What he has actually withdrawn from
The trigger was two nights at AFAS Live. Littler was booed and whistled through his Friday win over Danny Noppert, and it got worse on the Saturday: during the 10-9 last-leg win over Nathan Aspinall, referee Charlie Costorphine stopped play to address the arena. “Ladies and gentlemen, please, out of respect to both of the players, please do not whistle whilst they are throwing,” he said. It was Aspinall, the man on the other side of the board, who had asked him to.
Littler’s line afterwards was unambiguous. “If the Dutch stay like this, then I’m not going to do any Euro Tours over there,” he said. “There’s just no point in me travelling, wasting my time whilst I’m getting booed.” Asked whether he really meant it, he said he was 100 per cent prepared to do it.
He was out of the tournament by Sunday teatime, beaten 10-4 by Jonny Clayton in the quarter-finals. By Tuesday morning he had withdrawn from Players Championship 29 in Den Bosch, on Wednesday he was absent from Players Championship 30 at the same venue, and his entry for the Dutch Darts Championship in Maastricht on 16-18 October had been cancelled. Gerwyn Price and James Wade also came off the Den Bosch entry lists, though neither has tied their absence to the crowds. Den Bosch went ahead without them and produced a fourth ranking title for Cameron Menzies and then the first PDC ranking title ever won by a Czech player.
The two October dates that change the arithmetic
Most of the coverage has counted three withdrawals and stopped. The ProTour calendar makes it four, because Players Championships 31 and 32 on 28 and 29 October are at the Maaspoort in Den Bosch too — the identical venue Littler has just twice declined to visit.
| Event | Date | Venue | Littler |
|---|---|---|---|
| Players Championship 29 | Tue 22 September | Maaspoort, Den Bosch | Withdrew |
| Players Championship 30 | Wed 23 September | Maaspoort, Den Bosch | Withdrew |
| Players Championship 31 | Wed 28 October | Maaspoort, Den Bosch | Ruled out by the boycott |
| Players Championship 32 | Thu 29 October | Maaspoort, Den Bosch | Ruled out by the boycott |
| Players Championship 33 | Wed 4 November | Mattioli Arena, Leicester | Open |
| Players Championship 34 | Thu 5 November | Mattioli Arena, Leicester | Open |
Six events were left when Littler walked out of Leicester in August. Four of them are in the Netherlands. If the boycott holds, his 2026 floor season is now two days long: Players Championships 33 and 34 at the Mattioli Arena on 4 and 5 November.
How far behind is he?
This matters because of a table Littler does not lead. The 64-player field for the Players Championship Finals at Minehead is set entirely by the Players Championship Order of Merit, which counts prize money from the 34 floor events and nothing else. Major titles are worth nothing to it. We flagged the problem in August, when he was still sitting on £0 having skipped the first 26 events.
He then did something about it, and the results were decent without being enough. At Players Championship 27 he lost 6-5 to Jermaine Wattimena in the quarter-finals; a day later Brendan Dolanbeat him 7-4 in the semi-finals of Players Championship 28. A quarter-final and a semi-final pay £4,000 and £6,500, so two days of work returned £10,500. After that second defeat he was reported to be £16,750 adrift of Shane McGuirk, who held 64th place on £27,250 — and £27,250 minus £16,750 is exactly £10,500, which is a useful sign that the reported numbers hang together.
The ceiling assumes he wins both Leicester events, the most the prize ladder allows from two days. Source: ESPN and Yahoo Sports for the standings after PC28; PDC prize breakdown for the ceiling.
What Leicester would have to look like
Every Players Championship pays from the same £150,000 pot, and the ladder is steep at the top and flat underneath it. That shape is what makes two events such a narrow runway.
| Finish | Prize |
|---|---|
| Winner | £15,000 |
| Runner-up | £10,000 |
| Semi-finalists (2) | £6,500 |
| Quarter-finalists (4) | £4,000 |
| Last 16 (8) | £3,000 |
| Last 32 (16) | £2,000 |
| Last 64 (32) | £1,250 |
Run the combinations against a £16,750 shortfall and almost none of them work. A title plus a last-32 run is £17,000, which just about does it. Two runner-up finishes are £20,000, which does it comfortably. A runner-up and a semi-final is £16,500 — £250 short. A title plus a first-match exit is £16,250, also short. In other words he needs to win one of the two Leicester events, or reach both finals, and anything less almost certainly is not enough.
And £16,750 is the floor rather than the target, because the bar keeps moving. McGuirk’s £27,250 was a September snapshot; the rest of the Tour Card field will play all six remaining events, including the four in Den Bosch, and 64th place will be worth more by the time Leicester comes round. Littler has to clear a number that is rising while he is not on the floor at all. Where every player stands is on our ProTour Order of Merit, and the difference between that list and the one he does lead is set out in our guide to how the PDC Order of Merit works.
Germany is the precedent
None of this is a first. Littler has not entered a European Tour event in Germany since 2025, also over crowd treatment, and the effect on his schedule has been visible all year: he has played three European Tour events in 2026, in Poland, Belgium and Czechia, out of fifteen on the calendar. He won two of them, including the Czech Darts Open in Prague against Luke Humphries.
That restraint has a ceiling of its own on the European Tour Order of Merit, the one-year list that fills the European Championship. Three entries put Littler fifth on £75,000 at the last published update, which is comfortable — but it is comfortable because of what he won, not how often he played, and a fourth country coming off the schedule narrows the margin further. The full picture of that race is in our Road to Dortmund breakdown. Dortmund itself, from 22 October, he is still playing.
What the sport is doing about it
The players have been clear about which noise they object to. Stephen Buntingput it plainly after Amsterdam: “I don’t like the whistling. I’d rather have someone shouting abuse at me than whistling.” His suggestion was sanctions — “Punishments need to be brought in, maybe. To give it some sort of stop. Until that happens, it’ll keep happening.”
Something is being tried, though nothing has been formalised. Mark Webster, working for Sky Sports, said he had “spoken to a few of the security guys who are experimenting with stuff within the crowd”, and that whistling specifically is the target: “I know they’re trying to take it out of the game.” The distinction matters. Booing is a crowd expressing a preference and no sport has ever legislated it away. A short whistle timed to the release of a dart is closer to interference, and it is the one a player cannot train himself to ignore.
Webster does not think Littler walks away from the sport over it, and nothing in the last week suggests he will. What he has done is smaller and more concrete: removed a country from his diary, in a season where the floor events were already the one box he had left unticked. The rest of the ProTour season is on our 2026 calendar, and the table he still leads by a distance is the PDC Order of Merit.