Peter Wright's dream of becoming world number one looks set to become a reality in the coming weeks. But, as Christopher Kempf explains, the battle for supremacy between Wright and Gerwyn Price could run all year...
For most of the history of darts, the world number one has been a player universally recognised as the best in the world, and on the basis of having won multiple televised events over the previous two years has raced ahead of the competition.
This was never more extreme than at the beginning of 2017, when Michael van Gerwen, who held all seven ranking TV titles at the time, had a lead of more than £1m over then-number two Gary Anderson.
Since £500,000 is awarded to the winner of the World Championship, and only four players have ever attained an Order of Merit value greater than £1m, the odds of two players being nearly tied at the top of the ranking leaderboard is quite low.
Five years after Van Gerwen's 2017 zenith, the distance currently separating one and two in the world is £9,750 - less than 1% of what it was after MvG's second world title, and on the verge of shrinking to zero.
In all likelihood, darts is about to crown its fifth world number one of the Order of Merit era when Peter Wright, currently on £1,186,750, overtakes Gerwyn Price's, currently on £1196,500, with Van Gerwen a distant third.
Normally the future trajectory of one player relative to another is difficult to project, but in this case we can be confident that Price, who is defending 5.4% of his ranking total in the next ten days, will be less able to replenish this income about to drop off his Order of Merit total than Wright, who is defending barely more than 1%.
If Price does not reach the final of either the International Darts Open (ET1) or the UK Open, or if Wright advances beyond the early stages of either tournament, we will witness the coronation of an elaborately coiffed, technicolor world number one.
The Order of Merit is about to bid farewell to the last tournaments prior to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, and is likely to do so by ending the 14-month reign of Price.
What if we look to more concrete metrics of a players' short-term performance, to determine who is statistically the number one player in the world?
Price's Premier League exploits last week gave him an enormous boost - he leads the world by substantial margins when comparing each Tour Card Holder's last 100, 250 and 500 legs played, and is firing off 180s at an unprecedented rate.
Two nine-dart finishes in the 100-leg period, 52 180s, 13 ton-plus checkouts and a 104.33 average have lifted him far above the competition, but as they occurred in the non-ranked Premier League, Price sees no benefit on the Order of Merit.
Intriguingly, the world number two in averages over the last 100 legs played is Damon Heta; the Australian's strong showing as the only other player with a 100+ average over his last 100 legs played, in spite of having won no titles yet in 2022, demonstrates the limits of using averages to determine world rankings.
Statistician Lendel Faria, adapting the ranking system used by professional chess, in which the pairwise results of matches and the relative strength of opponents (as determined by those results) are the only factor in calculating players' ranks, puts Price as world number one and Joe Cullen as two.
According to a system in which the quality of your victories is most important, Cullen outranks Wright because of his superior recent record against other top players.
What if the World Championship title were surrendered by the World Champion to the next player to defeat him, and then picked up by the next victorious opponent of that player, and so on, as in boxing?
The current lineal champion would be Price, who picked it up from Van Gerwen after he held it for less than an hour after defeating Joe Cullen.
The title would have passed in and out of Wright's hands multiple times in 2022, and would have shown up as far down the Order of Merit rankings as Niels Zonneveld and Tony Martinez.
What determines who is the best? There's no one answer - various ranking systems will strike different people as alternatively ingenious and inappropriate.
But any system other than the Order of Merit ranking will always have the title of world number one rapidly shifting from one player to another, as a previously excellent player cools off and another one plays the best darts of their life.
The Order of Merit's raison d'etre is its stability and heavy weighting of the big TV events - this usually ensures that once a player reaches a certain ranking position, it is insured against total collapse due to new money remaining on the ledger for two years.
But in a situation such as the one currently faced by Wright and Price, with the two so close in their Order of Merit sums, the title may change hands more often than usual.
Price is defending £37,000 more in Order of Merit income than Wright before the 2022/23 World Championship, and as both players won a TV ranking title at different points in October 2020, the top spot may change hands multiple times in the space of just one month.
Until last Thursday, it looked as if Price, being unable to replicate Wright's results, would soon fall rapidly behind his Scottish rival on the Order of Merit.
Price's two nine-darters suddenly changed the state of play - more results like that may even prevent Wright from overtaking him, in spite of the money-defence math.
But if neither player wins many titles in 2022, the Wright/Price rivalry for world number one could turn into a pitched battle, with no final conclusion until the 2022/23 World Championship.
Follow Christopher on Twitter @ochepedia.