Jayden Walker, 14, Is Youngest WDF Senior Champion

What happened in Selsey

The England International Open ran at Seal Bay Resort from 9–11 October, the smallest of three senior titles decided there across the weekend. Walker beat the 16-year-old Archie Self in the quarter-finals, according to Darts World’s report from the venue, and won his semi-final against Jack Nankervis 4–0.

The final was a best of nine. Turner twice cut into the lead and twice lost the next leg. Walker finished with a 93.81 average, three 180s and a 136 checkout — figures reported identically by dartsnews.com, Darts World and the Finnish site finndarts.com.

How big is the record, really?

Bigger than the previous two moves put together, and that is the part the headlines skip. Records like this normally creep. Littler won the WDF Irish Open at the Gleneagle Hotel in Killarney over the weekend of 13–14 November 2021, beating Barry Copeland 6–2. He was 14, but at the very end of it: born on 21 January 2007, he had about ten weeks of being 14 left when he threw that final. Kaya Baysal then took the record off him at the Budapest Classic in April 2025 and did it, as both dartsnews.com and the Burnley Express reported at the time, by 13 days.

Thirteen days. Walker has moved it by something between seven and eight months. He turned 14 in August and won a senior title in October, which puts the youngest-champion mark weeks after a player’s 14th birthday instead of weeks before their 15th. His exact date of birth has not been published, so the figure in days is not available — but the shape of it is not in doubt.

The cheapest record in darts

Walker won the lowest-ranked of the three. The England Classic and the England Masters are Silver events paying £1,500 to the winner; the International Open is a Bronze event with £1,900 in the building in total. Making history came to £500.

Hold that against the professional game for a second. Entry to the 2027 PDC Qualifying School costs £475 plus VAT in the UK, and buys you nothing except the right to turn up. The youngest senior champion in WDF history earned roughly the price of the application form. That is not a complaint about the WDF, which runs an amateur circuit and prices it accordingly — it is the clearest illustration of the gap between the two halves of the sport that you will find. Our guide to how the PDC and WDF differ sets out the rest of it.

Why the record happened on the WDF circuit

Because it could only have happened there. The PDC’s youth ladder has a hard floor: the PDPA’s own induction notes state that players may compete on the Winmau Development Tour “from the day they turn 16”, and Q-School is open to anyone 16 or over on its opening day. There is no 14-year-old route into the PDC ProTour and no exception for form. The WDF’s senior ranked events, by contrast, are open to youth players — which is why the last three holders of this particular record all set it in WDF halls rather than at Wigan or Milton Keynes.

The quarter-final is the whole thing in one match. Archie Self is 16. Eight days before Selsey he won his maiden PDC Development Tour title at Robin Park in Wigan, beating Sam Jackson 5–2, and he already had two Challenge Tour titles from this season. He went on to win the England Masters in Selsey roughly an hour after taking the Youth title there. Walker beat him and then won the bigger prize — and of the two, only Self can legally chase a Tour Card.

What Walker can do next, and when

Almost everything in front of him is WDF or international darts, not PDC. He already has a senior England shirt: he won the men’s international trial at The Spa in Bridlington in September, at 14, which put him in the squad for the British Internationals, the Six Nations Cup and the World Cup. Darts World, reporting from Bridlington, had him beating Jack Nankervis 2–1 in sets in that final — the same opponent he then whitewashed in the Selsey semi.

The PDC side is simple arithmetic and a long wait. He turns 16 in August 2028, so Development Tour events open to him in the back half of that season and the Q-School staged in January 2029 is the first he can enter. That is a materially different position from Mitchell Lawrie, the 15-year-old Europe Cup singles champion, whose 16th birthday falls on 4 November this year and who is therefore two weeks from eligibility rather than two years.

Littler is the obvious comparison and the obvious trap. His Irish Open win was a gateway — it put him into the WDF World Championship at 14 — and the rest of that career did not follow automatically from it. Baysal, who took the record off Littler eighteen months ago, was in the same Selsey building this weekend: Darts World had him losing the England Classic semi-final 4–3 to the eventual champion, Chas Barstow. Two players have now held this record and gone on to very different things. Walker has the record; what he does not have is a shortcut.