What is the PDC Europe Super League?
It is the route to Alexandra Palace for players in PDC Europe’s Next Gen programme, and it has produced a World Championship qualifier every year since 2013. Twenty-four players spend four days at Halle 39 in Hildesheim, and exactly one of them leaves with a place at the 2027 PDC World Darts Championship. There is no second prize and no consolation place — the runner-up goes home with nothing but the final.
Three separate lists feed the field. Sixteen players come off the PDC Europe Next Gen Order of Merit, four more off the Next Gen Youth Order of Merit, and the last four earned their seats on Monday night in head-to-head play-offs between the eight regional winners of PDC Europe Start, the newer entry-level series covering northern, southern, eastern and western Germany, eastern and western Austria, and eastern and western Switzerland. René Damm, Christian Gödl, Lukas Nußbaum and René Kern won those four matches and were in the groups twenty-four hours later.
One late change is worth knowing about, because it has already shaped the tournament. Daniel Klose sat second on the Next Gen list, but he had already taken the last Ally Pally place on the Challenge Tour, so his Super League seat passed down the order of merit to Kevin JuĂźen. JuĂźen finished Tuesday second in Group B.
How the groups stand after the first round robin
Each group of six plays a full round robin on Tuesday and repeats it on Wednesday, so every player gets ten group matches and every pairing meets twice. Tuesday produced precisely fifteen matches per group — the arithmetic of a six-player round robin — which puts the group stage exactly halfway. The top four in each group go through to Thursday’s round of 16 and the bottom two are out.
| Gp | Player | W | L | Legs | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 1. Jan Schmidt | 4 | 1 | 27:15 | +12 |
| 2. René Eidams | 4 | 1 | 26:23 | +3 | |
| 3. Florian Preis | 3 | 2 | 26:18 | +8 | |
| 4. René Damm | 2 | 3 | 19:22 | -3 | |
| 5. Mika Donnevert | 2 | 3 | 21:26 | -5 | |
| 6. Kimi Seemann | 0 | 5 | 15:30 | -15 | |
| B | 1. Jaimy van de Weerd | 5 | 0 | 30:16 | +14 |
| 2. Kevin JuĂźen | 3 | 2 | 27:25 | +2 | |
| 3. Dragutin Horvat | 3 | 2 | 26:27 | -1 | |
| 4. Deniz Baudis | 2 | 3 | 22:28 | -6 | |
| 5. Christian Gödl | 1 | 4 | 25:29 | -4 | |
| 6. Patrick Tringler | 1 | 4 | 23:28 | -5 | |
| C | 1. Paul Krohne | 4 | 1 | 28:17 | +11 |
| 2. Finn Behrens | 4 | 1 | 29:21 | +8 | |
| 3. René Kern | 3 | 2 | 25:26 | -1 | |
| 4. Lenny SchlĂĽter | 2 | 3 | 24:22 | +2 | |
| 5. Tim Scholz | 2 | 3 | 19:23 | -4 | |
| 6. Kilian Hohnstedt | 0 | 5 | 14:30 | -16 | |
| D | 1. Marcel Hausotter | 5 | 0 | 30:15 | +15 |
| 2. Carsten Hoffmann | 4 | 1 | 28:18 | +10 | |
| 3. Lukas NuĂźbaum | 2 | 3 | 22:20 | +2 | |
| 4. Patrick Reisenegger | 2 | 3 | 20:25 | -5 | |
| 5. Liam Maendl-Lawrance | 1 | 4 | 19:27 | -8 | |
| 6. Luca Wolff | 1 | 4 | 13:27 | -14 |
Groups B and D have a clear leader and Groups A and C do not. Jan Schmidt and René Eidams both won four of five in Group A, Schmidt ahead on a leg difference of plus twelve to plus three; Paul Krohne and Finn Behrens are level on four wins in Group C. In both of those groups the third-placed player has a healthier leg difference than the man above him, which counts for nothing while the win column separates them but matters a great deal if Wednesday levels things up.
Two results from Tuesday stand out for being the wrong way round. Schmidt finished the night on top of Group A having lost the group’s final scheduled fixture 6-3 to Florian Preis, the player sitting third. Krohne topped Group C despite taking the heaviest beating handed out in it: Tim Scholz beat him 6-1, and Scholz is fifth and facing elimination.
Source: dartn.de and dartsnews.de group tables, 10 November 2026. Five matches of up to eleven legs gives a maximum of 30 legs won.
Thirty is the ceiling, not a flourish: six legs wins a best-of-11 match and the rest are not played, so five wins cannot produce more. Hausotter and van de Weerd both hit it, and the only thing separating first place in Group D from first place in Group B is that Hausotter conceded fifteen legs and van de Weerd sixteen. At the other end, Wolff and Hohnstedt won thirteen and fourteen legs respectively from five matches each.
Two former champions are still in the field
Thirteen editions have been played and twenty-four players are in Hildesheim, so the odds are against any of them having won it before. Two have. Eidams won the 2015 title and is second in Group A eleven years on. Dragutin Horvat won it in 2016 and again in 2023, and he is third in Group B, inside the qualifying places.
Horvat’s record here is the strangest in the tournament’s history. Beyond those two titles he was runner-up in 2017, 2018 and 2020 — five finals from thirteen stagings, more than anyone else has managed, and three of them lost.
| Year | Winner | Runner-up |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Arno Merk | Daniel Klose |
| 2024 | Kai Gotthardt | Paul Krohne |
| 2023 | Dragutin Horvat | Pascal Rupprecht |
| 2022 | Florian Hempel | Niko Springer |
| 2021 | Martin Schindler | Florian Hempel |
| 2020 | Nico Kurz | Dragutin Horvat |
| 2019 | Nico Kurz | Martin Schindler |
| 2018 | Robert Marijanovic | Dragutin Horvat |
| 2017 | Kevin MĂĽnch | Dragutin Horvat |
| 2016 | Dragutin Horvat | Stefan Stoyke |
| 2015 | René Eidams | Maik Langendorf |
| 2014 | Max Hopp | Sascha Stein |
| 2013 | Andree Welge | Maik Langendorf |
Read that list downwards and it explains why this unglamorous four-day event in Hildesheim is worth paying attention to. Max Hopp won the second edition in 2014 and went on to a long PDC career. Nico Kurz won it twice, in 2019 and 2020. Martin Schindler beat Florian Hempel 11-10 in the 2021 final after losing the 2019 final himself, Hempel won it the following year, and both men have been Tour Card holders ever since. Paul Krohne, who leads Group C, lost the 2024 final 8-7 to Kai Gotthardt.
The newest qualifying route is outperforming the youth list
Eight of the twenty-four did not come through the main Next Gen Order of Merit: four from the Next Gen Youth list, and four from the PDC Europe Start play-offs on Monday night. After one round robin the two routes have diverged sharply.
Three of the four Start play-off winners sit in qualifying positions — Kern third in Group C, Nußbaum third in Group D, Damm fourth in Group A — with only Gödl outside, fifth in Group B. Of the four youth qualifiers, only Deniz Baudis is in a qualifying place, fourth in Group B. The other three won one match between them from fifteen, and Seemann and Hohnstedt are the only players in the tournament yet to win any. A route that did not exist in previous editions has handled its first Super League better than the youth order of merit has.
Lenny SchlĂĽter, fourth in Group C, is the one youth-eligible name in the field with recent silverware in this building: he came from 4-2 down to win a Development Tour title in Hildesheim earlier in the season.
Jan Schmidt has a bigger week than most
The Group A leader is playing two tournaments in eight days, and the second one is on television. Schmidt is in the 48-player field for the Grand Slam of Darts in Wolverhampton, which starts on Saturday, and the draw put him in Group N with 14th seed Chris Dobey and Martin Schindler.
Which is a neat piece of symmetry nobody has written down. Schmidt spent Tuesday topping the group stage of the tournament Schindler won in 2021 — the win that put Schindler on the path to becoming the first German to contest a televised PDC ranking final— and on Saturday the two of them are in the same Grand Slam group, where only the winner goes through. If Schmidt is still in Hildesheim on Friday night, he will have played knockout darts for a World Championship place and then travelled to Wolverhampton inside about forty-eight hours.
Why the defending champion is not here
Arno Merk won the 2025 final 8-6 against Klose and made his World Championship debut a month later. He then won a PDC Tour Card at Q-School in January, which took him out of the Next Gen programme the Super League draws on, so the 2026 field has no defending champion in it. The tournament has done this to itself by design: it exists to push players up a level, and it loses them as soon as it succeeds.
What happens next
| Round | Legs | When (CET) |
|---|---|---|
| PDC Europe Start play-offs | Best of 11 | Mon 9 Nov, 19:00 |
| Group stage, first round robin | Best of 11 | Tue 10 Nov, 17:00 |
| Group stage, second round robin | Best of 11 | Wed 11 Nov, 17:00 |
| Round of 16 | Best of 11 | Thu 12 Nov, 20:00 |
| Quarter-finals | Best of 11 | Fri 13 Nov, 20:00 |
| Semi-finals | Best of 13 | Fri 13 Nov |
| Final | Best of 15 | Fri 13 Nov |
Wednesday night repeats Tuesday’s fixtures with the pairings reversed, and then sixteen players carry on into a fixed bracket on Thursday. The quarter-finals, semi-finals and final are all played in Friday’s session, which means the eventual champion has to win four knockout matches in one night to take the place at Alexandra Palace. Sport1 is showing every session in Germany, and PDC Europe is streaming them.
Hildesheim is one of the last pieces of the 2027 World Championship puzzle to fall into place. The Nordic & Baltic place went to Anton Östlund in Odense at the weekend, Hungary’s went to Andras Borbely in Budapest at the start of the month, and a Polish qualifier and a Dutch and Belgian qualifier follow this weekend. The full picture of who gets in and how is in our guide to qualifying for the PDC World Championship, and the live projections sit on the World Championship Race table. Every date left in the season is on the 2026 calendar.