How Clayton won the Swiss Darts Trophy final
The final was level at 4-4 and then it was over. Clayton won the ninth leg, the tenth, the eleventh and the twelfth, so the 8-4 scoreline hides both how tight the first eight legs were and how quickly the last four went. The two outlets that reported the match in detail, DartsNews and dartn.de, describe the same pattern in those closing legs: Humphries arriving at big finishes, going at the bullseye, and missing, with Clayton punishing each miss.
Clayton’s 101.68 was only his second-best average of the day, behind the 105.00 he threw in the semi-final. It did not need to be better. He had already beaten Rob Cross 6-4 in the last 16 while being out-averaged by more than six points, and the final followed the same script on a narrower margin.
Humphries averaged more than Clayton in all four rounds and still lost
Both men played four matches on Sunday, and in all four rounds the Humphries number was the bigger one: 114.15 against 100.46 in the last 16, 100.40 against 98.82 in the quarter-finals, 111.17 against 105.00 in the semi-finals, and 101.75 against 101.68 in the final. He won the scoring comparison four times out of four and went home with the smaller cheque.
Taking the mean of each man’s four match averages — a rough measure, since it weights a best-of-11 the same as a best-of-15 — Humphries comes out at 106.87 and Clayton at 101.49. A gap of more than five points across a day of darts is enormous. It bought Humphries £15,000 and a runner-up’s plaque.
Red bars are Humphries, grey are Clayton. Bars are scaled from zero to 120. Source: DartsNews and dartn.de match data, corroborated by Darts World for the last 16.
The pattern ran all weekend. The first round in Basel produced two deciding legs and the man with the lower average won both of them. The second round removed ten of the sixteen seeds. Over three days in the St. Jakobshalle, scoring kept losing to finishing.
Cross is the other exhibit. His 106.68 in the last 16 is the highest average posted by any loser on finals day, and it is higher than anything Clayton managed all Sunday — the champion’s best was 105.00 in the semi-final. Cross had averaged 105.95 in the first round, too. He threw better than the man who won the tournament and he was out by mid-afternoon.
Swiss Darts Trophy finals day results in full
Fifteen matches were played on the Sunday: eight in the last 16 over the afternoon, then the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final in the evening session.
| Round | Winner | Avg | Score | Loser (avg) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Last 16 | Karel Sedlacek | 93.17 | 6-2 | Josh Rock (82.67) |
| Last 16 | Jonny Clayton | 100.46 | 6-4 | Rob Cross (106.68) |
| Last 16 | Bradley Brooks | 92.05 | 6-3 | Jeffrey de Graaf (80.66) |
| Last 16 | Gian van Veen | 100.97 | 6-4 | Tom Bissell (91.77) |
| Last 16 | Mensur Suljovic | 93.87 | 6-5 | Ross Smith (95.08) |
| Last 16 | Dirk van Duijvenbode | 88.37 | 6-3 | Michael Smith (91.01) |
| Last 16 | Cristo Reyes | 100.89 | 6-4 | Damon Heta (92.79) |
| Last 16 | Luke Humphries | 114.15 | 6-0 | Krzysztof Ratajski (94.96) |
| Quarter-final | Jonny Clayton | 98.82 | 6-2 | Karel Sedlacek (95.82) |
| Quarter-final | Gian van Veen | 88.74 | 6-5 | Bradley Brooks (92.10) |
| Quarter-final | Mensur Suljovic | 102.03 | 6-1 | Dirk van Duijvenbode (88.00) |
| Quarter-final | Luke Humphries | 100.40 | 6-3 | Cristo Reyes (98.98) |
| Semi-final | Jonny Clayton | 105.00 | 7-4 | Gian van Veen (96.47) |
| Semi-final | Luke Humphries | 111.17 | 7-4 | Mensur Suljovic (100.55) |
| Final | Jonny Clayton | 101.68 | 8-4 | Luke Humphries (101.75) |
Mensur Suljovic was the one unseeded man in the semi-finals, and he got there the hard way: he had already beaten Michael van Gerwen on the Saturday, then edged Ross Smith 6-5 and dismantled Dirk van Duijvenbode 6-1 with a 102.03. The other three semi-finalists were seeds one, two and three. For all that Saturday’s cull took ten seeds out, the very top of the draw did not crack: Humphries, Gian van Veen and Clayton all came through round two, and all three then went on to the last four. James Wade, the fourth seed, was the first name in the draw to fall.
Humphries’ 114.15 is a Swiss Darts Trophy record
The 6-0 win over Krzysztof Ratajskiwas the performance of the weekend. Humphries took six legs out of six and averaged 114.15, the highest match average recorded in the three editions of this tournament. The previous best was Luke Woodhouse’s 110.69 against Dave Chisnall in 2025, which Wikipedia’s record of that event describes as the highest in tournament history at the time.
It is also worth noting what it displaced in our own coverage. When we published the round-two resultson Sunday morning, the best average reported in Basel was Clayton’s 108.81 against Maik Kuivenhoven. That stood for about six hours.
What Clayton’s win does to the Grand Slam field
Two days ago we published the state of the Grand Slam of Darts qualification race, with 29 of the 48 places filled and Clayton named alongside Gary Anderson as the notable absentees. The reason he was missing is structural: the Grand Slam awards no places on the PDC Order of Merit, so being inside the world’s top ten counts for nothing. A player needs a televised final or a ProTour title in the qualifying window.
Clayton had neither. He lost the Premier League play-off semi-final 10-9 to Humphries at The O2 in May, one leg short of the televised final that would have qualified him. That post identified Basel as his quickest remaining route, because a European Tour title qualifies outright. He took it, and he took it by beating the man who had kept him out in May. The PDC, Sky Sports and dartn.de all confirmed his Wolverhampton place within minutes of the last dart.
The win is also Clayton’s first ranking title of 2026, which is a strange thing to write about a player who won the New Zealand Darts Masters earlier in the year and reached the semi-finals of the World Series of Darts Finals. Neither of those is a ranking event. A week after his 52nd birthday, this is the £35,000 that actually counts towards the two-year rolling PDC Order of Merit.
Clayton’s four European Tour titles
| Year | Event | Final |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Austrian Darts Open | beat Gerwyn Price 8-5 |
| 2023 | Austrian Darts Open | beat Josh Rock |
| 2025 | Dutch Darts Championship | beat Niko Springer 8-6 |
| 2026 | Swiss Darts Trophy | beat Luke Humphries 8-4 |
Eight years separate the first from the fourth. One European Tour final he lost along the way is worth a mention: Josh Rock beat him 8-4 in the 2024 Dutch Darts Championship, the exact scoreline Clayton turned on Humphries in Basel. Rock was in this field too, seeded sixth, and lost 6-2 to Karel Sedlacek in the last 16.
One European Tour event left in 2026
Basel was the fourteenth of fifteen European Tour events this season. The last is the Dutch Darts Championship at the MECC in Maastricht from 16 to 18 October, five days away, and it is the final chance for anyone still chasing a Grand Slam place by that route. Gary Anderson, the other name our qualification piece flagged, withdrew from Basel and now has one European Tour event and a handful of Players Championship events left before the Tour Card Holder Qualifier on 6 November.
Humphries leaves Switzerland with the strangest weekend of his season. He arrived as the World Grand Prix champion, broke the tournament average record, threw 111.17 to reach the final, threw 101.75 in it, lost, and collected £15,000. The 2026 calendar gives him four days off before Maastricht.