It’s just a few days since the PDC announced the 2025 Premier League line-up and they’ve now announced the participants for the first World Series of Darts event of 2025 – the Bahrain Darts Masters.
The 2025 Bahrain Darts Masters is nearly upon us 🌴
— PDC Darts (@OfficialPDC) January 8, 2025
Here's the confirmed field that will battle it out at @BAH_Int_Circuit on January 16-17 in the first World Series event of 2025 🙌
👉 https://t.co/eiQuurWeRz pic.twitter.com/DVxbbIZxRY
Taking place on January 16th – 17th, eight PDC representatives will compete against eight Asian representatives and for those new to darts in 2025, the World Series of Darts is a non-ranking, invitational tournament.
It’s a way for the PDC to visit different regions around the world in an effort to grow the popularity and visibility of darts worldwide.
As a result of the invitational format, the PDC use the eight Premier League players as a default selection.
They are the players who are on the TV weekly from February – May so have fan recognition during this period of the year.
It essentially helps to sell tickets for these events.
Due to the busy schedule though, there will often be 1-2 players who are unavailable for these events due to holidays, family commitments or for other reasons.
So, there are back-up players that the PDC use to fill in these spots.
2025 World Championship runner-up Michael van Gerwen is not available for the Bahrain Masters and as a result, Peter Wright has been called up as a PDC representative.
Wright was on the World Series of Darts roster in 2024 but his selection alongside some of the Premier League faces has not gone down well with darts fans on social media…
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Darts Fans Voice Frustration over Bahrain Darts Masters Player Selection
After the Premier League line-up was announced, many fans were left shocked by some of the decisions.
It wasn’t necessarily the players included but rather more focus was on those that were left out.
Michael Smith and Peter Wright have lost their place from 2024 but this wasn’t so surprising given their 2024 performances across the season.
Rather, it was new faces that fans wanted to see given a chance.
Damon Heta, Dave Chisnall, and Dimitri Van den Bergh were all names thrown into the hat but one name in particular caused a backlash.
Mike De Decker made history as being the first World Grand Prix winner NOT to be selected in the Premier League. Most had him as a favourite to be a wildcard inclusion based not only on winning the Grand Prix but for a strong end to 2024.
Many see him as a likeable and talented player that they want to see given a platform by the PDC to push on and the World Series of Darts reaction has echoed this.
Just look at some of the responses over on X:
Matt Porter, the PDC Chief Executive has tried to justify De Decker’s exclusion saying the following:
“Mike (De Decker) is an outstanding talent and is someone that undoubtedly we will see in Premier League Darts in the future. We didn’t feel he was quite ready.
“There’s a lot of tournaments throughout the year and winning one – we’ve seen players in the past I don’t want to embarass by naming them – but players like Danny Noppert, Ross Smith and Andrew Gilding that have won TV tournaments. But you have to show that you can compete in the latter stages of TV tournaments on a regular basis.
“Doing it once is fantastic and is something that you will always have but to really be part of the elite, you have to be doing it on a regular basis over multiple years.”
It’s a fair reasoning but after the response to the first World Series of Darts line-up, this might need to be reconsidered.
There’s clearly a big demand for new faces in these events and fans are really pushing for it…
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