Who plays who in the European Championship first round?
All 32 qualifiers play in the first round, over best of 11 legs. The top half of the bracket is on Thursday 22 October and the bottom half on Friday 23 October, which is why Littler and Michael van Gerwen do not throw on the opening night.
| Seeded player | Opponent | Day |
|---|---|---|
| (1) Ross Smith | (32) Karel Sedlacek | Thu |
| (16) James Wade | (17) Damon Heta | Thu |
| (8) Gian van Veen | (25) Andrew Gilding | Thu |
| (9) Luke Woodhouse | (24) Dirk van Duijvenbode | Thu |
| (4) Niels Zonneveld | (29) Cameron Menzies | Thu |
| (13) Gerwyn Price | (20) Rob Cross | Thu |
| (5) Danny Noppert | (28) Stephen Bunting | Thu |
| (12) Luke Humphries | (21) Ryan Searle | Thu |
| (2) Wessel Nijman | (31) Martin Schindler | Fri |
| (15) Ryan Joyce | (18) Jermaine Wattimena | Fri |
| (7) Jonny Clayton | (26) Niko Springer | Fri |
| (10) Josh Rock | (23) Chris Dobey | Fri |
| (3) Krzysztof Ratajski | (30) Dave Chisnall | Fri |
| (14) Kevin Doets | (19) Michael van Gerwen | Fri |
| (6) Nathan Aspinall | (27) Cristo Reyes | Fri |
| (11) Luke Littler | (22) William O’Connor | Fri |
Why is Luke Littler only the 11th seed?
Because this is the one PDC major that ignores the world rankings completely. The field and the seeding both come from the European Tour Order of Merit, a single-season table counting nothing but prize money won at the year’s 15 European Tour events. Littler finished it 11th on £75,000. Van Gerwen finished 19th, which makes him the lower seed in his own tie against Kevin Doets at No.14.
Littler has never won this title — a last-16 exit in 2025 is his best run at it — and he starts against William O’Connor, the 22nd seed, on Friday. The mechanics of the bracket and the leg lengths are set out in our European Championship format guide.
Source: PDC Europe, final 2026 European Tour Order of Merit after the Dutch Darts Championship.
Smith and Wessel Nijman finished a long way clear. Behind them the table flattens out badly: third place to 16th covers fourteen players inside £23,500, which is less than the gap between Smith and Nijman alone. The three pairs of equal-length bars above are not a rounding artefact. They are exact ties.
The five ties that shaped the bracket
Prize money on the European Tour comes in round-number increments, so a 32-man table built from it produces ties, and this year it produced five. Four of them fell inside the qualifying places and were broken on countback to decide the seedings. The fifth decided who was in the tournament and who was watching it.
| Level on | Players | What the countback did |
|---|---|---|
| £87,000 | Noppert (5) & Aspinall (6) | Split into opposite halves |
| £81,000 | Van Veen (8) & Woodhouse (9) | Drawn into the same second-round tie |
| £75,000 | Littler (11) & Humphries (12) | Split into opposite halves |
| £40,500 | Menzies (29) & Chisnall (30) | Drew the 4th and 3rd seeds respectively |
| £34,500 | Sedlacek (32) & Huybrechts (33) | Decided who qualified at all |
Sedlacek and Kim Huybrechts both finished on £34,500. The countback gave Sedlacek 32nd and Huybrechts 33rd, and the PDC has not published which criterion separated them. Huybrechts went into the final weekend inside the places and lost his opening match in Maastricht to the host-nation qualifier Jimmy van Schie, which left him stuck on a total that everybody below him could still reach.
Two of the other countbacks had consequences a bracket away. Littler and Luke Humphries were level to the pound on £75,000; being split 11 and 12 put them in opposite halves, so they can now only meet in Sunday’s final. Gian van Veen and Luke Woodhouse, level on £81,000, got the opposite treatment: seeds 8 and 9 sit in the same second-round tie, so the defending champion and the man who finished level with him could be eliminating each other on Saturday afternoon.
How Maastricht rewrote the seedings
The last European Tour event of the season moved the top of this table as much as the bottom. Niels Zonneveld won the Dutch Darts Championship, beating Danny Noppert 8-5 in an all-Dutch final for his maiden PDC ranking title. The £35,000 cheque took him to £87,500 and the fourth seeding; without it he would have finished the season on £52,500, outside the top 20.
Stephen Bunting arrived in Maastricht on £33,000, holding the last qualifying place by a thread after Sedlacek’s first-round win pushed him out of the 32. He reached the semi-finals, where Zonneveld beat him 7-4, and the £10,000 that came with it lifted him to £43,000 and the 28th seeding. His reward is Noppert in the first round.
Martin Schindler escaped the £34,500 logjam by beating Sedlacek in the second round in Maastricht, which was worth exactly the £5,000 that made him 31st rather than a countback case. He now faces Nijman on Friday. Van Veen did not win the title but he did produce the weekend’s defining performance, a 120.24 average in a 6-0 win over Sebastian Bialecki — the first 120-plus match average in European Tour history, past Dave Chisnall’s 118.66. Chisnall is in Dortmund too, seeded 30th, and plays Krzysztof Ratajski.
Michael Smith and Gary Anderson are the two notable absentees. Neither earned enough across the 15 European Tour events to reach the top 32, and the European Championship has no qualifier or wildcard route to fall back on. The European Championship race standings show how the full table finished.
What the second round already looks like
Because every seed starts in round one, the second round is drawn in advance. The winner of Smith against Sedlacek meets the winner of James Wadeagainst Damon Heta — the 16th seed against the 17th, the closest first-round pairing in the bracket. Noppert or Bunting play Humphries or Searle, and Zonneveld or Menzies meet Price or Cross.
In the bottom half, Littler or O’Connor face Nathan Aspinall or Cristo Reyes, Ratajski or Chisnall meet Doets or Van Gerwen, and Jonny Clayton or Springer play Josh Rock or Chris Dobey. Matches jump from best of 11 to best of 19 at that stage, an eight-leg increase that tends to punish anyone who scraped through on Thursday or Friday.
When is the European Championship on?
The tournament runs from Thursday 22 to Sunday 25 October at the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund, where it has been staged since 2022, with a £750,000 prize fund and £150,000 to the champion. The first round is split across Thursday and Friday, the second round fills two sessions on Saturday, and Sunday carries the four quarter-finals in the afternoon before both semi-finals and the final in the evening.
Van Veen defends the title he won by beating Humphries 11-10 in last year’s final. The rest of the season is on the 2026 calendar, with the Grand Slam of Darts in Wolverhampton next up in November.