LEC vs LCS - Viewership Comparison

League of Legends fans often compare LEC and LCS, the most popular LoL leagues in the West. LCS features many players from Europe, and both leagues have a large overlapping viewership. Also, esports fans have recently been arguing more and more about the problems of these tournaments with the audience outflow. The Esports Charts team has conducted additional analysis on this topic.

LEC and LCS Seasons Comparison (2019-2022)

Situation for Europe is better than for North America

We have compared several LEC and LCS seasons in terms of Average and Peak Viewers numbers over several years to look at the dynamics of the viewership. On the charts you can see a curious anomaly — a sharp increase of the audience in 2020, which can be attributed to the coronavirus pandemic and a hard lockdown: during that period, most sports competitions were canceled, entertainment venues, cinemas, restaurants, bars, etc. were closed. In such an environment, interactive entertainment (streaming and esports) began to attract more and more viewers. Of course, this led to the growth of the audience of professional League of Legends leagues and other esports games.

From 2021 onwards, the pandemic situation began to gradually stabilize. Sports competitions and entertainment events began to be held again, lockdowns were lifted, etc. As a result, fans of esports began to return to their usual leisure time, so the professional leagues started to lose their audience. This can be especially seen in the LCS chart, where the audience decline has been remaining for the fourth season in a row. Since the summer of 2021, the situation has stabilized: there are small fluctuations, but in general the graph has reached a plateau.

When most countries lifted the strict lockdowns imposed because of the pandemic, professional League of Legends leagues began to gradually lose their audience. However, there are exceptions to this situation — we will cover them in another article, where we will sum up the results of the summer seasons of all the splits.

The European LEC league has a slightly different situation. If you look at the charts and take into account the "pandemic factor", you can say that the LEC spring seasons have usually been more popular than the summer seasons. Why does this happen? Before the spring season, teams often reshuffle their lineups, which draws an audience. Plus, there is plenty of time that passes after Worlds and fans have a chance to get bored with the competitive scene. There are also a lot of reasons for the decline of the summer season: vacations, summer break, active leisure time, etc.

Leagues Audience Overlap

Disclaimer: Unique Authorized Viewers is the total number of people, logged in on Twitch, who have visited the channel's broadcasts over a certain period of time.

LCS & LEC Twitch Audience Overlap

As we wrote above, LEC and LCS have a large audience overlap. We have analyzed the official English-language channels of both leagues on (main Twitch channels) and found that more than 56% of LCS viewers also watched LEC games. In turn, 54% of LEC viewers watched LCS games. Moreover, the number of unique authorized viewers of the leagues is very similar: 1.46 million and 1.41 million.

What is the reason for such similar numbers? A part of LEC viewers watch LCS games, but they do not stay for the rest of the day (they watch only games that are held at a convenient time for them). The average viewing time per authorized viewer of LCS is five hours, and six hours for LEC. That is why we can see a similar number of unique viewers, but a significant difference in concurrent viewership of the leagues in general.

LEC and LCS Summer 2022 Seasons Comparison

American teams did not make it into the Top 10

We have compared the most popular LEC and LCS teams of the 2022 Summer Season in terms of Average Viewers. Unlike previous seasons, no team from North America made it into the Top 10 In other words, the most unpopular LEC Summer 2022 team drew more viewers at broadcasts than the most popular LCS Summer 2022 team after all. The Top 3 teams of the summer season from Europe are G2 Esports, Fnatic and Rogue, as usual, while North America's Top 3 has 100Thieves, Evil Geniuses and Cloud9.

More detailed statistics on particular days, stages, teams and broadcast languages are available in our dashboard. You can purchase full statistics of events on respective tournament pages.

LCS Summer 2022 has the lowest performance in four years

This summer, LCS set an anti-record: the league saw its Average Viewers number of fewer than 100K people during a group stage for the first time in its history.

Another interesting feature is the change in audience activity from one stage to the other. Many fans complain that the LEC and LCS group stages are very protracted and, basically, have little impact on anything. Some even sarcastically call this stage "qualification for seeding". It is also interesting that the lowest audience activity is in the middle of the group stage: fans often neglect this period, returning only to the final weeks, where there may be a fight for playoff spots.

The playoff stage is a different story. Games there draw twice as many viewers as they do during the group stage. This situation is the same for both LEC and LCS.

Most popular matches during the Group Stage

Language Statistics

The most popular LEC languages are English, French, and Spanish. Each of them has different dynamics. English is completely in line with the chart of the Average Viewers number. French is gradually growing: during LEC Summer 2019, the AV number on the French broadcast was 12.7K viewers, and at LEC Spring 2022 it has already risen to 45.3K. The AV number on the Spanish broadcast remains almost unchanged and has been fluctuating between 20-26K people for the last few years. We should note that LEC is one of the few leagues where there is no community casting at all. In other regions, popular streamers are often involved in covering games.

LCS basically has a single key broadcast language, English. Until the summer of 2020, the league had also broadcast in French and Korean, but then those languages were abandoned. In the summer of 2022, the Korean broadcast returned, but with a relatively small online audience (2.5K AV). This number could have been higher, as there are many players from South Korea playing in LCS, but different time zones make it very difficult to attract more viewers.

***

Regardless of the audience reach situation, many LEC and LCS viewers agree that Riot Games needs to change the format of both leagues. Fans are frustrated by the fact that the favorites are often the same teams. Similarly, the constant failures of underdogs, who "only serve their slot in the league and don't progress at all," cause dissatisfaction. If the leagues want to build an audience, they need a new format, fresh blood among the participants and interesting production with additional broadcast languages.

The LEC organizers also need to pay attention to community casting — it has helped the Valorant Champions Tour well, and could have the same effect on the European League of Legends league. Especially when teams that are owned by popular streamers — Team Heretics, Karmine Corp, KOI and others — will appear there in the future.