On the way to breaking records — PGL Anwerp Major 2022 Legends Stage recap

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PGL Antwerp 2022 went on a short break before the start of the playoffs. Yesterday, on May 17, the second group stage of the tournament ended, during which eight best teams of the tournament were determined. Esports Charts sums up the results of the Legends Stage and its audience statistics, and also tells which match set new championship’s record by the audience.

Legends Stage Results

On the fourth day of the Legends Stage, the fate of the last three slots in the playoffs was decided. In the first match, the sixth and eighth teams of the HLTV.org world ranking met: Heroic played against Team Vitality. Teams played an amazing series with a lot of highlights, but in the end Heroic booked the ticket to the next stage (16:7 on Mirage, 14:16 on Overpass and 16:12 on Inferno).

The next match, G2 Esports vs FURIA Esports, turned out to be no less spectacular. International roster of G2 tried its best, but could not cope with the aggressive playstyle of the Brazilians — 12:16 on Vertigo, 16:14 on Inferno and 11:16 on Ancient. Thus, FURIA reached the playoffs of the Major for the second time in its history, and G2, according to ocelote, will think about what to do next.

Copenhagen Flames ended the dream run of Imperial Esports

One of the most beautiful stories of this major ended in the third series. Imperial Esports, which had an amazing series against Cloud9, won’t play on stage in front of the fans. In the final match, FalleN & fnx’s team lost to Copenhagen Flames — 2:16 on Inferno and 18:22 on Vertigo. However, the Brazilians have the right to be proud of themselves: as FalleN himself admits, the team performed better than expected. In turn, Copenhagen Flames can be congratulated with their the first Major playoffs.

Legends Stage Viewership Overview

As expected, Legends turned out to be more popular with the viewers than Challengers. Spectators have become especially active in recent days: on the final day, two matches reached TOP-3 by concurrent audience as they attracted over million viewers, and one of them even set current record of the event.

In 46 hours of airtime matches of Legends Stage amassed over 27 million Hours Watched with an average audience of 584K viewers. By both metrics this stage of PGL Anwerp Major became more popular than PGL Major Stockholm, as they grew by 4% and 7%, respectively.

FURIA vs G2 Esports match reached the highest concurrent viewership of the event so far as it peaked at over 1.1 million viewers. It’s 14% more than the peak of Stockholm’s Legends Stage: interestingly, highest value of previous major was reached during two matches that were played simultaneously (NAVI vs NiP и MOUZ vs ENCE).

Even though the event reached new viewership record on the last day of Legends Stage, main languages and platforms didn’t update milestones by PV: only French-language broadcasts (23K PV) & Steam.TV (92K PV) managed to do so.

A huge number of spectators followed the “Last Dance” of FalleN and his partners throughout the Legends. Imperial became the most popular team of the stage by a huge margin with an average audience of 612K people. The vast majority of viewers were, as expected, Brazilian CS:GO fans. The team gained 20% more Average Viewers than its closest pursuer, G2 Esports.

The top 5 also includes the Brazilians FURIA and Cloud9, the difference between which was a little more than 2 thousand people. Natus Vincere rounded out the list of leaders, having played only three matches during the stage.

The most popular channels remained the same as during Challengers Stage: only their places in the top 5 have changed. The undisputed leader is once again Gaules, who not only set a record for his channel by PV and entered the top 10 across the entire Twitch platform, but also helped the Portuguese language set a new record for concurrent audience in CS:GO.

Two Twitch channels of PGL took 2-3 places, and one of Steam.TV players dropped to fourth place. Russian-language Twitch broadcast of Maincast took fifth place by watch time (it lacked less than 8K Hours Watched to reach fourth place).

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In all respects, the PGL Antwerp Major has so far attracted more viewers than the record-breaking Stockholm event. Perhaps the main intrigue for the playoffs is whether the current event will be able to set a new record by PV, which is 2.7 million concurrent viewers.

The first playoff matches will be held on the evening of May 19 with FaZe Clan facing NiP and FURIA playing against Team Spirit. You can watch games and follow its statistics on the tournament page.