European Masters Summer 2022 — Statistics prior to Playoffs

The Esports Charts team sums up the results of the European Masters Summer 2022 prior to the start of the playoffs, which are just about to start. Here are which teams remain in contention for the title and the event's current audience reach. Spoiler: as noted in the previous article, things are gloomy without Karmine Corp.

European Masters Summer 2022 Group Stage Results

UoL Sexy Edition, Vitality.Bee, LDLC OL and X7 Esports, which also played in the last season's playoffs, qualified for the final stage of the tournament. Besides them, Team BDS Academy and GameWard surprised everyone by not losing a single series in their groups. AGO ROGUE, on the other hand, disappointed its fans: it reached the semifinals in spring, but now it didn't even make it to the playoffs.

We should mention Team Heretics, the team of the popular Spanish streamer TheGrefg, won the Superliga title in August, made it to European Masters for the first time and reached the playoffs straight away. Recall that it will have to compete with the best European teams in LEC next year, since the club bought the Misfits Gaming slot in the franchise league.

Group Stage Viewership Statistics

To calculate the reach of the European Masters Summer 2022 audience, we compared the statistics of this group stage & Play-In with the same stages metrics from past seasons. We didn't take into account the tournaments prior to 2020, as the earlier seasons had a different format.

The European Masters Summer 2022 group stage & Play-In matches accumulated 3.1 million Hours Watched, drew 49.3K Average Viewers and 86.8K Peak Viewers. Vitality.Bee is the most watched team prior to playoffs, as its matches amassed 462K Hours Watched. Team BDS Academy and Giants Gaming are leaders by the Average Viewers number: both teams attracted 67K AV, and Team Heretics is in third place with 64K AV.

Three highest totals correspond to the seasons where Karmine Corp played

If we compare it with the previous season, European Masters Summer Season shows a drop in all metrics and a strong outflow of the audience. As we wrote before, the main reason is the absence of Karmine Corp, one of the most popular teams in France. It is the champion of Spring 2021, Summer 2021 and Spring 2022, but this summer the team failed to qualify for the tournament, losing the spot to other LFL teams.

The league's reach declined immediately without Karmine Corp fans. To be more precise, the metrics returned to the level of the Spring 2020 and Summer 2020 seasons where Karmine Corp did not participate. It's remarkable how just one team can drastically change the viewership numbers of an entire championship.

It is quite easy to find a pattern here

The "Karmine Corp effect" is clearly illustrated by the viewership of the top group stage games, as the Karmine Corp games attracted the most viewers in the previous three seasons. The highest result was recorded in the Spring 2022 season: KC vs. X7 game was watched by more than 167.6K Peak Viewers. For comparison, the series between Team Heretics and Team BDS Academy became the most popular match in the group stage of Summer 2022 and it drew only 86.8K Peak Viewers: half as many.

Another clear example is the difference in broadcast languages. In the group stage of European Masters Spring 2022, the PV number on the French broadcast was 126.4K viewers when Karmine Corp was playing. This time around the number dropped by 65% to 43.8K Peak Viewers. It should be kept in mind that French is the main language of European Masters, usually it gathers the largest audience.

The English-language broadcast also had a slight drop (-17% compared to previous event), but the Spanish-language broadcast of the European Masters Summer 2022, on the contrary, grew from 17.4K to 27K Peak Viewers (+55%). This growth can be attributed to the participation of Team Heretics in the current event.

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European Masters Summer 2022 Playoffs take place online from September 15 to 25. In the first round, Unicorns of Love SE will play against Team Heretics, LDLC OL will encounter Dusty, Team BDS Academy will compete against Vitality.Bee, and GameWard will play against X7 Esports. We should remind you that the total prize pool of the tournament is €150K, and the winner will get €40K.