Most Popular Regional Leagues of League of Legends in Summer 2022

Summer splits have come to an end in all League of Legends regional tournaments, and the season culminates with Worlds 2022, which will determine this year's best team. Esports Charts sums up the splits and points out the trends in viewership statistics of the leagues. Spoiler: viewership decreases far from everywhere.

Regardless of the drop in key viewership metrics, the leaders among the regional leagues remained unchanged: LCK and LEC are still firmly in first and second place, respectively, by all key metrics. An important change in the rankings is that now LCS rounds out the Top 3, although in the spring the Brazilian league CBLOL was ahead of it by HW totals.

Unlike most other regional tournaments, the statistics of LPL, the Chinese franchise league, are higher than they were in the spring: HW totals are up 16% and PV totals are up 32%. The opposite trend is seen with CBLOL, where PV totals grew by 8%, but HW totals decreased by 19% (due to decrease of Average Viewers).

Tournaments for Europe, North America, Brazil, China and South Korea continue to significantly outperform other Worlds qualifying tournaments by all key metrics. VCS (Vietnam) continues to hold sixth place by both Peak Viewers and Hours Watched, although its results are 56% lower in HW and 38% lower in PV than the leagues ranked fifth by the corresponding metrics.

LLA (Latin America) showed quite a good growth by PV: while the most popular match in the spring had 60.7K PV, in the summer this value increased by 55% (at the match Isurus Gaming vs. Estral Esports).

It is interesting that among the regional leagues, only two reached their PV numbers not at the finals. In VCS, the playoff Day 4 match between GAM Esports and Saigon Buffalo drew the most viewers, and in PCS Summer 2022, the lower bracket final between PSG Talon and Beyond Gaming reached PV number of the tournament.

How do European regional leagues perform?

It is not a secret that many domestic leagues for European countries gather many times more viewers than a lot of tournaments in other regions of the world. France and Spain are particularly successful in this, with many teams of famous European streamers and even football clubs: one can just recall Karmine Corp in France (team of the streamer Kamet0) and KOI in Spain (owned by Ibai and Gerard Piquet).

Considering the summer splits by Peak Viewers, LFL (France) and LVP SuperLiga (Spain) are in 6th and 7th place, respectively. In the summer, they had 210K and 205K PV and thereby surpassed VCS Summer 2022.

What's more surprising is that among all summer splits, the second division (!) of the German regional league rounds out the Top 10. It attracted over 91K PV owing it to an amazing performance by a local team of streamers, who won the championship. We covered that amazing story here.

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Summer splits traditionally attract fewer viewers than spring splits. At the same time, many of the top leagues, especially LCS and LEC, have been rapidly losing audience recently, which many attribute to the end of a serious pandemic phase. However, there are counterexamples to this trend, which we will cover in detail in an upcoming article about the dynamics of the regional leagues over the long period of time.