Gerwyn Price proposes new Premier League format including Royal Rumble-style event

Gerwyn Price has called for a radical change to the Premier League Darts format, which includes a weekly Royal-Rumble style event.

‘The Iceman’ secured his place in this year’s Finals Night by reaching the final of Night 15 in Birmingham, where he was beaten by runaway leader Luke Littler.

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Currently third in the league standings on 24 points, Price will now battle it out with Luke Humphries to secure third-place in the final league stage outing in Sheffield on Thursday.

The pair are level on points, but clinching third spot will see either avoid a semi-final showdown with Littler in the play-offs.

And while Price has his sights set on glory in this year’s Premier League, he has now revealed he would like to see it take a very different form when it returns for future editions.

In with the… old?

The current Premier League Darts format has come under fire in recent years, with many branding it too repetitive.

At present, the event sees the eight of the best players in the world picked to tour Europe for 17 nights, culminating in a Finals Night at the O2 in London.

This style was introduced in 2022, with the competition previously having a 10-player field from weeks 1-9, where each player faced every other competitor once, playing one match per night over a best-of-12 leg format.

After week nine, the bottom two players would be eliminated and the remaining eight played each other once over the following six weeks, before moving onto a four-player Finals Night.

With many now fed up of seeing the same names going head-to-head every week in the Premier League’s current format, Price has proposed a return to the old style in the first phase.

Proposing his change, Price wrote on Facebook: “Back to the old format of 10 players all playing one game per night.

“After 9 weeks the bottom two drop out like in previous years and go into the format of the last few years.

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Getty

“8 players into a 1/4 final and play down to a winner.”

Price’s twist

Price’s proposal didn’t end there, as he then suggested an exciting new shake-up to the Premier League.

The Welshman called for the introduction of a WWE-style ‘Royal Rumble‘ match between the second and third matches of each night.

Two random players would start this process, with the winner of this match moving on to the following week, where they would play a new mystery opponent that is revealed just before the match takes place.

This is where we would see the WWE-inspired surprise entrances, with a player’s walk-on song playing to indicate who is set to play.

Price explained: “The twist and added excitement would be a royal rumble-style game added on each Premier League night, 16 players in total for this and play each Premier League night in between Premier League game 2 or 3, winner stays on for the next week and nobody knows who the surprise challenger will be each week.

WWE

“The royal rumble winner after the full 16 weeks gets a belt, prize money and a space in the following year’s Premier League.

“The royal rumble challengers would be top 8 from the one year order of merit and 8 highest-ranked players on the one year order of merit outside the Premier League selected players.”

Giving a flavour of how this would look, Price included a video of himself competing in a MODUS Super Series event in Leicester earlier this year, where he took part in a Royal Rumble-style darts event.

The 2023 Premier League runner-up added: “Walk ons for the royal rumble players would be a bit like this video below.

“So 26 of the world’s best all being involved.”