EA Champions Cup 2021 — how many viewers does a tournament lose without Twitch?

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In June and September, two major FIFA Online 4 tournaments from the EA Champions Cup series took place — EACC Summer 2021 and EACC Autumn 2021. In the new material, Esports Charts will compare the statistics of championships with previous events of the EA Champions Cup series.

EACC Summer/Autumn 2021 viewership stats

The EACC Summer 2021 matches were held from June 28 to July 4. The championship got 729.3K Hours Watched, having spent 36 hours on the air. The grand final of the event between FaZe Clan and Manchester City China, which was watched by 44.7K concurrent people, got the largest Peak Viewers number. On average, the tournament matches attracted almost 20.1K spectators.

The statistics of the last EACC Autumn 2021 turned out to be notably lower than that of its predecessor. The autumn event generated 20% less HW than the summer one, despite being on the air for exactly the same number of hours. The tournament also got 30% less PV and 20% less average viewers.

Comparison of EACC 2021 with previous events in the series

EACC Winter 2019, which reached a record 1.37M HW for the series with an average audience of 41.3K viewers, showed the best viewers activity among other events of the series that were played on FIFA Online 4. At the peak, 106.6K viewers watched the tournament simultaneously. EACC Spring 2019, which generated 12.4% less HW than EACC Winter 2019 and got 23.7% fewer viewers at its peak, ranked second. At the same time, its indicators were still higher than those of the events held in 2021. Note that the tournament of 2020 season was excluded from the comparison, since it was divided into divisions, thus its viewership indicators are the lowest in the series.

The only tournament that EACC Summer 2021 and EACC Autumn 2021 were able to get close to was EACC Winter 2018 — the first FIFA Online 4 competition. It should be borne in mind that although the championship did not break away much from the events of 2021, it was on the air for only 23 hours — this is the smallest indicator within the series.

Such low figures for EACC Summer 2021 and EACC Autumn 2021 can be explained by the fact that the organizers of the tournaments refused to broadcast on Twitch. It was this platform that attracted most of the viewers of EACC Spring 2019, EACC Winter 2019 and EACC Winter 2018.

For comparison, in May 2021, FIFA Online 4 got 800K Hours Watched on Twitch — 25 times more than in April. This month has become one of the best in the history of the football simulator. However, you need to remember: EACC is primarily to target fans of FIFA Online 4 from Asia, since the tournament is played only by teams from China, Vietnam, Thailand and South Korea, where the game was released a few years ago.

Read: The most popular tournaments in September 2021: Valorant ahead of CS:GO

Despite the explosive growth of the game statistics, EACC Summer 2021 and EACC Autumn 2021 could not come close to the indicators of the previous EA Champions Cup event. The lack of coverage on Twitch, which has become a key streaming platform for FIFA Online 4, made the events the least popular in the series in terms of viewers activity.