$1.7 million total prize pool in the Madden NFL league: debut tournament has attracted more viewers than the latest OWL event

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September 9th marked the end of Madden 23 Ultimate Kickoff, the first tournament of the Madden Championship Series with a total prize pool of $1.7 million. The Esports Charts team has provided a summary of the event and also calculated the audience coverage.

In total, four tournaments are planned for the Madden Championship Series 2023. MCS Ultimate Kickoff took place on September 7th and 9th with total $180K prize pool, of which $50K went to the winner. In November, the organizers will hold MCS Ultimate Thanksgiving with a prize pool of $260K, and in January there will be an MCS Ultimate Wild Card with $260K prize pool. The final tournament of the series called MCS Ultimate Madden Bowl will be held from January 23 to February 10, where participants will fight for the share of $1 million. More detailed information can be found on the organizers’ website.

As for MCS Ultimate Kickoff, the broadcast generated 444.5K Hours Watched over nine hours on air and attracted 48K Average Viewers and 66.1K Peak Viewers. Most of the viewers followed the matches on the official channels of eamaddennfl on Twitch and EA Sports on YouTube.

Compared to other tournaments of the discipline, MCS Ultimate Kickoff became the second by Peak Viewers and the fifth by Hours Watched. At the same time, it should be taken into account that Ultimate Kickoff was on air for only 9 hours, while other tournaments from the top 5 had 20-30 hours of airtime.

Top 5 Madden NFL Tournaments by Peak Viewers & Hours Watched

While MCS Ultimate Kickoff can't match the FIFA tournaments, it has almost surpassed The Coinbase NBA 2KL 3v3 SLAM OPEN (68.8K), the most popular NBA 2K tournament. However, viewership of the event is still quite impressive: for example, the Madden NFL 23 tournament surpassed the Overwatch League 2022 Summer Showdown (which ended around the same time) by Average and Peak Viewers.

If we talk about the achievements of the Madden NFL 23 section on Twitch, then for the last week (September 7-14) it took the 56th spot by reaching a total of 945K Hours Watched, 5.6K Average Viewers, and 64.6K Peak Viewers. The section is located between those of Among Us and Red Dead Redemption 2 in the ranking. For comparison, FIFA 22 is in the 38th spot (1.5M Hours Watched) and the recently released NBA 2K23 is in the 13th spot (8.5M Hours Watched) in the platform’s overall top.