An overview of IEM Cologne 2022 — one of the most popular CS:GO tournaments of the year

Loading

The main CS:GO tournament of July, IEM Cologne 2022, ended in Germany. At the LANXESS Arena in Cologne, the world’s strongest teams competed for a share of one million dollars and a quota for IEM Katowice 2023. In this article from Esports Charts, you will learn about the results of the championship, as well as the audience it attracted.

Tournament results

24 teams from Europe, the CIS, North America, Brazil, and China performed at IEM Cologne 2022 in total. Some of the teams started from the Play-In stage, while the higher-seeded teams got invites to the group stage right away.

The Play-In stage didn’t feature any particular surprises, although one can note the underwhelming home performance of BIG, as well as the early elimination of three Brazilian teams MIBR, Imperial Esports, and paiN Gaming. But it was Movistar Riders that surprised everyone by getting this far despite being an underdog.

FaZe Clan with IEM Cologne 2022 trophy | Source: ESL

Advancing to the playoffs from Group A were Natus Vincere, Movistar Riders, and MOUZ — while the performance of Heroic, ENCE, G2 Esports, and Team Vitality was below expectations (although at the time of the tournament all these teams were in the HLTV.org world ranking’s top 10).

Advancing from group B were FaZe Clan, Astralis, and Team Liquid. The players of Cloud9 and FURIA Esports were not able to perform as productively as at IEM Dallas 2022 — both teams were knocked out by the almost unstoppable Astralis. Pleasing its fans with decent performance was also Team Liquid, which was somewhat reinvigorated by the arrival of YEKINDAR as a stand-in. The main highlight of the playoffs was the victory of Movistar Riders over Team Liquid and the first-ever entry of the Spanish team into the semi-finals at such a large event.

Making it to the grand final were the main favorites of the tournament: FaZe Clan and NAVI. They ended up making use of all five maps to determine the winner. As a result, karrigaN’s team won with a score of 3:2. This was the second defeat of NAVI from FaZe Clan in the final of a large tournament in 2022. The last time this happened at PGL Major Antwerp 2022.

Viewership statistics

In 93 hours on air the official broadcasts of IEM Cologne 2022 generated 25.8M Hours Watched with an average concurrent audience of 276.7K Average Viewers. The most watched match of the tournament was the grand final between FaZe Clan and NAVI, which gathered 1.2M Peak Viewers. By the way, it was the matches featuring NAVI that generated the most Hours Watched: 9.35M. Holding the second spot in terms of popularity were the matches of the FaZe Clan. It should be noted that the entry of these two teams into the final greatly contributed to the audience reach. NAVI is an esports club with the most media presence in the CIS, and FaZe Clan has a large fan base in North America and Europe. The confrontation of these teams greatly boosted the audience of both the Russian-language broadcast and the English-language broadcasts.

Final statistics of IEM Cologne 2022

In terms of maximum concurrent audience, English became the most popular broadcast language, gathering 621K Peak Viewers, which is slightly more than at IEM Katowice 2022 in February. Interestingly, only majors managed to gather more viewers on English-language broadcasts of CS:GO. The second spot went to Russian (275K) and Portuguese (204K). Ukrainian broadcast reached the mark of 24.6K Peak Viewers. Note that most of the viewers followed the event on Twitch.

The main statistical achievement of IEM Cologne 2022 is that it entered the top 5 tournaments of the discipline by Peak Viewers, and also became the most popular non-Major event in CS:GO history. The event outperformed even IEM Katowice Major 2019 and IEM Katowice 2022 by the indicator.

Top 5 CS:GO tournaments by Peak Viewers

When talking about the largest tournaments of 2022 (at the time of the article’s publication) IEM Cologne 2022 became the fourth in terms of Hours Watched and Average Viewers, as well as the second in terms of Peak Viewers. Interestingly, four out of six largest 2022 CS:GO tournaments were won by FaZe Clan.

The biggest CS:GO tournaments of the first half of 2022

The next big CS:GO tournament will be ESL Pro League Season 16, which will be held from August 31 to October 2. The matches of IEM Rio Major 2022 will start at the end of October.

More detailed statistics for CS:GO tournaments and competitions in other disciplines are available with the Esports Charts PRO subscription. Learn about its benefits on this page.