Challenger Stage Overview - PGL Major Antwerp 2022

The last four days in Antwerp, Belgium, were intense, as 16 teams from all over the world competed for a place in the second group stage of the Major. It is the most prestigious tournament in the CS:GO discipline. The Challengers featured incredible comebacks and underdog victories, as well as showed the best viewership stats in the history of the series. Esports Charts sums up the first group stage and tells you about the top teams, matches and broadcasts of the tournament.

Challengers Stage Results

Perhaps, one of the biggest disappointments for CS:GO fans (especially the ones from Denmark) was the poor performance of Astralis, the four-time Majors champion. It is true that the team has not played like in 2019-2020 for a long time, and the first part of the current season can hardly be taken as an achievement, but it advanced to the Legends Stage. However, it was not a lucky game: in the decisive game, the Danes were defeated by Team Liquid, which started the event with two losses and was expected to be knocked out early.

Imperial fought its way into the "legends" hard: fnx can still win 3 majors out of 3. Photo by PGL

Apart from that, the outcome of the group stage was quite predictable: all favorites qualified for the second group stage without much trouble. G2 Esports and Team Vitality showed the best result by winning three out of three matches. ENCE, Team Spirit and Outsiders (ex-Virtus.pro) also qualified for the group stage. But there was a tough fight for the remaining slots.

Both Imperial Esports and Bad News Eagles made it to the Legends Stage along with Team Liquid. In the decisive game, the Brazilian team led by FalleN smashed the Russian team forZe, which had won its first two matches and was one step away from qualifying. Meanwhile, a sensation from Kosovo defeated MIBR in an intense series: after losing the the first map, BNE won the final two matches and will play against the strongest teams in the world.

Challengers Stage Viewership Statistics

PGL Antwerp Major 2022 had the best start in the history of the Major Series, and its Challengers stage was the most successful in terms of viewership among all the events in the series.

In four days, the matches were on air for 43 hours and in that time they accumulated more than 19.2 million Hours Watched. This is almost 9% more than was recorded at the end of the same stage of PGL Stockholm Major. The Average Viewers number was 450K people, which is also an increase by more than 12%.

The current Peak Viewers number of the stage and the whole tournament happened on the first day of the competition, when two matches were broadcasted at the same time. The PGL Antwerp Major broadcasts had 707.3K PV — almost 6% more than the Challengers' stage result during the Stockholm Major.

On the final day of the stage, the matches were played one after the other, and the final game of forZe vs. Imperial Esports attracted more than 706K PV. That is 12% more than the PV number of the second most popular stage game, when G2 Esports clashed with Team Spirit.

Portuguese surprisingly topped the list of broadcast languages. The Brazilian tournament audience supported their favorites passionately on the final day of the Challengers Stage — over 381K Peak Viewers, the vast majority of whom were Gaules viewers.

English, the official language of broadcasts, ranks second, with the Peak Viewers number of 327K people on Day 1. It should be noted that the Top-3 unexpectedly included Spanish: Argentinian streamers helped it a lot, as they actively covered the matches of the 9z team during the first two days.

Twitch predictably became the top broadcasting platform, and the second place went to Steam.TV, the players of which automatically uploaded the tournament broadcasts to the Steam page of the CS:GO game client. It is noteworthy that Nimo TV (which broadcasts the tournament in Vietnamese) outpaced YouTube by Peak Viewers.

Top teams by AV & HW

The top team by Hours Watched is forZe, which played the maximum number of matches. For the same reason, MIBR, Imperial and Bad News Eagles made it into the Top-5. It is interesting that G2 Esports ranks fourth — the team finished the stage with a 3:0 score.

G2 Esports takes first place in the top most popular teams by Average Viewers — it is far ahead of all the other teams. We remind you that detailed statistics on popular teams are available with PRO subscription.

The Brazilian caster Gaules became the leader among the broadcast channels, covering most of the matches of the tournament: thanks to the success of the Brazilian teams, his channel accumulated more than 5.4 million Hours Watched (more than 28% of the stage's total). Two English-language PGL Twitch channels, a Russian-language stream by Maincast and one of the Steam.TV players also made it into the Top-5.

The Legends Stage matches start on May 14, and the viewership statistics are expected to increase significantly on that day, as many top and extremely popular teams — including Natus Vincere, FaZe Clan, and Ninjas in Pyjamas — will join the game.