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Every evening at 9 pm, for seven weeks, a French public television channel now carries a program about a video game competition. It is called "La Minute EWC", it began on Tuesday, July 7, 2026, on France 4, and it is the visible part of a media partnership between the Esports Foundation, which organizes the Esports World Cup, and France Televisions, the country's national public broadcaster. The foundation published the agreement on its press page on July 8, under a headline that names the broadcaster the official French media partner of the 2026 event.
The partnership comes with the event's change of country. The Esports World Cup, a festival of tournaments in which clubs compete across many games, was held in Riyadh for its first editions. The 2026 edition runs in Paris from July 6 to August 23, and the foundation calls it the first international edition of the event.
A daily program on two channels
The release describes the arrangement in a few lines. France Televisions offers what the foundation calls exclusive daily coverage of the competition. The vehicle is "La Minute EWC", presented as a daily segment that features the competition and the highlights of the day.
The program airs every day at 9 pm on France 4, one of the group's national channels, and again late at night on France 2. The release gives no precise hour for the second broadcast and no running time for the segment. It is also available on the group's streaming platform, and highlights are published on the social media channels of France Televisions.
Related readMasters Santiago Swiss stage draws 8.53 million hours watchedThe run lasts seven weeks from July 7, which covers the length of an event the foundation itself describes as a seven-week competition.
A daily segment is not the live broadcast of the matches
The release speaks of a media partnership and of daily coverage through one program with highlights. It does not say that France Televisions shows matches live, and it names no other French broadcaster.
Nothing in the text concerns money. The foundation does not say whether a fee is paid in either direction, how long the partnership runs beyond the 2026 event, or whether it extends to later editions.
The agency between the two parties
A third name appears in the release. The partnership was brokered by N.E.O., short for New Esports Org., which the foundation describes as a European esports promoter founded by Bertrand Amar and Matthieu Dallon. The company does more than introduce the two sides: according to the release, it handles the full production of the daily program.
The division of roles follows from that. The broadcaster provides the channels, the time slots and its online platform, and the program itself is made by a company from the esports sector. The release quotes neither France Televisions nor N.E.O.
The only person quoted is Mohammed Al Nimer, the Chief Commercial Officer of the Esports Foundation. "Bringing the Esports World Cup to Paris means bringing it to one of esports' true homes," he said in the release. He also described France as one of the countries that helped shape modern esports, a country whose fans have filled arenas and whose clubs and players have left a lasting mark. Through France Televisions, he said, audiences can follow the stories and rivalries of the event every day on national television. The foundation's ambition, in his words, is to help esports become one of the world's biggest sports, which starts with making its greatest moments accessible to everyone.
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To support the choice of France, the release cites the France Esports Barometer, a survey of the French public, without giving the year of the edition it uses. It adds that France has hosted many of the industry's biggest international events over the past decade. Three figures are quoted. Some 11.8 million people aged 15 and over are interested in esports. Six million take an active part in competitive gaming. More than 1.5 million compete in amateur and semi-professional tournaments.
Source: France Esports Barometer, as quoted in the Esports Foundation release of July 8, 2026. The third figure is given as more than 1.5 million.
On those figures, about half of the people the survey counts as interested take no active part in competitive gaming themselves. The release addresses the program to national television audiences as a whole.
The release then sets out the scale of what those viewers are shown. The 2026 event gathers more than 2,000 professional players from 200 clubs, representing over 100 countries. They play 25 tournaments across 24 games, for a prize pool of US$75 million, which the foundation calls a record.
What a daily summary has to cover
The Esports World Cup is not one tournament but a series of them, and the game lineup the foundation published in January runs from shooters such as Counter-Strike 2, Valorant and Apex Legends to League of Legends and Dota 2, fighting games such as Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8, the soccer game EA Sports FC 26, the racing game Trackmania and chess. The 24 titles also include Call of Duty, Fortnite, Rocket League, Overwatch 2, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Honor of Kings, Free Fire, Teamfight Tactics and both PUBG: Battlegrounds and PUBG Mobile. Fortnite and Trackmania were presented in January as new additions.
Related readMSI 2026 peaks at 2.32 million viewers, more than 32 percent below 2025One competition ties the weeks together. The Club Championship, which the foundation calls its flagship cross-game competition, crowns a single club across all the games. The January release sets US$30 million of the prize pool aside for the top 24 clubs, US$3 million more than the year before, with US$7 million for the winner, and more than US$39 million for the game tournaments themselves. The rest goes to club and player awards, among them a most valuable player award in each tournament, and to qualifying events.
The event also has a public side in the city. The foundation's site places the opening ceremony at La Seine Musicale and a fan festival at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. For the 2025 edition, it counted more than 3 million visitors to the event and its festival in Riyadh over seven weeks.
How the event got to Paris
Those figures were first announced for another city. On January 20, 2026, the foundation presented the 2026 edition as a return to Riyadh, with the same dates, the same 25 tournaments and the same prize pool. On May 20, it confirmed that the festival was moving to Paris, as HLTV, the reference news site for Counter-Strike, reported that day.
In its reply to HLTV, the foundation said that all announced titles, tournaments and competitive formats remained unchanged, and that a slight shift in the tournament schedule was possible. It added that the changes tied to the new host city would follow in the coming days, and it named two of them: operational details for the new venues, and broadcast scheduling adapted to European time zones. HLTV also reported that Valve, the publisher of Counter-Strike 2, granted an exception so that the tournament in its game could relocate.
Related readPGL Astana 2026 peaks at 1.16 million, PGL's best outside a MajorJust under seven weeks separate that confirmation from the first episode of "La Minute EWC". The release on the French partnership carries a dateline of June 30, in Paris and Riyadh, and was posted on the foundation's press page on July 8, the day after the program started.
Where the French deal sits in the event's distribution
The foundation distributes the broadcast of its event across platforms, countries and languages, and its own figures for last year show how far that goes. For the 2025 edition, it reported coverage across 28 platforms through 97 broadcast partners and more than 800 channels, in 35 languages, reaching 140 countries. It counted more than 750 million viewers and more than 350 million hours watched, with a peak of 7.98 million people watching at the same moment, reached during the League of Legends tournament according to the January release.
One agreement of another kind, published by the company concerned, shows how a language is handled. Naver, the South Korean internet group, said in a release dated December 16, 2025, that its streaming platform CHZZK would stream the Esports World Cup exclusively in Korean for three years, from 2025 through 2027.
Set beside it, the French agreement is of a different kind. As the release describes it, it is not a stream of the competition and it is not defined by a language feed. It is a slot on national public television, in the country where the event takes place, filled by a program made for it.
What the release leaves open
The partnership is announced for the 2026 event, and the program's seven weeks end with it. The competition runs until August 23, a Sunday.
Several points are not addressed in the text. The release does not say who presents the program or from where it is produced. It does not give the hour of the late broadcast on France 2. It publishes no audience target and no commitment to report the program's ratings. And it does not say whether the partnership would apply to a later edition, wherever that edition is held.
The foundation has not published the full list of its 2026 broadcast partners in that release either. The comparison available for now is the 2025 total of 97 partners.
The name this event could hold, on the bracket and everywhere else.
An example of the format. It does not mean the name is registered, used or endorsed by anyone named in this article.
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