CBLOL breaks viewership record

The CBLOL — Brazil’s tier one League of Legends league — has broken its peak viewership record.

CBLOL 2024 Split 1’s Grand Final saw LOUD beat paiN Gaming 3-2 with the match-up reaching just under 460,000 peak concurrent viewers, according to analytics platform Esports Charts.

As well as gaining a new concurrent viewership peak, the league also saw its greatest number of hours watched with a combined 24.9m hours viewed by spectators over the course of the split. The new peak concurrent viewership eclipsed CBLOL’s previous record — set in Split 1 2021 — by more than 40,000 viewers. The figure is also significantly greater than last year’s Split 1 peak viewership of 276,078, which featured the same LOUD vs paiN Gaming matchup in the Grand Finals.

Prior to the new record, CBLOL’s top two viewership peaks were both during times of an all-around boost to esports spectator numbers due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Split 1 2021 and Split 2 2020), with fans spending more time indoors giving them more opportunity to tune into events. Having now set a new record years later, CBLOL continues to grow into one of League of Legends’ most-watched leagues.

The CBLOL’s rise in viewership comes at a time when North America’s League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) continues to struggle. Its recently concluded Spring Split reached a viewership peak of only 246,184, the league’s lowest ever for a Spring split. However, the peak was up by around 22,000 when compared to the 2023 Summer Split. 

CBLOL’s rise and the LCS’s decline have led to growing calls from the community to merge League of Legends’ Americas leagues, including the LCS, CBLOL and Latin America’s LLA.

This would mirror the VCT Americas league currently employed in VALORANT — developer Riot Games’ other big esport title. Any such merger in LoL, however, would have potential complications around the size of a new league, decision-making on which teams to allow in, and how existing deals with franchised LCS organisations would be amended and/or terminated to accommodate the merger.