Valorant Challengers 2023 EMEA results

Last matches of the Valorant Challengers 2023 EMEA Split 1 division, which includes the national leagues of France, Spain, Portugal, and other European and Central Asian countries, came to an end on March 12. The Esports Charts editorial team has calculated which league drew the most viewers and how it managed to outperform its competitors in the region.

What is Valorant Challengers?

Valorant Challengers is a system of national and regional leagues that Riot Games created to support and develop the Valorant tier-2 scene. The Challengers system, like the Valorant Champions system, consists of three divisions: Americas, EMEA, and Pacific. Each of these divisions is divided by country or region. For example, the EMEA Challengers have separate leagues for France, Spain, Portugal, Northern Europe, and so on. There is a similar division in Challengers Pacific and Challengers Americas.

In the national leagues, teams compete for points to qualify for Ascension Tournament in their region: Ascension EMEA, etc. The winners of these tournaments will receive the option to play in the Valorant Champions Tour regional leagues in 2024 and 2025 on an equal basis with their partner teams.

Results of the First Seasons of Valorant Challengers EMEA

The first national league splits in Valorant Challengers EMEA ended earlier than the Americas and Pacific divisions. The list of winners is as follows:
— Northern Europe: Apeks;
— Eastern Europe: Acend;
— France: SBG;
— Italy: GMT Esports;
— Spain: Case Esports;
— Portugal: SAW;
— DACH: CGN Esports;
— Turkey: S2G Esports;
— MENA: Unity Esports + Team RA'AD.

We should remind you that Northern Europe includes Great Britain, Denmark and Sweden, and Eastern Europe includes Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, etc. DACH includes Germany, Austria and Switzerland, while the MENA division includes teams from Iraq, the GCC, North Africa and Central Asia. However, all these divisions are very arbitrary, as there are many foreign players in each EMEA division.

Most Popular Challengers EMEA Leagues

All EMEA leagues differ from each other in the number of participants and matches, but even when comparing them roughly, some of them are far ahead of others in terms of popularity.

Most Popular Challengers EMEA Leagues

The French national league, VALORANT Challengers 2023 France: Revolution, became the most popular league in Challengers EMEA. In the first split, its matches accumulated more than 1.1 million Hours Watched. The season's Average Viewers number was 8.6K, the Peak Viewers number was 44.9K. By all these metrics, the French league is steadily ahead of all the other leagues in EMEA. The national league of Turkey is in second place. Spain is at the bottom of the Top 3.

A large role in the high results of the French league was played by the community casting. The fact is that two teams in the league are owned by popular French streamers — the co-owner of Mandatory is ZeratoR and the founder of Joblife is JLTomy. They both actively covered their teams' matches on their personal channels, and were far ahead of the official valleague_fr channel by Peak Viewers. Other regional leagues also featured prominent community casters, but their audience reach was much smaller. For example, Spanish league games were actively covered by mixwell from Team Heretic.

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National league matches in the Challengers Americas and Challengers Pacific divisions end on March 19, but we can already see that some leagues there are well ahead of the top leagues in EMEA. For example, the leagues in North America and Japan exceeded the 140K Peak Viewers mark — three times more from the French league, the most popular one in EMEA.