LEC Summer 2026 final peaks at 434,973, the league's lowest since 2024

The LEC ended its summer with a smaller audience than a year earlier. The Grand Final of LEC Summer 2026, between G2 Esports and Movistar KOI, peaked at 434,973 viewers, according to a release published on September 21, 2026, by the audience analytics firm Esports Charts. That is 8.13 percent below the peak of LEC Summer 2025, and the league's lowest peak since 2024.

The LEC is the top League of Legends league of the EMEA region, which covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Its summer split closed with three days of Finals in Nice, from September 18 to 20. The drop in the peak is not the largest change the firm measured: average viewers fell faster, while the number of channels showing the matches went up.

Esports Charts, LEC Summer 2026 release of September 21, 2026. Both changes compare the 2026 summer split with the 2025 one.

Two measures, two different falls

Esports Charts publishes two headline audience measures. Peak viewers is the highest number of people watching at the same moment, across the channels it tracks. Average viewers is the mean number of people watching across the whole time the event was on air. The first describes the best moment of a split; the second describes all of it.

Both comparisons are with the same split a year earlier, the summer of 2025, whose Finals were played in Madrid. On the first measure, the summer of 2026 lost 8.13 percent. Applied to this year's peak, that percentage puts last summer's best moment at about 473,000 viewers, a figure derived from the firm's own numbers rather than published by it. On the second measure the loss was more than twice as steep: the average fell by 17.9 percent compared with LEC Summer 2025, the release says.

The longer view is the firm's own. Among all the events it tracks for the league, the last two LEC splits are the only ones whose average fell below 200,000 viewers. The release does not print the averages themselves, nor the total of hours watched for the split.

Where the audience thinned

The firm points to a few places where viewers were missing. English, French and German all saw their peaks dip compared with the summer of 2025, and the firm gives those dips as the reason the top-end results stayed below LEC Summer 2025. The release gives no figure for any one language.

The other change concerns co-streams, channels where a creator shows the official broadcast with their own commentary. A few prominent streamers did not broadcast the matches this summer, Esports Charts writes. It names one: Sergio "knekro" García, a Spanish content creator of KOI, who was among the most popular co-casters of the 2025 summer split and did not stream the LEC Summer 2026 matches.

At the same time, the number of unique channels showing the split went up. The release does not give the count, and it does not say how many of the new channels were co-streams.

Seventeen languages, nine partners

The league's own broadcast plan shows where creators fit in. Riot Games, which runs the league, set out its broadcast for the year on January 13, 2026. Fans can watch the LEC in 17 languages, through official broadcast partners and through co-streamers, the publisher wrote. The official partners and the on-air talent were named for all of 2026.

The English broadcast is presented by the league's own desk, which Riot lists as Drakos, Vedius, Sjokz, Laure, Medic, Dagda, Hysterics, Odoamne, JackSpektra and Finn. The other languages are handed to partners, each with its own channels.

The rest of the 17 languages are covered by co-streamers alone. Riot's list adds Greek, Italian, Korean, Russian, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese, each through one or more creators.

Team co-streamers and independents

Riot sorts its co-streamers into two groups. The first are creators tied to an LEC team; co-streams, Riot writes, feel like virtual watch parties. For LEC Versus, the January list named Jankos and Caltys for G2 Esports and Troubleinc for Team Vitality in English. In French, it named Kamet0 for Karmine Corp, alongside creators for G2 Esports, Team Vitality and Shifters. In Spanish, it named Ibai for Movistar KOI, JordiLMK for Fnatic and Werlyb and Champi14 for Team Heretics. In German, Obsess streamed for Fnatic, Karni for SK Gaming and Sola for G2 Esports; Natus Vincere had LynxÇerezz in Turkish and MalzaharBerkut in Ukrainian. The second group are independents with no team, such as Caedrel in English, Diamondprox in Russian, or Frajgo, Kaseko and Nervarien in Polish.

The partners and the main broadcast were in place for the whole year; the co-streams were not fixed. knekro, one of the most popular co-casters of summer 2025 by Esports Charts' account, was not on the January list either.

The question of how much the LEC depends on creators was already raised in the spring. On April 21, Sheep Esports reported on a debate set off by a FlyQuest video published on April 17. Citing viewership data, the video said co-streamers accounted for nearly half of the watch hours at Worlds 2024. Sheep Esports noted that Riot Games declined its request for an interview.

The same report described how the discussion spread across the scene. Sjokz, a host of the LEC's own English broadcast, shared the co-streaming guidelines ESL had published for its own events and said they should be the standard across esports. Caedrel, the independent English co-streamer on Riot's January list, had ended one of his LEC co-streams early after his chat turned negative, writing in his chat that he was logging off for the day and would return later that week. Caedrel's own team, Los Ratones, had stopped in February: he announced on February 12 that it was shutting down after missing the playoffs of LEC Versus, as Sheep Esports reported that day. None of these points carries a figure for the summer split, and the Esports Charts release does not tie its own numbers to the debate.

A new platform since MSI

One part of the broadcast did change during the year. On June 26, Riot Games announced that Kick would carry live broadcasts of global and regional events across LoL Esports, Valorant and Teamfight Tactics, starting with MSI 2026, the Mid-Season Invitational. China and Korea are excluded. Riot said viewers on Kick get the same drops and incentives offered during its global event broadcasts on other platforms, drops being small in-game rewards for watching, and that streamers on Kick are held to the same moderation standards as elsewhere.

The announcement covers the regional events of LoL Esports, and the summer split was the first LEC split to start after it. The Esports Charts release does not split the audience by platform, so it gives no measure of what Kick added. The rise in the number of unique channels covers every platform together. Riot was not the first large organizer to sign with Kick this year: ESL had announced a streaming partnership with the platform in April, putting its Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 Pro Tour on Kick beside other platforms.

Finals in Nice, and the road to Worlds

The Finals that produced the peak were played away from the league's Berlin studio. Riot announced on July 8 that the Summer Finals would be held at the Palais Nikaia in Nice, from September 18 to 20, with one best-of-five series each day, a match won by the first team to three games. Riot said the language of the show inside the hall would be French, with hosts on site to lead the crowd.

The weekend also settled the third and final LEC place at the World Championship, Riot wrote. Worlds 2026 runs from October 15 to November 14 in the United States. Riot set its shape on March 22: 19 teams, a Play-In in Los Angeles, a Swiss stage through the semifinals in Allen, Texas, and a final on November 14 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

Esports Charts measured the LEC against the other regional leagues that send teams there. Among the six regional qualifiers for Worlds 2026, LEC Summer 2026 ranked second by peak viewers, behind only the LCK 2026 Season in South Korea. No other circuit had passed 200,000 peak viewers, the firm wrote, with three of them still in progress when the release was published.

The next measure of the league's audience comes with Worlds itself, which opens on October 15, a little under four weeks after the Nice final.

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