The League of Legends EMEA Championship (LEC) has recorded a peak of 417,113 viewers for its Summer Split Grand Final between G2 Esports and Fnatic, according to data available from esports viewership and data company Esports Charts.
This figure sees the peak viewership grow by more than 73,000 compared to the 2023 Summer high of 343,576, though figures are down from the Winter (830,816) and Spring (593,554) splits of this year.
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The 2024 Summer split earned an average of 220,462 viewers across its weeks of competition, compared to 172,558 in 2023, and its hours watched totalled 18,978,065, up from last Summer’s 16,177,242 despite almost eight hours less runtime across the latest event.
Despite the improvement on last year, 2024 has seen viewership declining split-on-slit. The Summer split’s viewership trend continues to be affected by LEC’s format restructure that came into effect last year. Rather than closing out the season with the Summer playoffs, now the EMEA calendar is concluded through the Season Finals; a fourth ‘split’ which crowns the year’s overall league champion and hosts the LEC’s only arena roadshow each year.
With the bigger spectacle soon to follow, fan engagement around the Summer split seems to have dwindled, a phenomenon that was also seen last year.
Additionally, the immense popularity of MAD Lions KOI (MDK) and Karmine Corp — the league’s two streamer-led teams — means that matches featuring either of the two are often those that draw in the most viewers, largely through their respective owner’s live co-streams.
As a result, Spanish language and French language viewership peaks did not occur during the Grand Finals. The Spanish peak of 126,054 came during MDK’s elimination match in the first round of the lower bracket, while the French peak of 155,467 came as Karmine Corp was eliminated in the lower bracket third round.
The league’s five most-viewed matches of the year so far have all featured either MDK or Karmine Corp. The Winter split peak of 830,816 viewers — the league’s highest since 2021 — came when Ibai Llanos’ MAD Lions KOI made it to the playoffs Grand Finals.
