European Masters Summer 2022 overview — Team Heretics triumph and Spanish broadcasts record
The European Masters Summer 2022 Grand Final between Team Heretics and Team BDS Academy took place last weekend, and the Spanish team won with the score of 3:2, securing the second trophy of the season following LVP SuperLiga. The match improved the event's viewership statistics quite a bit, which had been sagging due to the absence of such teams as Karmine Corp & KOI, and the Spanish-language broadcast set a new viewership record. In a new article, Esports Charts sums up the European LoL Championship.
Tournament Results
The international Team Heretics lineup, formed at the beginning of the year, did not have any significant achievements except for winning Superliga Division 1 Summer 2022. Therefore, experts did not believe in the team's success, casting it as the underdog in every playoff game up to the Grand Final. Heretics struggled to defeat Unicorns of Love SE (3:2) on their way to the title match, but then had a solid victory (3:1) over LDLC OL, the EU Masters Spring 2022 vice-champion, EU Masters Summer 2020 semifinalist and EU Masters Spring 2020 champion.
The final boss for the Spanish team was Team BDS Academy, which defeated them twice in the Group Stage, but that opponent was also defeated by the Spaniards eventually. Team Heretics' victory in European Masters Summer 2022 brought €40K to the team and attracted a record Spanish-speaking audience to the series, about which we will talk below.
EU Masters Summer 2022 Viewership Statistics
Tournament broadcasts totaled more than 5.7 million Hours Watched with 60.3K Average Viewers. European Masters Summer 2022 reached its Peak Viewers number at the Grand Final, which was 280.8K people. At the same time, the LDLC OL vs. Heretics semifinal, one of the Top 2 most popular matches of the tournament, had more than twice fewer Peak Viewers.
Team Heretics became the most popular EU Masters Summer 2022 team, attracting 105K Average Viewers. Team BDS Academy is in second place, drawing only 3K fewer AV. LDLC OL, Unicorns of Love Sexy Edition and Giants are also in the Top 5.
French proved to be the most popular broadcast language of the tournament, despite the absence of France's most hyped team, Karmine Corp. Broadcasts in this language accounted for more than 41% of the tournament total HW, owing to the fact that all four LFL representatives made it to the playoffs.
Spanish-language broadcasts rank second by HW contribution. It broke its own record for PV in the European Masters series, drawing 88.6K PV at the Grand Final. Potentially, the PV number of the Spanish language and the entire event could have been even greater if the KOI team owned by Ibai and Gerard Piqué had qualified for the tournament.
Also, EU Masters Summer 2022 set new records in Portuguese and Hungarian, broadcasts in which attracted 8.6K and 1.8K PV, respectively.
The Top 3 broadcast channels by each of the viewership metrics includes the French channel otplol_, the Spanish channel LVPes and the English channel EUMasters. At the same time, the contribution of otplol_ to the HW number of the tournament was more than 41.5%.
Popularity Dynamics of European Masters
The popularity of European Masters tournaments increased significantly in 2021 because of the Karmine Corp participation, the team which is owned by the popular French streamer Kamet0. In 2022, the team participated in the spring event, won the championship and helped bring the series to a record level, but failed to qualify for EU Masters Summer. At the same time, the total HW number of the two EU Masters tournaments in 2022 is almost the same as last year's results.
We have also analyzed the EU Masters Spring 2022 and EU Masters Summer 2022 audiences in detail. We found that the summer tournament was followed by more than 42% of the spring tournament audience, with the total number of Unique Authorized Viewers of the event decreasing by almost 24%, and the French viewers by 45% specifically.
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It should be noted that during the Play-In and the Group Stage, the tournament fell considerably behind similar stages of the three previous championships in the series. The situation was improved by the playoffs and, in particular, the Grand Final, which was probably the hottest event of the series. At the same time, the European Master series showed that it can achieve good results even without the participation of one of the most popular teams.
