Darts Players Have Same Six Clauses Inserted in PDC Contracts

Every PDC tour card holder has the same six clauses written into their contracts, a former pro has revealed.

There are currently 128 active PDC tour card holders, though that figure will reduce at the end of the 2025/26 season following the World Championship.

Each year, the top 64 players in the two-year Order of Merit, along with those entering the second of the two-year tour cards they won at Q-School, will remain as PDC professionals during the 2026/27 season.

The remaining cards are on offer at the UK and EU Q-Schools, which take place at the end of January 2026.

Although 128 players enter the World Championship, only the top 40 players in the PDC Order of Merit automatically qualify for the tournament - meaning the likes of Luke Littler, Luke Humphries and Michael van Gerwen safely qualified.

The top 40 players in the ProTour Order of Merit are also guaranteed a spot, along with 48 international qualifiers and the winners of the tour card holder qualifiers.

For next year's tournament, the ProTour slate is wiped clean, with all 128 tour card holders having a near enough equal chance of qualifying for the World Championship.

128 players qualify for the PDC World Darts Championship (Image: Getty)

Former PDC tour card holder Matthew Edgar has revealed that, for each of the active tour card holders, six clauses are put in place as part of their official contracts.

And while most of those are reasonably self-explanatory, there are a number of more detailed rules in place.

The first is that PDC players cannot play on 'streamed' events, such as online exhibitions or MODUS Super Series tournaments.

"I think this is down to a couple of reasons," Edgar says. "One is to protect the players, to protect their intellectual rights.

"The other one, I think, comes down to if it's non-DRA [Darts Regulation Authority] regulated. During COVID, there was a bedroom competition, and the bookies priced it [the final] up, because there was nothing going on.

"That's an unregulated event, just two guys playing darts on the Internet in their bedroom. That could have opened up a world of anything."

In the UK, each exhibition also cannot be held within a 30-mile radius of a venue that the PDC is staging events at, within a 28-day timeframe either side of that event.

That timeframe is expanded to 56 days either side when events are held outside of the UK.

The third clause is that players cannot compete in any event that carries the word 'world' in its title, such as the WDF World Championship.

That rule prevented, for instance, Beau Greaves from defending her WDF Women's World Championship this year after she accepted an invitation to the PDC version.

The fourth clause, meanwhile, allows the PDC to revoke a tour card if a player does not enter a PDC event across a 12-month timeframe.

Tour card contracts also run for 30 days beyond the end of the World Championship - effectively a non-compete clause that is used in other sports.

The PDC also install a 'levy' as part of their contracts, whereby players pay 2 per cent of their prize money won during each season.

And there is also a social media rule in place, where players can send up to two social media posts on their personal account to promote PDC events if requested.