Viewership results of LEC Spring 2023 Week 1

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The LEC Spring 2023 League of Legends Week 1 games took place in Berlin on March 11-13. Esports Charts has summed up Week 1 in terms of views and compared the start of the Spring Season with previous Splits. Spoiler: The league had better results in the winter.

Standings Position

Each team played three matches in the first game week. SK Gaming and Team Vitality did best, securing three wins each. Fnatic and Team Heretics had the worst results, sharing the last place in the standings with three losses each. Winter Split finalists G2 Esports and MAD Lions are still in the middle of the standings.

Week 2 should be even more intense, because Team Vitality will play against G2 Esports, as well as attempt to knock SK Gaming off the top of the standings. We should note the match between G2 Esports and KOI, which will be held on March 19. It has a high potential to be the most popular matchup of the Group Stage if ibai continues to stream his team's matches. G2 Esports also has a huge fanbase in League of Legends — all thanks to its previous achievements in tournaments (the club won LEC five times, and before that was victorious in EU LCS). The game between KOI and Fnatic will be another interesting series in the second week, taking place on March 20.

Viewership Statistics

On Week 1, LEC Spring 2023 matches accumulated 3.6 million Hours Watched and drew 209.2K Average Viewers. The most popular game of the week was the series between MAD Lions and KOI — it attracted 348.1K Peak Viewers.  

KOI also became the most popular team of Week 1 — the games with its participation attracted more than 265K Average Viewers. As usual, the owner of the team, popular Spanish streamer ibai, deserves a lot of credit for this. He covered all the KOI games on his channel. By the way, the ibai channel is now the second most watched channel in the league (second only to the official English-language LEC channel). 

Comparison with Previous Splits

Compared to previous seasons, Week 1 of LEC Spring 2023 shows higher results than LEC Summer 2022, but lower than LEC Winter 2023. This applies to all metrics — total Hours Watched, Average and Peak Viewers.

Dynamics of LEC 2022-2023 by Peak Viewers (1st weeks only and top matches):

• LEC Spring 2023 — 348.1K (KOI vs MAD Lions);
• LEC Winter 2023 — 467K viewers (KOI vs Fnatic);
• LEC Summer 2022 — 292.5K viewers (G2 Esports vs Excel Esports);
• LEC Spring 2022 — 527.5K viewers (G2 Esports vs Excel Esports).

In terms of broadcast languages, the situation is similar. During LEC Winter 2023, all of the major languages had significantly higher numbers than in the Spring Season. For example, at the start of LEC Spring 2023, French lost 37% of the Average Viewers number, while Spanish lost 35% of that number. English broadcasts saw a 27% drop in the same metric. But when comparing LEC Spring 2023 with LEC Summer 2022, the same languages show an increase (+58% for Spanish).

We should remind you that in 2023, Riot Games changed the LEC format and increased the number of seasons, adding a Winter Season to the Spring and Summer ones. This is important to consider when comparing Splits, as LEC starting seasons are usually more popular than later ones. In 2023, Winter was the starting season, and it showed quite comparable totals to Spring 2022. Spring 2023, on the other hand, is more like Summer 2022 regarding viewership results. 

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The LEC Spring 2023 matches take place from March 11 to April 17 in Germany at the LEC Studio. The teams will compete for a quota place for Mid-Season Invitational 2023 and LEC Finals 2023. We should remind you that G2 Esports already has both of these quotas, as the team became the Winter Season champion.