Jonny Clayton, the former plasterer who ended Luke Littler’s perfect year

Jonny Clayton

Photo: Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 4, 1974 Wales
Occupation	Darts Player
Awards	Masters · Premier League Darts · World Grand Prix · World Series of Darts Finals · PDC World Cup of Darts (shared) · Swiss Darts Trophy · New Zealand Darts Masters

Luke Littler had won the first six major events of the season when he walked out against Jonny Clayton in the quarter-finals of the World Series of Darts Finals in Amsterdam. From three legs each, Clayton took seven of the last eight legs, and the talk of a perfect year was over. “Luke wasn’t at full flow,” he told ITV. “He gave me chances upon chances. That’s not the Littler we all know. But Jonny Clayton can play darts as well!”

That last sentence could serve as a summary of his career. Clayton has rarely been the loudest presence in a room, not even in Welsh darts, where Gerwyn Price supplies the noise. He is “The Ferret”, a man from Pontyberem who kept plastering for Carmarthenshire County Council long after he had started winning on the professional tour. His best season, the one with four major titles, keeps slipping further into the past, while the big nights of his late career keep ending on a dart that lands a few millimetres the wrong side of the wire.

Clayton was born in Llanelli on 4 October 1974 and grew up in Pontyberem, in the Gwendraeth Valley. Rugby came first. He played scrum-half for Pontyberem RFC and captained the club, which has since named a lounge after him. He supports Liverpool and wears the number 97 under the collar of his playing shirt in memory of those who died at Hillsborough. Darts stayed a sideline for years, and he only won a Professional Darts Corporation tour card on the final day of Q-School in 2015, at the age of 40.

The late start did not slow him for long. In 2017 he won his first ranking title, at Players Championship 22, and reached the final of the Players Championship Finals, beating Price, Stephen Bunting and the top seed Rob Cross before losing to Michael van Gerwen. The following year he beat Price 8-5 in the final of the Austrian Darts Open and became the first Welshman to win a title on the PDC European Tour. In 2020 the two of them won the World Cup of Darts together, whitewashing the England pair of Cross and Michael Smith 3-0 in the final.

Then came 2021. Clayton won the Masters, beating Mervyn King 11-8 in the final after checking out ten times from eleven attempts against James Wade earlier in the event, a rate the PDC said could be a world record. The title earned him a debut in the Premier League, where he hit a nine-dart finish on the third night, scraped into the play-offs in fourth place and then beat Van Gerwen 10-8 and José de Sousa 11-5. No Welshman had won the Premier League before him, and nobody had won it from fourth. In the autumn he beat Price 5-1 in the World Grand Prix final and Dimitri Van den Bergh 11-6 at the World Series of Darts Finals. That made four televised titles in a single year, and he only gave up plastering the following year.

The trouble with that season is that every later one has been measured against it, and none has matched it. His next major final, at the 2023 World Matchplay, ended in an 18-6 defeat by Nathan Aspinall. At the 2025 World Masters he came back from 5-2 down against Luke Humphries and lost 6-5 in the deciding leg. In 2026, his strongest year since then, the pattern held. He missed a match dart in a 10-9 Premier League semi-final defeat by Humphries, and at the World Grand Prix in October he missed three more against Price in a 3-2 quarter-final loss. Around the same time he argued that the world’s top 16 should qualify automatically for every event, comparing the current system to an FA Cup without the Premier League clubs. Plenty of fans answered that the elite already start later in many majors and collect bigger cheques for it. Without his European Tour win in Basel he might have missed the Grand Slam himself, and the case sounded odd from a man who won four majors in a season while he still had a day job.

Some of the dip had nothing to do with darts. His father, John, died in July 2023, and Clayton came close to walking away. “It was over, I won’t lie to you,” he said at a press conference in December 2024. “When I lost my dad, it hurt. He was my inspiration to keep playing.” He also manages gout and has played through flare-ups in his ankles. On a Premier League night in Nottingham in March 2026 he limped visibly between visits and still won the night, beating Humphries 6-1 in the final. “I take medication every day,” he said. “I don’t want to miss these nights.” He is married to Ellen, and they have two children.

The recovery began in 2025. He averaged 112.77 against Martin Schindler at the World Masters, reached the UK Open semi-finals, a run that lifted him to fifth in the world, and won the Dutch Darts Championship, beating Niko Springer 8-6 in the final. He was still fifth this October. At the 2026 World Championship he matched his best run, reaching the quarter-finals before Ryan Searle beat him 5-2, and his return to the Premier League brought four nightly wins and second place in the table. He beat Price 8-4 to win the New Zealand Darts Masters in Auckland, beat Littler 10-4 in Amsterdam on 20 September and won the Swiss Darts Trophy in Basel on 11 October, beating Gian van Veen with a 105 average in the semi-final and Humphries 8-4 in the final. It was his fourth European Tour title. Two weeks later, at the European Championship in Dortmund, he beat Springer and Josh Rock before Schindler beat him 10-1 in the quarter-finals.

Asked this month to rank the greatest players, he named Phil Taylor and Van Gerwen, waved away Wade’s claim to the second spot and said Littler “could play blindfolded and still be just as good”. It was a generous line from a man who had beaten Littler a few weeks earlier. Clayton’s next stop is the Grand Slam of Darts in Wolverhampton from 14 to 22 November, and the World Championship starts on 11 December. He has never gone past the quarter-finals there, and this time he arrives ranked among the top five, with a win over Littler in his recent record.

Tags: sports, athletes, Luke Littler, darts, darts players, Jonny Clayton, Gerwyn Price, Premier League Darts, World Series of Darts Finals