League of Legends 2024 Spring splits see academy leagues mirror franchise circuits’ growth
The three academy leagues across some of League of Legends' most renowned regions have ended, and there's one obvious leader when it comes to viewership figures. While the two top continue to grow their audience reach with every event, reflecting the trend seen in their main circuits, one competition continues to struggle to stay relevant due to various factors.
Academy leagues are seen as a testing ground for upcoming talents, with many prominent esports organizations having their B teams participate in these tournaments to give their unproven, often younger pros a chance to gain experience and show that they're ready for the step up. It also breeds a sense of competition between the main squad and those chomping at their heels, for a run of bad form can see someone sent down to developmental while another name gets elevated, essentially asked to sink or swim in the highly competitive environment of professional gaming.
The first of these developmental competitions to end was the North American Challengers League Spring 2024 on April 9. Despite carrying the highest prize pool among this trio of events at $100,000, it has continued to suffer due to internal conflicts and the organizational shortcomings suffered by multiple teams associated with the main franchise league.
This competition recorded 21.4K Peak Viewers, 924K Hours Watched, and 6.7K Average Viewers over 137 hours of airtime. The watch time and peak concurrent viewership saw declines of 44.9% and 45.1% from the North American Challengers League Summer 2023, with the former metric falling even further when compared to last year's Spring split, which did have a much longer airtime.
These drops in audience reach have mirrored the downward trend that the main franchise circuit has been seeing over the past few years despite the best efforts of Riot Games. What is worrying is that this trend is more or isolated to the North American region, with many other circuits around the world seeing growth and development in their leagues.
One of the main leaders in this regard is the CBLOL, whose Spring split set new league records for HW and PV. Community casting and the consistent performances of teams with cult reputations, like LOUD and paiN Gaming, have led to such records being broken in 2024.
Reflecting this blossoming is its academy league, the CBLOL Academy Split 1 2024, which ended on April 28 after posting its best numbers in a couple of years. Carrying the highest prize pool in series history, this event notched 68.2K PV, 2.8M HW, and 21.7K AV over an airtime of 132 hours.
The PV number was the highest recorded since 2022, while the last time the watch time hit such a high mark was in 2021. The first League of Legends competition in the series to have two sides come in from the qualifiers, allowing for non-academy teams to compete in the circuit, it was helped by the performances of paiN Gaming Academy and LOUD Academy. The latter ended up winning the entire thing, while Brazil's most famous esports organization finished fourth after a run till the Lower Bracket Semifinal in the Playoffs.
We now move to the crown jewel of the current LoL competitive scene, the LCK, where the numbers have hit astonishing levels over the past few years. The recent Spring split created multiple records, including becoming the most popular non-Worlds match ever, to continue the region's hot streak that included helping host a milestone Worlds 2023.
The LCK CL Spring 2024 also continued this momentum, becoming by far the most successful tournament in the developmental series. It became the first event in the Challengers League to cross 100K PV, while the 2.9M HW it registered was only the second time it got past the 2M mark.
The debut of European LoL legend Rekkles for T1 Esports Academy played a big part in this massive leap in PV. His first match for the academy side of perhaps the most popular side in global LoL achieved the above figure, with no other game going past 100K PV.
In fact, the top nine matches at this tournament would all have been enough to set a new record for peak viewership, showing just how much interest fans of the discipline have for any event that happens. It also makes the circuit unique in that it is such a one-team event thanks to the massive following that T1 enjoys, with all five entries in the top five including the current world champion.
While Korea and Brazil continue to thrive with every competition held in the LoL ecosystem, the North American region seems to be headed the opposite way. It hasn't helped that the top teams in America have either not performed to expectations or have exited the league entirely.
If the circuit wishes to recapture its former glory and justify the perks it receives in terms of seedings and slots at major global competitions, a good result at upcoming tournaments is vital. A good start would be the Mid-Season Invitational 2024, which begins on May 1 and pits the world's 12 best sides against each other, with a slot at the 2024 World Championship at stake.
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