League of Legends becomes first game to hit one million viewers at EWC 2025
Held in the second week of the festival’s calendar, the Esports World Cup 2025 for League of Legends took place between July 16-20, bringing the world’s best esports teams to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The grand final match not only became the first EWC 2025 game to receive over 1,000,000 Peak Viewers, but it also exceeded the peak viewership of last year’s finals featuring T1.
Following the record-breaking Mid-Season Invitational 2025, EWC 2025 featured immediate rematches of the games played at that international event. Teams were given a second chance to prove their mettle against the international competition, and Chinese competitor Anyone’s Legend jumped on this chance. In the playoffs of the EWC 2025, Anyone’s Life was able to defeat T1 with the score of 2:0, getting their revenge after T1 eliminated AL from the MSI 2025 in the lower bracket final.
The grand final showdown between Gen.G and Anyone’s Legend received over 1.2M Peak Viewers, roughly 80,000 more viewers than last year’s finals. At this point in the EWC 2025 calendar, this is the most popular game of the festival so far: upcoming events include MLBB, Chess, Counter-Strike 2, and many more.
The next-most popular game of the EWC 2025 was T1’s playoffs match against KOI. The Spanish esports organization has bounced back to the top of EMEA in 2025, claiming their first-ever LEC title in the Spring 2025 season and once again appearing at international events. Playoffs games featuring T1 enjoyed a visible boost in viewership, with their quarterfinal match against KOI reaching just slightly higher than their following elimination match against Anyone’s Legend.
In total, the League of Legends EWC 2025 achieved over 18.1M Hours Watched, improving significantly over last year. In 2024, the LoL EWC event hosted 8 teams in a simple single-elimination bracket. While these high-stakes games received significant Average Viewers, the 2025 edition was more comprehensive – featuring a Group Stage and four more teams – and maintained a strong viewership throughout.
The Average Viewers metric of the EWC 2024 was also slightly inflated by the passionate support for T1. In the single-elimination bracket, T1 received massive waves of viewers supporting them from across the globe. The Korean organization is popular everywhere League of Legends is, and their matches at the EWC 2024 earned the club an AV of over 750,000. Viewership at the EWC 2025 was less extreme, and with audience more evenly spread, no team reached 700,000 AV — although two came very close.
Check out a quote for the EWC 2025 LoL in our Events Dashboard and explore insights like: how Korean-language viewership shifted from SOOP Korea (formerly AfreecaTV) to Naver’s CHZZK in 2025, loss of Vietnamese viewership by reducing coverage for the latest edition, and the absence of certain top co-streamers.
As it stands, the League of Legends event at the EWC 2025 is its most popular event right now. The 2025 edition featured a more balanced distribution of viewership across its expanded format, resulting in significantly higher watch time compared to last year.
The EWC is not yet over, with many more tournaments yet to decide the ultimate Club rankings of the festival, and settle the results for top viewership results of the summer. Keep up to date on the latest Esports World Cup 2025 happenings with Esports Charts.
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