Phil Taylor may have retired from playing darts, but the 16-time world champion has not put the arrows away. More than a year after announcing that he was stepping away from the game altogether, Taylor is back practising for around an hour every day, spending more time in the gym and working on his diet as he tries to sharpen up his game.
There is no grand comeback announcement. Taylor is not talking about reclaiming a Tour Card or throwing himself back into the PDC calendar. But he is no longer speaking like a man completely finished with playing either. "We'll play little odd things, you know what I mean? For fun," Taylor told Oche180. "I am practising for about an hour a day, but my form isn't like it used to be. I've just got to sharpen up a little bit. Everything changes as you get older. I'm 66 now, so your body changes."
That work is not limited to the practice board. "I'm training a lot now. I do the gym work, so I'm trying to get back as I used to do," Taylor continued. "I'm eating very healthy, so we'll see what happens now. See if I can get my form back." Taylor was last seen in competitive action on the Seniors Tour.
Taylor's standards were once almost untouchable. For much of his career, anything short of winning could feel like failure. The reality at 66 is very different, and Taylor is under no illusions about where his current game sits against the best players in the world. "I'm playing all right, but not like I could," he admitted. "I couldn't beat the two Lukes at the minute, or Cristo Reyes or whatever, but I can hold my own in a pub league."
Luke Littler, in particular, has spent the last few years chipping away at records once owned by Taylor. Most recently, the two-time world champion broke Taylor's tournament average record at the World Matchplay. Taylor had actually been warned about Littler long before the teenager exploded onto the biggest stage. "I was down at Target and [Gary Plummer] said, 'Keep your eye out for this young kid named Luke Littler,'" Taylor recalled. "I'd never heard of him at the time, even though he only lives probably 20 or 30 miles from me. Gary was right. He's phenomenal. He really is that good. He's brilliant. And if anybody can break my records, it's going to be him."
The biggest of those records remains Taylor's 16 world titles, a benchmark Littler is inevitably measured against whenever another major trophy arrives. Taylor, though, knows better than most that winning is only one part of the equation. Staying at the top long enough to keep doing it is another challenge entirely. "If he wins 16 in a row, he's got to qualify for the next 14 or 15 years," Taylor said. "And just to do that itself is an achievement. Anybody that's been in a World Championship - I was in it 20-odd times, I think - it's an achievement in itself just to stay motivated. You need to be in the top five, really, to get the decent draws. So he'll do well to beat 16."
Retirement has never quite been a straight line for Taylor. His first farewell came at the end of the 2018 World Championship, where Rob Cross denied him a 17th world crown in the final. Even then, Taylor was hardly limping towards the exit. He had won a record-extending 16th World Matchplay title only months earlier and remained capable of going deep at the sport's biggest events. For several years, that looked like the end of his competitive career. Then came the World Seniors circuit. Taylor returned to televised competition in 2022 and quickly showed that plenty of the old game remained, reaching the finals of both the World Seniors Masters and World Seniors Matchplay during his first season back.
By 2024, however, the battle was increasingly with his own body rather than the player standing across the stage. Hip problems became difficult to manage, Taylor underwent surgery and some of the events intended to form part of his farewell were lost from the schedule. His last competitive appearance of that spell came at the Champion of Champions in March 2024, where Martin Adams edged him 10-9. Then, in May 2025, Taylor made things sound rather more final. He announced that he was retiring from playing darts, drawing another line under a career that had already stretched across four decades.
Taylor has never sounded particularly sentimental about his first retirement from the PDC. Where some players struggle to leave behind the routine, crowds and competition, Taylor had been counting down the months. "No, it had been coming for a while," he said when asked how difficult the decision had been. "Once you make a decision that that's it, then that's it. I was retiring, and that was the longest year. It was like waiting to go on holiday when you were a kid. You know: 'How long's left, Mum?' 'Three months.' It was great for me just to say enough's enough now. I was 58. I'm not going to have a 60 at darts, so enough was enough. I didn't mind a bit."
Even the strength of that final PDC season did little to tempt him into carrying on. Asked whether it had felt strange to walk away after winning the World Matchplay and reaching another World Championship final, Taylor's answer was typically straightforward. "No, I was fine. I'd made my mind up and that was me done."
These days, Taylor's routine looks very different from the decades spent living out of suitcases and travelling from tournament to tournament. His mornings now often include shopping for fresh food before a practice session around 11am, with gym work following later in the day. That may be a long way from the relentless schedule of his peak years, but the competitive instinct has clearly not disappeared completely. Taylor is back on the board every day, trying to sharpen his game, trying to improve his fitness and, in his own words, waiting to "see what happens".
