It isn’t clear these days whether Luke Littler is meeting famous people or famous people are meeting him.

The rubbing-shoulders concept got a little blurry between his hot lap with Formula 1 ace Lando Norris and posing with English Premier League soccer players Aaron Ramsdale and Declan Rice (the clue probably lay in the fact the Arsenal pair requested the photo). But it is safe to say that, in the aftermath of the PDC World Darts Championship run that shot him to global renown, he was less established with the spectacle surrounding celebrity than NRL grand final winner and England great Sam Burgess.

In January, when Luke ‘The Nuke’ finished runner-up to world No.1 Luke Humphries in London, the final pulled in 3.71 million TV viewers - Sky Sports’ highest non-football audience on record. Even so, he did not expect to be warned about the cameras waiting outside his family home in England’s north-west. Nor did he anticipate the instant notoriety before he had even turned 17, and the online abuse directed towards his then girlfriend, Eloise Milburn.

“Me and my family, we went away to somewhere in Wales. No one knew where we were - we just had to get out of there,” Littler recalls. Once the circus had died down and the family returned to Warrington, Littler received an invite to visit his beloved rugby league team, the Warrington Wolves, during pre-season training under their new head coach.

“Sam Burgess, the manager, he actually helped me out,” Littler says. “He just spoke to me on how he dealt with the pressure and gave me advice. Obviously, there was paparazzi outside my house during the world championships and after, and I was getting a bit of hate. He was just like ‘don’t even read anything, just get on with your life’. He didn’t really speak about what he went through, he just said it was the same sort of thing.”

Pretty soon after that, he hired PR firm Soapbox to look after his social media accounts. “They’ve done something, so I can’t see message requests off random people,” he says. “That’s helped me, so I don’t go checking and see some awful message. And I don’t really look at anything else.”

Littler does still look at his phone quite a lot, especially while he’s competing and can’t physically be on the terrace at Warrington’s The Halliwell Jones Stadium. Between Premier League matches, while his rivals practise for the next round, he is often hunched over the small screen. “I have a little practice, but if Manchester United or Warrington Wolves are on, I’ll have to tune in and watch a bit of the game,” he says. “I just do what feels right for me.”

These are level-headed words from a teenager whose catalogue of early career achievements and kebab-loving everyman persona have amassed him 1.4 million Instagram followers and single-handedly turned darts into a sexy sport. As Paris 2024 experiments with breakdancing, calls are growing louder to include darts on the Olympic program.