The 1993 Darts Breakaway and the Sanctions That Later Unraveled

In January 1993, sixteen professional darts players made the decision that divided their sport. They left the British Darts Organisation and formed the World Darts Council, creating a rival body in a game whose principal competitive structure had been concentrated under the BDO since Olly Croft founded it in 1973. Phil Taylor, Dennis Priestley, Eric Bristow, and John Lowe were among the players who signed the breakaway statement. Their action did not produce an immediate settlement. It produced a contest over who could stage tournaments, who could enter them, and which organization possessed authority over professional darts.

The dispute moved quickly from declaration to discipline. On January 24, 1993, after the World Championship, the BDO suspended all sixteen WDC players from BDO tournaments. The sanction reached the competitions controlled by the organization that had made their careers possible, and it placed the rebels outside the circuit where the sport’s established titles and invitations were administered. A player could still hold his professional identity, his ranking, and his public reputation, yet be excluded from the tournaments through which the BDO exercised practical power.

At Finchley on April 25, the BDO passed further motions. The penalties expanded beyond a simple tournament suspension toward BDO-sanctioned darts and associational conduct. The distinction mattered because the conflict was no longer confined to whether sixteen men could enter a particular event. It concerned the relationships, competitions, and affiliations that connected players to the organization. Croft was part of the BDO during this period, as the association attempted to preserve a common circuit by restricting participation in the rival one.

The sanctions also moved beyond Britain’s domestic darts structure. On October 18, 1993, in Las Vegas, the World Darts Federation voted to ratify the bans on WDC players. The decision gave the BDO’s position wider federation-level support and made the breakaway an international organizational dispute. It did not transform every tournament in every country into an identical enforcement zone, but it established the political direction of the sport’s governing bodies: the players had departed one circuit, and the organizations responsible for that circuit sought to limit the routes available to them elsewhere.

For the players, the alternative was not merely theoretical. The WDC had been created to stage professional competition outside the BDO’s control. Taylor and the other rebels were no longer asking only for permission to return; they were participating in the construction of a separate professional structure. Bristow later spoke publicly about the settlement that followed, but in 1993 the immediate fact was simpler: a group of established players had chosen institutional separation, and the BDO answered by treating that separation as a breach requiring suspension.

The legal posture changed four years later. On June 30, 1997, the BDO and WDC reached a Tomlin order, a court settlement that ended the worldwide ban on WDC players. The agreement did not simply suspend the penalties for a season or create a temporary passage between rival calendars. It recognized the WDC’s right to stage professional competitions, giving the breakaway organization a settled place in the sport’s institutional landscape. The dispute that had begun with exclusion therefore ended, in legal terms, with recognition of the rival body’s authority to operate.

The settlement also changed the identity of the organization the BDO had tried to contain. After the Tomlin order, the WDC renamed itself the Professional Darts Corporation. The new name attached a durable commercial and sporting identity to the breakaway. What had begun as a statement signed by sixteen professionals became a separate competition system, no longer defined solely by its opposition to the BDO. The legal settlement had converted a contested departure into an acknowledged rival, while leaving the sport divided between two professional pathways.

That division survived the settlement. The Tomlin order ended the worldwide ban, but it did not merge the BDO and the PDC or remove the practical consequences of belonging to one circuit rather than the other. Eligibility rules continued to express the older separation. Players could move through the sport under different organizational permissions, and the existence of two professional bodies preserved the central question raised in 1993: whether a player’s affiliation should determine access to competition.

On August 23, 2018, the BDO announced another alteration. Under a decision overseen by chairman and chief executive Derek Jacklin after discussions with the BDO board, the organization said it would remove historic restrictions on current PDC Tour Card holders entering BDO qualifying events. The change did not erase the separate histories of the two bodies. It altered one remaining barrier by allowing players holding the PDC’s principal tour credential to seek entry through BDO qualifying competition.

The language of the 2018 decision was narrower than reconciliation. It addressed restrictions on current PDC Tour Card holders and BDO qualifying events; it did not settle every structural dispute between the organizations or repair every weakness within the BDO. The change nevertheless marked a further retreat from the exclusionary position adopted in 1993. A player’s relationship with the PDC no longer automatically barred him from that defined BDO route.

Across twenty-five years, the dispute moved through three institutional forms: suspension, legal recognition, and partial access. The sixteen-player breakaway created the WDC; the BDO’s sanctions attempted to protect its circuit; the 1997 Tomlin order ended the worldwide ban and recognized professional competition outside BDO control; and the 2018 rule change removed a historic restriction at the qualifying level. The enduring arrangement was not a single unified darts authority, but a sport whose competing structures had learned, through litigation and altered rules, to exist beside one another.