Brazillian teams dominate ESL Pro League Season 18 viewership in Group Stage
ESL Pro League is one of the most prestigious and well-known professional leagues in the CS:GO sphere. Earlier this month we looked at how the viewership for Group A was dominated by community caster Gaules, who overshadowed the official ESLCS broadcast and was the most-watched broadcaster for the Group A stage. Now that the entirety of the four Groups is behind us, let's take a look at how all the Groups combined performed.
Pro League Season 18 is made up of 15 permanent partner teams of the league and 17 additional teams were invited based on their World Ranking or were successful in minor regional leagues and qualifiers. These teams were split into four groups that played a triple-elimination bracket to have four teams from each group advance into Playoffs.
Team Vitality, NAVI, ENCE, and G2 Esports are the highest-seeded teams of each group, and they advance directly to the quaterfinals of the event. Complexity, BIG, Movistar Riders, and FaZe Clan advanced directly to the Round of 12 as they made it to the Upper Bracket Final of their group but ultimately lost against the teams that directly qualified for the quarterfinals. Finally, there are eight more teams who managed to qualify for the Playoffs through the mid and lower brackets of the groups, these teams are: Fnatic, Monte, Astralis, Eternal Fire, Virtus.pro, 9z Team, MOUZ, and FURIA Esports.
Eternal Fire, 9z Team, and Movistar Riders are all teams that have come to Season 18 of Pro League to impress. Eternal Fire has been struggling at Pro League in recent years, always qualifying to compete through regional events but this marks their first time at Pro League advancing into the Playoffs stage.
9z Team and Movistar Riders both have been competing in Challenger leagues and events for a while, but now they have a chance to prove themselves at a proper Pro League event. This event is 9z team’s first time at ESL Pro League, Movistar Riders have competed before, but their best result is a top-eight finish at Pro League Season 15
Which of these teams was the most successful at drawing in viewership throughout the Group stage of the event, and did any teams that brought large viewership with them see themselves eliminated from the tournament early?
ESL Pro League Season 18 Viewership Statistics
In total, the Group stage of the 18th iteration of ESL’s Pro League brought in just under 20M hours of watch time. This viewership is roughly equal to the previous season of Pro League, if not a little lower. The Pro League has been live for 198 hours already and as the Playoffs begin this will likely extend for another 50 hours or so. Impressively, throughout the almost 200 hours of airtime, the broadcast has received a consistent average concurrent viewer count of over 100,000.
Looking at the Peak Viewers by language for the event, it’s clear how real the community support for FURIA is, and how influential Brazillian community casters like Gaules are. Gaules’ coverage of Group A and specifically FURIA’s matches were some of the most popular broadcasts of the event so far, and his coverage of the event helped bring a boost to Peak Viewers that the event needed.
Excluding FURIA, Gaules’ channel also supported the Group B stage as MIBR were knocked out of the upper and mid brackets, and eventually lost the final match against Monte, failing to qualify for Playoffs. Despite MIBR’s short time in the Pro League event, their matches dominated Group B viewership. Throughout the top five most popular matches of Group B, MIBR were playing in four of these highly-watched matches.
FaZe vs NAVI was also one of the most popular matches of the event, with both teams being huge brands in CS:GO and esports generally, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. NAVI totally shook up their roster in July of this year, removing electroNic, Perfecto, and npl in favour of Aleksib, jL, and iM. NAVI has struggled to prove the firepower of their new roster in recent events, with a win still evading them at Gamers8 2023 and IEM Cologne 2023. The Pro League presents NAVI with an opportunity to prove their worth against some of the top teams in the world and if they manage a solid Playoffs run, we could see an explosive growth in the viewership for this event.
Looking at the most popular matches of each of the four Groups for the event, we can see clearly which groups were the most popular. Group A was hugely popular thanks to FURIA and their loyal fanbase, the effect of this viewership is clear to see in our data, where Portuguese was the most popular language for event broadcasts during Group A.
Group C also received high viewership as FaZe Clan and NAVI battled it out in the Upper Bracket Final. Two of the best teams in the world competing against one another for top seed managed to just fall short of the viewership that Brazillian community streamers brought to Group A.
Group B was once again supported by Brazillian community casters, but to a lesser extent than Group A. MIBR was one of the most popular teams of the entire event according to Average Viewers, and they were the most popular team of Group B alongside Evil Geniuses. On top of this community support, the EG and MIBR match was one of the most exciting matches of the event. Viewers watched as the MIBR swept EG 16-1 on the first map of the Bo3, before losing map two 22-20 in overtime. Eventually, MIBR were able to overthrow the American organisation with a 25-22 overtime victory on de_nuke.
Highlights of the intense MIBR and EG game at ESL Pro League Season 18 Group D’s most popular match of G2 Esports against Complexity was the Upper Bracket Final match, and this was by far the most popular game of Group D. Group D generally struggled to generate viewership compared to the previous Groups, and Average Viewers generally was on a downturn for the groups throughout the stage. Perhaps due to Groups C and D lacking the Brazillian teams and community support that was present in Groups A and B, but also probably affected by the long run-time of the event. By the end of Groups, the event had been broadcasted for almost 200 hours, long enough for any CS fan to get their fill. Interest in the event was slowly waning as the Group stages progressed, but we can expect viewership to rise upwards once again for the Playoffs stage.
ESL Pro League kicks off again with the Playoffs stage today, the 26th of September. All four Round of 16 matches will be hosted today, with the Round of 12 taking place tomorrow, and the Quarterfinals the day after that. The Semifinals and Grand Final matches will be hosted this weekend on Saturday and Sunday, respectively. Keep an eye on the ESL Pro League Season 18 tournament page for all the details of viewership as we update the data, and watch out for some articles covering the viewership of the event in-depth once it has concluded.
Detailed Esports data at your fingertips.
Subscribe to & start exploring!
