European LoL loses audience — LEC Summer 2022 makes the worst start in 2 years

Loading

The League of Legends Summer Split matches are in full swing. The European league is traditionally the second most popular in the discipline, but its viewership statistics keep getting lower. At the end of the first three weeks of the group stage, LEC Summer 2022 showed the lowest viewership results for the last 2 years.

LEC Summer 2022 had 190.1K Average Viewers in its first week, nearly 204K AV in its second week, and only 169.4K AV in its third one. These metrics decreased by 28.7%, 3% and 12%, respectively, compared with the previous Summer Split, and by 45.7%, 25.2% and 36%, respectively, compared with LEC Spring 2022.

It is interesting that the most successful week of LEC Summer 2022 is the second one. LVPes, which broadcast LEC Summer 2022 matches in Spanish, lost half of its audience on one of the two game days of the week. It was on June 25, during the broadcast of the Ibai ’Ibai’ Llanos boxing event, when the streamer set a new platform record for Peak Viewers. He was the one who drew half of the Hispanic viewers of LEC Summer 2022. Learn more about it here.

In comparison with Spring Splits, the Average Viewers number of LEC Summer on YouTube streams in 2021 and 2022 dropped by about 30%. At the same time, LEC Summer 2021 broadcasts on Twitch dropped by 24%, and the metric of LEC Summer 2022 decreased by 39%.

When we look at the LEC stats for the past two years, we can see that the viewership stats for Summer Splits decreased compared with Spring Splits in almost all broadcast languages. In 2022 specifically, the decline ranged from 20% to 55%. English lost 37% of its average audience, French — 42%, Spanish — almost 34%, German — 40%, Polish — almost 32%, and Italian — 23%. Hungarian (+30%) became the only language in Summer Split that saw an increase in the Average Viewers number compared to LEC Spring 2022.

***

Despite the gradual decline of LoL audiences in Europe, LEC Summer 2022 can still outpace the previous Summer Split by Average Viewers. Such low numbers in the first three weeks of the tournament are partly due to the rather large number of events that drew some of the LEC Summer 2022 audience during that period. These events include La Velada Del Año II, Summer Games Done Quick 2022, and several CS:GO and Valorant tournaments. The tighter the schedule of streamer and esports events will be, the greater the chance of this trend getting worse.

LEC organizers should do something to improve this situation — they can attract independent community casters (like LCS, LLA and national leagues in Europe) or they can change the format of the tournament or raise the interest by rebranding it as it happened during the transition from the EU LCS to the LEC. We should note that similar problems have been observed with the big-budget LCS for years: the North American LoL audience continues to shrink, and the once-popular regional league cannot return to its former viewership levels.