While Barcelona burned during her hottest summer days, at the Barcelona International Gaming Center, located very close to the long-awaited beach, the final of the National Superiga of League of Legends (LOL) was held, which for the first time since the beginning of The pandemic was able to have two teams face facely and achieved a record audience of 300,000 spectators on Twitch.
"We are very happy to be here and thank the teams that have fulfilled the rules of confinement to make it possible. It is a very clear first step to recover events with public, we hope that we can celebrate them with followers at the end of the year," he explained At EFE Jordi Soler, the Director General of the League of Video Games Professional (LVP), the organizer of the competition.
The final of the Superliga had about 300,000 unique spectators on Twitch, got the historical record of concurrent viewers with 73,596 (in August 2020 were 27,755) and the mistress (average viewers per minute) arrived at 43,191 spectators (18,010 in August 2020).
"Already in the first game of the final we start with a record of hearing, it has been a challenge to fulfill the growth forecasts of this 2021 after a year of confinement in which we grew up a lot. Not only have we maintained, but we have overcome the Figures ", analyzed the Director General of the LVP.
In April 2020, it was scheduled for the final to be held at the Vistalegre Palace of Madrid, with capacity for 15,000 spectators, but the pandemic prevented it. Since then, the Superliga has been played online.
Although the last two finals (the summer of 2020 and the spring of 2021) were already made with the commentators in the plates of Mediapro in Barcelona, the teams still participated from their own stadiums.
The decisive duel of summer superliga of 2021, which apart from retransmitted by Twitch could also be seen by Ubeat (the ESPORS television channel of the MediaPro Group), faced Vodafone Giants with UCAM ESPORTS CLUB and had as the winner the first, That he rose with his seventh title thanks to the 3-1 he achieved in a final that was played at the best of five games.
The teams, as usual in the ESPORTS, were formed by very young professional players, some of them minors. Everyone exhibited their player's nickname, which is sometimes as alternative as '113'. Instead, others bet for some simpler, such as 'Attila', 'Rafitta' or 'Miniduke'.
The sanitary restrictions continued to be introduced into the show and only 70 people were part of the event among members of the teams, production workers of Mediapro and a few journalists, among which was EFE. The attendees underwent an antigen test before entering.
The Superliga right now is one of the references between the European national leagues and therefore it is usual for some of the best players of the continent to fchhen by the Spanish teams. This competition is a great promotional platform for them in the face that the sets of the LEC (League of Legends European Championship), the maximum European competition, are interested in their services.
The regular season of this edition of the summer superliga had already been closed with the best figures of consumption of the history of the competition: more than 1.9 million hours view (28% more than the summer of 2020), a AMA of 18,400 spectators (were 12,991 in 2020), a peak of concurrent viewers of 45,883 (32,380 in 2020) and 3.9 million accumulated viewers.
The ESPORTS has been one of those who has least suffered by the pandemic, although the impossibility of celebrating face-to-face events has cut the expectations of some sponsors, which are impatient for the situation to return to normal.
In Spain, according to 'Statista', the ESPORTS business invoiced more than 21 million euros in 2020 and the forecasts are that it can rub the 45 in 2024. The growth of this industry, which only generated 1.7 million in 2015 , it has been amazing over the past few years.
The operating pathways that have more growth margin in this sector are the sale of entries and emission rights, and sponsorships. Experts foresee that there will be 1,000 million Esports viewers around the world in 2025.
Date Of Update: 05 September 2021, 08:49
