The rise of LFL — how France joined the EU LoL scene’s leaders by viewership?

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The La Ligue Française de League of Legends (LFL), France's national LoL league has been seeing an unprecedented boom this year as its viewership skyrocketed to nearly match some of the top-tier LoL leagues. 

Although the recent Summer 2021 championship garnered pretty outstanding numbers, it wasn’t enough to outperform the LFL Spring 2021, which broke several of the league’s viewership records. In both cases, the hype around Karmine Corp was one of the main factors causing the rise in the popularity of the French competitive LoL scene.

To get a better perspective on how the LFL performed in 2021, Esports Charts compared viewership statistics of the league’s last 4 events and analysed the impact of participating teams on the viewership dynamics, as well as other factors responsible for the league’s recent success. 

Skyrocketing viewership 

The statistics from the last two seasons show a massive increase in LFL viewership by both Peak Viewers and Average Viewers metrics. While 2020's highest peak, reached during the third week of the Spring split, accounted for 22K concurrent viewers, the highest peak of the 2021 season was more than 8 times higher. More precisely, 194.9K Peak Viewers tuned in to watch the Solary vs. Karmine Corp match in Week 5 of LFL Spring 2021. 

The spring splits in both LFL seasons proved to attract more spectators than the following summer events — a fairly common result for many disciplines during summertime. 

Disclaimer: To calculate the average interannual percentage change in Peak Viewers and Average Viewers, we considered viewership results of each event’s group stages week by week. 

Compared to LFL Spring 2020, the highest weekly peak during the Spring 2021 regular season went up on average by 643%. When it comes to the Average Viewers count, the amount of weekly AV increased on average by 339.7%. Moreover, Spring 2021 is the only championship of the four that has marked the highest peak of over 100K in each week of group stages.

The recent Summer split has in comparison with Summer 2020 shown a bit less steep growth than the spring championship, yet its numbers are still exceptional. On average, the highest weekly peak increased by 505.4%, while the number of weekly Average Viewers increased by 223.8%. 

More interestingly, LFL gathered more French spectators in 2021 than the main European league — LEC.

The rise of Karmine Corp 

Naturally, the popularity of competing teams has a direct impact on the viewership of a given competition. The Karmine Corp’s story, however, shows how this can go even further and how the hype around one team can elevate the whole esports scene on a national level — all in the course of one year. 

During the 2020 LFL season (including playoffs), the most popular by Average Viewers was team Solary with 13K spectators on average, followed by Vitality Bee (11.6K AV), GamersOrigin (11.1K AV), LDLC OL (10.9K AV), and GameWard (10.6K AV). 

This year, however, the composition of the Top Teams chart is a bit different and reports substantially higher numbers. Based on collected statistics, Karmine Corp unquestionably dominated the 2021 season, attracting 91.1K viewers on average. That’s 596.8% more than last year’s leader and 45% more than this year’s second most-watched team (62.8K AV) — both of which being Solary. 

Third were Misfits Premier with 18.7K Average Viewers, followed by Vitality Bee (46.4K AV) and Team BDS (45K AV). 

So how did Karmine Corp manage to pull off this remarkable accomplishment in such a short time? Originally Kameto Corp, the French esports organisation was founded in March 2020 by streamer and former professional LoL player Kamel “Kameto” Kebir together with rapper and content creator Amine "Prime" Mekri. The org bought a slot in the LFL Division 2 but didn’t settle there for too long. 

At the end of 2020, Kameto rebranded to Karmine Corp and revealed its new roster for Spring 2021, which included players from all over Europe — one of the first steps to draw more attention. In March 2021, Karmine Corp won the LFL Spring split, upsetting Misfits Premier 3-0 in the finals. At this point, the team had already attracted an exceptionally large audience, while the LFL was rejoicing in viewership unheard of. 

Needless to say that the org has put a lot of effort into gaining more recognition. Kameto himself is one of the main reasons why LFL attracts so many spectators. The head of Karmine Corp actively casts his team’s matches and his channel even bypassed the main LFL broadcast by OTP LoL (the highest peak of 130K concurrent viewers as opposed to 67K).

Two months later, Karmine Corp won the European Masters Spring 2021 — a major EU LoL tournament that’s just a tier lower than the LEC. The team’s grand final match against BT Excel drew a huge crowd of 377K concurrent viewers — more than double the usual viewership of EU Masters.  

For this accomplishment, Karmine Corp got congratulated by the French president Emmanuel Macron via Twitter, which triggered a wave of mentions in French media, further bolstering the hype around the organisation. What was left for the org was to leverage the momentum while it lasted.

Other factors in LFL’s growing popularity 

Having participated in all of the matches with the highest weekly viewer count in both the Spring and Summer 2021 splits, Karmine Corp can evidently be considered the most popular team of the current French LoL scene. However, it’s not the only team that can take credit for the sudden popularity of the French league. 

Solary, Karmine Corp’s rival and the second most popular team in the league, has been  around since 2018 and reigned the LFL before Karmine's arrival. Looking at the top matches by Peak Viewers, the four most-watched matches of the LFL 2021 featured the Karmine Corp vs. Solary matchup. Solary also actively streams its matches, but it can hardly compare to Kameto’s numbers (the team’s LFL broadcasts reached the highest peak of 22K concurrent viewers during Spring 2021). Nonetheless, the team has been growing with the league and will likely continue to do so. 

Another factor causing the LFL’s cosmic growth might be the change in the league’s production team. In 2021, the OTP LoL company took over the tournament operations and casting from O'Gaming LoL. The new tournament operator provides French coverage for multiple LoL leagues, including the LEC and LCK. 

Lastly, the growing trend among the European regional LoL leagues has been present for a couple of years now. France itself as a region has won the last three EU Masters Spring events, laying the foundation for the rise of its League of Legends esports scene. 

That said, one thing is evident from the LFL’s recent success story — popular and well-established esports teams are vital for the growth of any esports scene. 

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