Ten things I would do if I was Matt Porter

I've always wondered what I would do if I had any sort of power to call the shots in the PDC. Let's throw out some random thoughts of easy things that can be fixed:

1 - USE DARTCONNECT FOR EVERYTHING

This one is a no brainer. Get all the stats into one, reliable platform (although saying that the day after they had a bit of a snafu in the Women's Series is good timing - congrats to Lisa btw). Everything in one place should allow for much greater stats integration, and move things away from the ever unreliable sportradar (completely unavailable for hours at a time yesterday, freezing continually on Friday). Just have a backup ref/marker at the Euro Tour etc mark it at the same time while the sportradar contract expires. As an aside, that there's been nothing WDF available on that platform for a while is really disappointing, that there's two events this weekend, one of them being the Isle of Man which has a gold and silver rated event, and we get NOTHING in terms of usable stats is unacceptable in 2022.

2 - TOP UP STAGE 2 Q-SCHOOL ENTRY LISTS FROM STAGE 1 PLAYERS

This should also be obvious. Nobody should be getting byes into the second round after day one, creating an incomplete round which you're not going to score points for. You have an ordered list of players that didn't make stage 2. Use it. I would also like to see them switch round one to a Swiss format, but that wouldn't be one of the first things that I'd do as logistically, while doable, would take a fair bit of work.

3 - REDISTRIBUTE CHALLENGE/DEVELOPMENT TOUR UK OPEN SPOTS TO AFFILIATED TOURS

Do we really need eight spots for each? Cut it back to six and offer four spots to the winners (if not already qualified) of, say, the DPA tour (when their country stops being insane and they can play at a national level), the SDC tour, the CDC tour and the Asian Tour (if that ever comes back). While the Challenge/Development Tours were in effect split into two I guess it was fine, but it's a bit much now. If you're just outside, go to Rileys and get your spot.

4 - PAY ALL ROUNDS OF THE UK OPEN

Seriously, if you've qualified for it you should at least get some payback to cover expenses. Especially given it's hosted in the arse end of nowhere. £250 for first round losers and £500 for second round losers would suffice. That's only an extra £24k worth of prize money, or just over a 5% increase. If the prize pool is bumped to 500k overall, do that, give the runner up 50k, semi finalists 24k, quarter finalists 13k, last 16 8k, remaining 2k can go to something like half last Rileys qualifier standing, half last round one player standing.

5 - AWARD A TOUR CARD TO THE WINNER OF PLAYOFFS BETWEEN AFFILIATE TOURS

With the Women's Series back on, there's naturally going to be talk of "should the winner get a tour card Sherrock should be in the Premier League it's so unfair". I'm not a fan of giving a card straight to the winner of tours that, let's be honest, are standards below the Challenge and Development Tours, which are open to basically everyone, and if you win those you deserve to be on the main tour. So, around the time of the World Championship (when you would expect the winners of most tours to all be in the same place), organise a mini tournament for the winners of all of them. Winner gets a card. If you can come through this sort of level, you'd at least stand more of a chance.

6 - NEW TOUR CARD HOLDERS HAVE A "ONE YEAR CARD" OPTION

This is a little bit of a weird one, but hear me out. While the simplicity of "all new card holders start on zero" is understandable, it seems potentially unfair on some players who might have had a pretty good end to the previous season, and have everything count for zero. So offer the players an option to have the previous twelve months' worth of ranking money remain counting, but they are effectively in the second year of a card, so if they are not in the top 64 after one year, they have to go back to Q-School again. It's not something I expect would be exercised very often, but may well be considered. The obvious example would be Krzysztof Ratajski in the year where he finally got his card, if he hadn't already got into the top 64 and wasn't working on this basis anyway. A more recent example might be Kevin Doets, particularly if he had done slightly better and got into the worlds and won his first round. Or, for that matter, Rusty-Jake Rodriguez. If someone's moderately close to the top 32 on the Pro Tour rankings at the end of the previous year, they may well want to retain that.

7 - EXPAND THE WORLD CUP TO 40 TEAMS

This would be a good way to kill two birds with one stone. It'll help expand the global game by getting an additional eight countries into the field, and by having countries 25-40 play off in a round one, you give all of them a competitive match in an additional session, with the obvious additional ticket/TV revenue that an additional session will provide - as well as having the benefit of filtering out the weakest teams on the day to try to minimise the amount of games in the round of 32 between a top seed and a weak country that simply aren't competitive or interesting to watch outside of research - which is in a format (pairs) that doesn't translate to what I want to know about (singles) anyway.

8 - SOME EUROPEAN TOUR TWEAKS

To be honest, after the last two years, I think we're just happy to have what looks to be close to a normal schedule, but some minor scheduling tweaks ought to be in place. It needs to be less German-centric, I get that it's a huge market, and at least unlike previous years there's less than half the events in Germany, but it just gives too huge an advantage for European Championship qualification to German players. Gibraltar needs to switch to some sort of Iberian championship and move around Spain and Portugal as well, with the home nation qualifiers allowing for all three of those countries. Maybe similarly there should always be one in the SDC area with a qualifier spanning all SDC-eligible countries.

9 - CHALLENGE AND DEVELOPMENT TOUR RANKINGS JUST LOOK AT BEST TEN RESULTS

As we're getting back to the stage where WDF events are taking place in increasing numbers, we're eventually going to get to the stage where Challenge and Development Tour weekends are going to clash with large WDF events - heck, the next Challenge Tour weekend clashes with the WDF worlds. While that example is obviously going to be a one-off due to the rescheduling, the PDC recognise that the schedule is that crowded that it's going to be impossible to avoid clashes, even within their own events, e.g. the second Dev Tour weekend is the same weekend as the Euro Tour in Leverkusen. So what I would suggest is that the rankings on the secondary tours only look at the top ten (not necessarily a fixed number, but I've just gone for roughly half the events on the schedule) results a player gets, so that it will give players more flexibility in sorting out their schedules, not only within darts, but also within work, school etc, and make it more viable for some who maybe cannot afford to take out the travelling costs to every event that there is.

10 - GREATLY IMPROVE THE OFFERING ON PDC.TV

Clearly the likes of Sky are going to have some form of exclusivity with stuff that they've broadcast, but for streamed events it is unbelievable that they do not have any sort of video on demand catchup. Looking back at ET1, they have NOTHING but limited highlights and the final. How they do not have every game available to go back and watch is ridiculous. I'd also have thought they'd backfill previous majors after the TV companies lose their rights, but there isn't a single game from the '21 Matchplay available outside of a couple of Youtube clowns playing each other, and scrolling back further they still have nothing from the worlds that was behind closed doors - fifteen months ago. This is real shut up and take my money situation and they are just missing out on so much value. There's better content on people ripping the stream illegally and uploading to Youtube. This is not difficult.