What has Nathan Aspinall actually won?
Two majors, a World Series title and four European Tour events. That is a better return than most players manage in a full career, and the first of them arrived early: he was a major champion by March 2019, around 18 months after turning professional.
| Event | Year | Result |
|---|---|---|
| UK Open | 2019 | Won — beat Rob Cross 11-5 |
| World Matchplay | 2023 | Won — beat Jonny Clayton 18-6 |
| US Darts Masters | 2019 | Won — beat Michael Smith |
| European Tour | 2025-26 | Four titles |
| World Championship | 2019, 2020 | Semi-finals |
| World Grand Prix | 2022 | Runner-up |
| Premier League | 2020 | Runner-up — lost final to Glen Durrant |
| Players Championship Finals | 2025 | Runner-up — lost 11-8 to Luke Littler |
The 2019 UK Open: a 170 to finish
Aspinall arrived at Butlin’s in Minehead for the UK Open on 1 March 2019 and left three days later with his first televised title. He beat Toni Alcinas, Christian Kist, Madars Razma, Steve Lennon, Ross Smith and Gerwyn Price to reach the final, then beat Rob Cross 11-5.
He finished it with a 170 checkout — the big fish, on the last dart of the tournament, in the biggest match of his life. Price had been beaten in the semi-final earlier the same day, and Cross had come through the other half by beating Michael Smith 11-7.
The 2023 World Matchplay: 13 of the last 14 legs
Four years later Aspinall won the Phil Taylor Trophy, and he won it in a canter. He beat Jonny Clayton 18-6 at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool on 23 July 2023, taking 13 of the last 14 legs and £200,000. Clayton, in his first Matchplay final, got the deficit back to 16-6 and that was the end of it.
It was the widest margin in a World Matchplay final since Phil Taylor beat Terry Jenkins 18-4 in 2009, and it made Aspinall the 12th different player to lift the trophy.
Four European Tour titles in 13 months
For most of his career Aspinall won majors and did not win on the European Tour. Then the floodgates: his first came at the 2025 European Darts Trophy, where he beat Ryan Joyce 8-4, and his fourth came at the German Darts Grand Prix in Munich on 6 April 2026, where he came from 5-4 down to beat Danny Noppert 8-5 with four straight legs.
All four titles landed inside those 13 months. The fourth also drew him level with Phil Taylor’s career European Tour haul, which says more about how late Taylor’s career overlapped with the circuit than about the two players, but it is a line in the record books all the same.
The World Championship gap
Aspinall has twice been two matches from the Sid Waddell Trophy and twice lost the semi-final: to Michael Smith in 2019, and to Michael van Gerwen in 2020. Those remain his only two semi-finals at Alexandra Palace.
It puts him in a familiar bracket. James Wade has ten majors and no world title; Aspinall has two and the same hole in the CV.
Premier League runner-up, then dropped
Aspinall reached the Premier League final in 2020 and lost it to Glen Durrant. He then became a fixture, and in January 2026 he stopped being one: the eight-man line-up announced on 5 January left him out for the first time since 2022, with Josh Rock taking his seat. Aspinall put it down to his ranking, which was 14th at the time.
The rest of the year complicated that. He spent 2026 climbing the very table that had cost him the Premier League seat, and he is now ninth.
His 2026: a final in February, a 105.15 in October
Aspinall’s season started with a final. At Players Championship 1 at Halle 39 in Hildesheim on 9 February he beat Adam Gawlas 7-4 in the semi-final and then lost the final 8-6 to James Wade, squandering three darts at a double at 7-6 that would have forced a decider. The defeat kept him waiting for a first Players Championship title since August 2022.
His best television run came in October at the World Grand Prix in Leicester, where he whitewashed Ryan Joyce 3-0 in the quarter-finals on a 105.15 average — the fourth-highest in the tournament’s history, in the one format that starts every leg on a double. Gerwyn Price then beat him 5-2 in the semi-finals.
Two deep runs, then, in a year that also contained the Premier League omission and a floor campaign that never built. It is a season that looks respectable on one table and barely registers on another.
Where he sits on the Order of Merit
The main PDC Order of Merit is a two-year rolling table of ranking prize money, and it has Aspinall ninth on £595,500.
Source: dartsrankings.com PDC Order of Merit, November 2026
Two things stand out. The first is how far clear Luke Littler has gone: his £3.14m is roughly triple the second-placed figure. The second is how little separates the players around Aspinall. Rock in eighth, Aspinall in ninth and Stephen Buntingin tenth are covered by £8,750 — one quarter-final between them, in either direction.
Why ninth in the world is nowhere near Minehead
Here is where the two tables diverge. The 64 places at the Players Championship Finals do not come off the Order of Merit at all. They come off the one-year Players Championship Order of Merit, built purely from prize money won at the season’s floor events, as our guide to the PDC ProTour explains. Majors count for nothing on it.
On that table Aspinall has £26,500, which is outside the top 64. After Players Championship 32 the last qualifying place belonged to Wesley Plaisier on £31,750, leaving Aspinall £5,250 adrift with only the Leicester double-header on 4 and 5 November left in the season. He is not alone up there: Littler, the reigning Minehead champion, finished the floor season on £10,500 and is already out of the event he won last year.
That matters to Aspinall more than to most, because he was in the 2025 final. Littler beat him 11-8 at Butlin’s last November. The Players Championship Finals format rewards the players who turn up to the floor events week after week, and a top-ten ranking buys no exemption from it.
The shape of the career
Aspinall’s record is unusually top-heavy. He has won the two majors that reward surviving a long, grinding week — the UK Open with its open draw, the Matchplay with its long legs — and he has four European Tour titles from the 2025-26 purple patch. What he does not have is a World Championship run deeper than a semi-final, or the week-in, week-out floor presence that fills a one-year ranking table.
At 35 he is ten months past a Premier League omission and five places higher in the world than when it happened. The two trophies are not going anywhere, and nor is the gap on the other list. Both are on the live Minehead qualifying table and the 2026 calendar.