LCK is unrivaled, and France is ahead of Spain: the current statistics of LoL regional leagues

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The regional leagues of League of Legends are in full swing: some are still in the group stage, and some are already preparing for the playoffs. Esports Charts decided to look at intermediate statistics of tournaments and check which region attracts the most viewers.

Most popular ongoing summer LoL leagues

The Korean league LCK Summer 2022 became the absolute leader in terms of audience outreach. The group stage of the tournament has almost come to an end, and the broadcasts of the league generated 46.8M Hours Watched at the time of publication of the article. The Peak Viewers mark for the summer season is still at 681K viewers and was reached during the T1 match against Gen.G. The Average Viewers mark reaches around 192.2K.

The second most popular tournament is the European franchise league LEC, the group stage of which is gradually coming to an end. The broadcasts of the summer split have already generated 15.4M Hours Watched. The broadcasts generated 172K Average Viewers, and the mark of 301K Peak Viewers was reached not during the match between Fnatic and G2 (as it usually happens), but during the encounter between Team Vitality and Excel Esports. Interestingly, LEC is not far behind LCK (the gap is only 12%) in terms of Average Viewers, but and the Korean league outperforms the European one by more than twice in Peak Viewers.

Also Read: European LoL is losing its audience — LEC Summer 2022 had the worst start in the last two years

Holding the third spot by audience among regions is the Chinese LPL Summer 2022. A few matches before the end of the group stage, the league broadcasts generated over 10.3M Hours Watched, 30K Average Viewers, and 121.1K Peak Viewers. The series between Royal Never Give Up and Weibo Gaming became the most popular encounter of the event.

The top 5 most popular leagues of the League of Legends summer split also included CBLOL Summer 2022 and LCS Summer 2022. Moreover, the Brazilian league was ahead of the higher-status North American league by all major metrics: Hours Watched, Average Viewers, and Peak Viewers. First of all, it is the outflow of the audience from the LCS (which has been observed for the third year in a row) that is to blame for this state of affairs. The number of viewers is also declining slightly in Brazil, but this does not happen as rapidly as in North America. At the same time, it should be mentined that these are completely different leagues in terms of status, differing not only by the prize pool but also by the number of reserved Worlds slots.

As for the European national leagues, the French LFL and the Spanish LVP SuperLiga showed approximately the same viewership results across all metrics. Things are a little worse for VCS. It should be reminded that the latter is of a higher status than the national European leagues, since teams there also fight for direct quotas for the Mid-Season Invitational and World Championship. However, Vietnamese teams have not played at the World Championships for two years in a row, as the country’s COVID-19 restrictions are particularly strict. It's still unknown whether the Vietnamese teams will be able to come to the tournament this year.

The regional leagues’ summer seasons are gradually coming to an end. The national leagues of France and Spain will be the first to finish as their winners will be determined on August 18 and 20, respectively. The last events to end are South Korean and Chinese events, where regional finals are coming at the end of summer split. The exact dates of these stages are still unknown, but they are expected to take place in September.

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The viewership statistics of regional League of Legends leagues can be followed in the corresponding section of the website.