ESL Pro League Season 16 results — the best tournament in the series by Hours Watched

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ESL Pro League is one of the most prestigious tournament series on the professional CS:GO scene, and the final of Season 16 took place on October 2 in Malta, where Team Vitality faced Team Liquid. Read about the results of the tournament and the number of viewers it gathered.

The decisive matches of the playoffs were held during the last week, and both Team Spirit and ENCE didn't make it to the final stage: one should note that these two were the semifinalists of the last Major — PGL Major Antwerp 2022. 

Team Liquid defeated Fnatic, MOUZ and Cloud9 on its way to the Final, while Team Vitality defeated Outsiders and G2 Esports. In the Grand Final, Team Vitality defeated Team Liquid 3-2. The decisive match was very tough and the teams took it to overtime on two maps. In the second set of extra rounds Team Liquid was one step away from winning the series, but Team Vitality prevailed, and then won the decisive map.

ZywOo claims ESL Pro League S16 MVP award

After a drastic lineup change in January, when dupreeh, Magisk, and coach zonic joined the team, it took a long time for Team Vitality to figure out its strategy. It played well in BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2022, but then the results started to drop: for a few months Team Vitality did not finish higher than 5-8 places. In PGL Major Antwerp 2022, it ranked only 9-11 and didn't advance to the playoffs. After winning ESL Pro League Season 16, Team Vitality's new lineup finally earned its first title. 

As for Team Liquid, after a "golden era" in the summer of 2019, it began to experience a downturn and serious problems in tournaments. Over time, this led to a series of substitutions, allowing only sporadic progress, but not regaining the previous level. The club had very poor results in the Majors, placing 12-14th in PGL Major Stockholm 2021 and 15th-16th in PGL Major Antwerp 2022. In the summer of 2022, YEKINDAR joined Team Liquid as a stand-in. After that, the team's results began to improve — it advanced to BLAST Premier: Fall Finals 2022 and now took second place in EPL S16.  

Viewership Statistics 

ESL Pro League Season 16 matches accumulated 38.2 million Hours Watched. The Average Viewers number was 161.2K people, and the Peak Viewers number amounted to 509.7K people at the Grand Final between Team Liquid and Team Vitality.

The most popular team of the tournament is Natus Vincere, it has the biggest number of AV (264K). Team Vitality comes second (240K AV), and in third place is G2 Esports (233K AV). According to the HW metric, the leader is Team Liquid (7.69 million HW). A little fewer was accumulated by Natus Vincere and Team Vitality. The other participants lagged far behind.

The most popular language of ESL Pro League Season 16 broadcasts is English: it accounted for 52% of HW total number and reached 265K PV. Russian and Portuguese broadcasts got approximately equal numbers: 15% each of the total HW number. Russian-language broadcasts saw 110K PV and Portuguese broadcasts saw the PV number of 88.2K people.

Fourth place goes to Vietnamese (7.8% of total HW and 60K PV), although there were no teams from Asia at the tournament. This is not the best result of the Vietnamese broadcast in CS:GO tournaments, but the best within the ESL Pro League series. It should be noted that the Vietnamese broadcasts have already drawn a large audience at CS:GO tournaments. For example, IEM Katowice 2022 matches were watched by more than 155K PV, and more than 100K PV watched PGL Major Stockholm 2021, IEM Cologne 2022, IEM Cologne 2021 and BLAST Premier Spring 2022 Finals on Vietnamese broadcasts.

Most of the tournament's viewers followed the matches on Twitch, the Amazon-owned platform accounted for more than 89% of total HW and drew 453K PV. In second place is NimoTV (7.8% of HW), which hosted the Vietnamese broadcast. The most popular broadcast channel is the English-language esl_csgo. In second place is the Russian-language channel csgo_mc, and in third place is the channel of the Brazilian streamer Gaules, who broadcast in Portuguese.

Comparison with Previous Tournaments

ESL Pro League Season 16 has become one of the longest tournaments in CS:GO history, totaling over 237 hours of matches. Only two events lasted longer: Huya DarkHorse League Season 7 (287 hours) and United Masters League Season 1: Online Stage (385 hours). As for the other metrics, EPL Season 16 cannot compete with the Tier 1 tournaments. For example, it ranked 9th by HW, while its AV and PV results did not even make it into the Top 20.

Comparing the most recent ESL Pro League tournaments, Season 16 showed the best result by AV and HW, but is behind ESL Pro League Season 14 by almost 250K PV (at that tournament Team Vitality lost to NAVI in the Grand Final).

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The next major CS:GO tournament is IEM Rio Major 2022. It takes place from October 31 to November 13 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Twenty-four teams from around the world will compete for a $1.25 million prize pool. The winner will also receive quota places for IEM Katowice 2023 and BLAST Premier: World Final 2022.