Ah yes, the good old PDC European Tour. Where stars collide and in my humble opinion, Dan Dawson shines brightly in comms duty.

A glorious travelling circus of darts spread across the continent, broadcast live on PDC.TV and held together by technology that occasionally appears to have been purchased from a car boot sale outside Doncaster.

As enjoyable as these three-day tungsten festivals undoubtedly are, the quality of the darts is often matched by the reliability of the stream. One minute you’re watching Luke Humphries pin tops. The next you’re staring at a frozen image of Ryan Searle looking like he’s just witnessed a murder in a garden centre.

The little scoreboard graphic in the corner deserves special recognition too. It vanishes so often you’d think it owed money to organised crime. Whoever is tasked with keeping the thing visible and displaying the correct score has somehow secured the broadcasting equivalent of finding a penny black stamp in his late Grandfather’s coat pocket. Fair play to them. Most people would struggle to remain employed after repeatedly forgetting one of the few things they’re actually paid to do, yet this mysterious individual continues to survive with the job security of a hereditary monarch.

Still, despite the occasional broadcast collapse resembling a Victorian bridge under modern traffic, I absolutely love the European Tour.

You’ve got elite stars. You’ve got hardened tour professionals. You’ve got local qualifiers who look as though they were selected at random from a beer festival after successfully identifying which end of a dart goes in the board. It’s magnificent.

However, I do have an observation. Which naturally means I also have a criticism and a completely unsolicited suggestion.

For those unfamiliar with how the 48-player field is assembled, here’s the current set-up:

• Top 16 on the PDC Main Order of Merit
• Top 16 on the ProTour Order of Merit
• 10 Tour Card Holder Qualifiers
• 4 Host Nation Qualifiers
• 1 East European Qualifier
• 1 Nordic & Baltic Qualifier

The first category is straightforward enough. Be one of the sixteen highest-ranked players on the planet and you’re in. Better still, you don’t even have to start in round one. You stroll straight into round two like a celebrity arriving late to their own wedding.

And that’s where my issue begins. Now before somebody accuses me of hating the elite players, I don’t. They’ve earned their rankings. They’ve won titles. They’ve filled trophy cabinets. Fair enough. But should that automatically grant them European Tour places as well? I’m not convinced.

Particularly when half of them treat the invitation with the enthusiasm of a teenager being asked to help carry shopping. The number of withdrawals nowadays is remarkable. Some of these lads pull out of European Tours more frequently than a 90-year-old approaching a busy junction and hearing the words, “Go on then, you’ve got plenty of time.”

My proposal is simple. The top sixteen on the ProTour Order of Merit get the automatic spots and become the seeds. Why? Because they’ve actually been there. They’ve done the miles. They’ve sat in enough motorway service stations to qualify for employee discounts. They’ve spent more time in Leicester than non-residents should ever have to endure. They’ve played every floor tournament imaginable while surviving enough Premier Inn breakfasts to shorten life expectancy by several years.

Reward them. After that, allocate another sixteen places to the highest-ranked players on the European Tour Order of Merit who haven’t already qualified. Again, reward performance. Reward consistency. Reward the poor sods who’ve spent months hauling dart cases through airports that look like abandoned Soviet military compounds.

Then make everybody else qualify. Even the stars. If the likes of Luke Littler, Michael van Gerwen or Luke Humphries decide they want to play, let them enter the qualifier alongside the rest of the tour card holders. If they attend regularly and perform to the standards we all know they’re capable of, they’ll quickly climb the European Tour Order of Merit and secure their place anyway. After all, they’re more than capable. That’s precisely why they’re ranked where they are on in the first place.

In other words, qualification becomes exactly what it should be – a reward for participation and performance, rather than a reward for already being famous enough to have your own aisle in the PDC merchandise shop.

The positives are obvious. You create a system based on merit rather than status. Players who grind away all year get rewarded. The ones slogging around Europe every weekend no longer watch invitations being casually declined by people they’d happily donate a kidney to replace. Although perhaps not a kidney. A spleen maybe. As long as it’s not the arm they use to throw.

Of course, there are drawbacks. European crowds love seeing the biggest names. That’s precisely why the PDC changed the system originally. But let’s be brutally honest here. You could wheel out Batman versus Kermit The Frog and most these crowds would be too drunk to notice. They’d probably still whistle when the lovable little green furry fella threw anyway. That said, he wouldn’t mind. He still gets to go home and bang Miss Piggy.

Half the venue would be singing before either contestant had thrown a dart. The other half would be booing somebody simply because they now think that’s either acceptable or the norm. I’ve witnessed European Tour crowds celebrate a 26 average with more enthusiasm than a Ryanair flight successfully touching down.

Which, incidentally, brings me neatly onto another mystery of modern life. Why do people clap when an aeroplane lands? What exactly are we celebrating here? The pilot successfully completing the one task he was specifically trained and paid to do? God, I sound like Roy Keane here!

Nobody starts applauding when a bus driver arrives in Wigan without mounting a kerb. You don’t see customers in Tesco giving Linda on checkout six a standing ovation because she managed to scan a tin of beans correctly. Yet somehow a bloke safely landing a £90 million aircraft after thousands of hours of training gets treated like he’s just performed open-heart surgery on a shark whilst surfing.

Anyway, European Tour crowds are very much the aviation passengers of darts. They’ll cheer absolutely anything. A 170 checkout? Massive roar. A 26 average? Massive roar. Somebody drops their pint and falls over a chair? Standing ovation and a chant lasting fourteen minutes. They’ll survive.

More importantly, it rewards the people who genuinely put in the graft. The players catching flights at ridiculous hours. The players driving hundreds of miles every week. Those spending hours in airport queues and forced to play suitcase roulette praying their baggage doesn’t end up at the North Pole.

And let’s not pretend the European Tour would suddenly become a wasteland without the biggest stars. There are still dozens of world-class players capable of producing astonishing darts. Many of them are household names. Many of them actually turn up. Many of them don’t treat automatic invites like they’re being asked to march barefoot across the Sahara Desert with their mother-in-law.

So perhaps it’s worth considering. Or perhaps it’s a terrible idea. Either way, I’ve now written several hundred words about it, so I’m pretending it’s insightful. Food for thought?

And just to prove the European Tour would still be bloody brilliant without Littler, Humphries, Van Gerwen and the rest of the celebrity cast, I’ve dotted pictures of some of these players throughout the article. You know, the poor bastards actually collecting air miles instead of withdrawal forms.