Darts, private equity and fuelling the booming sport’s growth in America
Nodor Group CEO Tom Brown and PDC chief Matt Porter on private equity in darts and how to realise the sport’s potential in North America.
To the south-east of Nairobi, a world away from Alexandra Palace, 2,000 Kenyans are working diligently to feed the global explosion in popularity of darts. There, at the Nodor Group’s main manufacturing plant, premium East African sisal and tungsten are turned into the Winmau dart boards and Red Dragon darts used on the PDC Tour.
Every year, 1m boards and 2m sets of darts roll off the production line. But it is not enough to feed demand as the sport scrambles to capitalise on booming attendances, TV audiences and equipment sales, especially among younger audiences inspired by the emergence of teenage superstar Luke Littler.
“Unless we can manufacture more we will limit the market, as we are the market leaders,” Nodor CEO Tom Brown, whose company saw revenue increase five-fold from 2019-24 and expects to hit £100m in sales this year, tells City AM.
Enter private equity. European firm Inflexion acquired a majority stake in Nodor in December 2024 and is driving the brand to up manufacturing and marketing capacity in order to cater to the unmet demand, especially in the less mature but infinitely bountiful North American market.
“Having strategic investment in the company allows us to maximise these opportunities,” adds Brown, who joined Nodor in October from home appliances maker SharkNinja. “Today we have a small footprint in the US but tomorrow we won’t. We’re aggressively hiring in the US, because at the moment, we think that we are part of the limiting factor that the US business isn’t bigger.”
Darts investors ‘have to understand it’
Nodor this week launched its latest product, the Blade X board, and it will debut on Thursday at the Winmau World Masters featuring 32 of the world’s top players including Littler and Red Dragon clients Luke Humphries and Gian van Veen. Winmau has also extended its partnership with the PDC to supply boards for all events on the tour.
PDC owner Matchroom fielded its own interest from private equity in 2023 but ultimately failed to agree a deal with CVC or KKR. The multi-sport promoter’s reported £800m valuation has been vindicated by the continued growth of darts. Like Nodor, the PDC is playing catch-up with demand – in its case, for tickets to its tournaments.
“I think it’s a really exciting opportunity for us all in the sport that there are people coming in with big ambitions and big resources that can help take us to the next level,” says PDC chief executive Matt Porter. But he adds: “One thing we learned speaking to potential investors was you can tell if people really understand it quite early in the conversations, and if they don’t understand it, they’re not the right people to come into it.”
The sport’s accessibility and mushrooming youth participation – “darts is now cool for kids,” says Porter – has created a bigger cohort of top players and is the key, both men believe, to making inroads in the US.
“Our sales in the US, market penetration, it’s all in growth, but there’s still that big breakthrough to come from that player-led explosion, the sort of exponential growth that we saw in the UK, Netherlands and German,” says Brown.
The PDC, which stages an annual tournament at Madison Square Garden, improved its penetration last year through a broadcast deal with NBC streaming platform Peacock, and Porter adds: “It takes time, it takes investment, it takes patience, because it’s not the current top American players who will be the beneficiaries of this – it’s the next generation.”