Clayton Beats Littler 10-4 to End the 2026 Clean Sweep

How the match turned

For six legs there was nothing in it. Clayton found 136 to level at 3-3, and from there the match stopped being a contest. Littler could not finish — 19 per cent on the doubles, roughly one successful attempt in five — and Clayton, who does not need a second invitation, kept taking the legs that were left lying around. He closed it out on 40.

This is the same Littler who, less than 24 hours earlier, broke Nathan Aspinall in a 12-dart deciding leg from 9-8 down. The scoring power has not gone anywhere this week in Amsterdam. The outer ring has been the problem all four days, and it had been papered over by two matches he won on the very last leg.

Clayton deserves better than to be treated as a plot device in someone else’s record chase. He won this title in 2021, and in August he beat Price 8-4 in an all-Welsh New Zealand Darts Masters final in Auckland. Against Littler he was in front from the moment he hit that 136 and never gave the lead back.

Sunday’s quarter-finals in full

All four last-eight ties were played in the afternoon session over the best of 19 legs, with the semi-finals and final following the same evening.

Gian van Veen won the all-Dutch tie from 8-6 down against Dirk van Duijvenbode, which was the only quarter-final that changed hands late. Gerwyn Price and Ross Smith both came through 10-7, against James Wade and Josh Rock respectively.

Set the four defeats next to each other and Littler’s stands out. The other three beaten quarter-finalists all made their winner work into the seventeenth or eighteenth leg. Littler managed four legs in fourteen.

What exactly has Littler lost?

The headline version is straightforward: Littler was trying to win all ten major televised tournaments in one calendar year, he had won every major he entered in 2026 before Sunday, and Amsterdam is where that stopped. Nobody has ever done it, and now nobody will do it this year.

The more useful version needs one distinction that most of the coverage skipped. Not every televised major is a ranking event. The World Series of Darts Finals is an invitational: it pays £450,000 across the week but none of it lands on the PDC Order of Merit, which is also true of the Premier League, the Masters and the World Cup. So the sweep Littler lost on Sunday is the all-television one. The sweep of ranking majors is untouched, because this event was never part of it.

That matters because the ranked version is the one with a precedent. Phil Taylor managed it in 2009, taking all eight ranked majors available to him that season — and he did it in a year when he lost in the Premier League semi-finals, which, being non-ranking, did not spoil the record. Littler is now in precisely that position, one televised defeat into a season that can still finish with every ranking major on the shelf.

Four of those are left, and they arrive in a nine-week run: the World Grand Prix in Leicester from 28 September, the European Championship in Dortmund from 22 October, the Grand Slam of Darts in Wolverhampton from 14 November, and the Players Championship Finals at Minehead. The awkward one remains Dortmund, the only major Littler has never won, as we set out back in August when he confirmed the clean sweep bid was still on. The full run-in is on our 2026 calendar.

Price and Smith left standing

The evening session removed the last two storylines. Ross Smith beat Van Veen 11-8 in the first semi-final, silencing a partisan AFAS Live and ending Dutch interest in the tournament. Price then beat Clayton 11-7 with an average of over 104, which was the best darts anyone played all day — and his revenge for Auckland.

That leaves a final between a two-time champion of this event and a man who has never won it — the outcome our Saturday-night preview said the bracket had already guaranteed, with all four former champions stacked into the bottom half and drawn in pairs. Price won this title in 2020 and 2022, the second of them by beating Van Duijvenbode 11-10. Smith is into the biggest final of his career.

Littler collects £17,500 and a week in a building that booed him from Thursday onwards. He leaves Amsterdam still world number one by a distance on the Order of Merit, still the reigning world champion, and with the harder of the two records he was chasing intact. Leicester is in eight days.