When the PDC announced its twelfth major in September it gave the dates, the city and the £750,000, and left the rest blank. On Wednesday it filled in the part that matters to anybody not already on the circuit: the inaugural European Open will be a 160-player tournament at the Salzburgarena, and 128 of those places go to Tour Card holders. The four routes that carry the other 32 are where the announcement gets interesting — and one of them is a good deal narrower than it sounds.
Five routes, with one of them doing almost all of the work. Every player holding a PDC Tour Card is in, and the PDC has been explicit that this includes anyone who wins a card for the 2027 season — so the graduates of January’s Q-School in Milton Keynes and Kalkar will have a Salzburg place waiting for them five months later.
| Route | Places | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| PDC Tour Card holders | 128 | Automatic, including 2027 card winners |
| International qualifiers | 16 | Criteria to be published |
| Challenge Tour | 4 | Top four on the Order of Merit |
| Development Tour | 4 | Top four on the Order of Merit |
| PDC Europe Start | 8 | Amateur series, German-speaking Europe |
| Total | 160 |
Darts World reports that full qualification criteria will follow in a later announcement. One outlet has published a different split of the 32 non-card places; the breakdown above is the PDC’s own, and it is the only version that adds up to 160.
Four places from the Challenge Tour and four from the Development Tour reads like eight new names from the second tier. Run it against the tables that have just closed and it is nothing like eight.
The problem is the order in which the PDC hands out prizes. Both tours give two-year Tour Cards to their leading players first, which means the men at the top of each Order of Merit have usually already won the bigger thing — and a Tour Card is one of the 128 automatic European Open places. Our final 2026 Challenge Tour table and final Development Tour table show how thoroughly that eats the route.
| Tour | # | Player | Won | Card status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Challenge | 1 | Joe Hunt | ÂŁ20,400 | Tour Card, 2027-28 |
| Challenge | 2 | Derek Coulson | ÂŁ15,500 | Tour Card, 2027-28 |
| Challenge | 3 | Tommy Morris | ÂŁ12,450 | No card |
| Challenge | 4 | Daniel Klose | ÂŁ12,250 | No card |
| Development | 1 | Sebastian Bialecki | ÂŁ21,900 | Carded in 2026 |
| Development | 2 | Jurjen van der Velde | ÂŁ12,350 | Carded in 2026 |
| Development | 3 | Cam Crabtree | ÂŁ12,350 | Carded in 2026 |
| Development | 4 | Jamai van den Herik | ÂŁ12,250 | Tour Card, 2027-28 |
Hunt, Coulson and van den Herik hold two-year cards covering 2027. Bialecki, van der Velde and Crabtree were all carded players during 2026; the years their cards run to are not something we can state precisely, so they are marked as such rather than counted either way.
Of the eight names in that table, exactly two — Tommy Morris and Daniel Klose, third and fourth on the Challenge Tour — are the only two who are not already inside the 128 as things stand. The Development Tour’s top four are all accounted for, Sebastian Bialecki among them — he won that Order of Merit on £21,900 without entering the final weekend in Wigan.
None of which is a flaw, necessarily. It depends entirely on a clause the PDC has not published, and the UK Open shows what that clause looks like when it exists. Minehead takes the eight highest-ranked players on each of the two Orders of Merit who have not earned a Tour Card, which is why Archie Self, fifth on the Challenge Tour and ninth on the Development Tour, walked out of Wigan with a first-round place at the 2027 UK Open rather than nothing. Written that way, the route always delivers eight genuine outsiders.
The European Open announcement says only “the top four”. Two readings are possible: the PDC adds the same carve-out and the places roll down to the next uncarded player, or it does not, and on a table like this year’s the route quietly does very little. The announcement also does not say which season’s tables apply — the completed 2026 lists, as the UK Open uses, or 2027 tables that will be half-played when Salzburg comes round in June. Both questions matter more to the players concerned than the £750,000 does.
The larger of the four minor routes is 16 international qualifying places, and this is the clearest structural break from the tournament the European Open is modelled on. The UK Open’s 32 non-card places all come through British-based pathways: the Challenge and Development Tours, PDC in the Community, and the Rileys amateur qualifiers. Not one of them is an international route. Salzburg hands half its spare places to exactly that.
The eight remaining places go to PDC Europe Start, and these are worth understanding before anyone calls them an open amateur door. PDC Europe’s own announcement of the series describes it as a regional circuit for players in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, carrying €40,000 in prize money and running qualifying routes into PDC events. It is, in other words, the German-speaking equivalent of Rileys — which makes the two tournaments mirror images. Each reserves a block of places for the grassroots game in its own region, and each then differs on whether anyone outside that region gets a look in.
A 160-player major is a rarity, and until now there has been precisely one. Against the rest of the televised schedule the scale of Salzburg and Minehead is obvious.
Source: PDC announcements for the 2027 European Open and European Championship, plus field sizes for the 2026 UK Open, Grand Slam of Darts, Players Championship Finals and World Grand Prix and the 2026/27 World Championship as published on this site.
Eight boards will run at once in Salzburg, with spectators free to walk between them, which is the Minehead experience transplanted to an Austrian exhibition arena. The PDC has not released round structures, leg formats or how the draw will be made, so the comparison stops at the door for now.
The pre-sale opens on 12 November 2026, seven months before the first dart is thrown. Friday and Saturday are sold as day tickets covering the multi-board sessions; Sunday, when the tournament narrows to a single stage, is ticketed session by session. There is a beer garden and a run of fan activities alongside the darts, which tells you roughly what kind of weekend the PDC is selling.
Three things, and all of them affect who actually plays. The qualification criteria for the 16 international places have not been published, and the phrase covers everything from regional affiliate allocations to a single open qualifier. Whether the Challenge and Development Tour places skip carded players is unresolved. And the prize breakdown behind the ÂŁ750,000 has not appeared, which matters because a 160-player field paying down a long way is a different proposition from one that concentrates the money at the top.
What is settled is the shape, and it is a deliberate one. The PDC has built a second tournament where a Tour Card alone is a ticket to a televised major, in a summer week that previously held nothing, five days after the World Cup of Darts in Frankfurt. For a professional who spends the year on the floor circuit and never reaches a televised stage, that is the single most useful thing the 2027 calendar does. Our original report on the European Open covers the rest of the 2027 expansion, and the season calendar has a Grand Slam and an Alexandra Palace to settle first.