow, beyond noting the streamer tends to produce one show per sport, per year rather than a slate of them.
None of it amounts to a sport chasing growth for its own sake. Whether it’s turning down a US city on spec, holding the line on Canada until a broadcaster bites, or keeping Netflix’s spectacle at arm’s length from the tour proper, Porter’s version of expansion looks deliberately unhurried.
Images: PDC
