MBC keeps the LCK Finals on Korean terrestrial TV through 2027

The last match of the South Korean League of Legends season will again be shown on one of the country's main television networks. Riot Games, the publisher of the game, announced on Thursday, August 20, 2026, that it has extended its agreement with the broadcaster MBC to carry the LCK Finals live on terrestrial television, the free channels received over the air. The Esports Advocate reported the extension the same day, citing the South Korean outlet Digital Daily: it is a two-year contract that covers the 2026 Finals and the 2027 Finals.

The LCK, short for League of Legends Champions Korea, is the professional league of the game in South Korea. Its Finals reached terrestrial television for the first time in 2025, and the audience that day was small by the standards of the medium. The renewal gives the two partners two more broadcasts, and the first is just over three weeks away.

Contract and date: Riot Games announcement as reported by The Esports Advocate, August 20, 2026. Rating: Nielsen Korea, via Daily Esports, quoted in the same report.

What the extension covers

The agreement concerns one match a year. The 2026 Finals are played on Sunday, September 13, at 2 pm Korean time, at the KSPO Dome in Seoul's Olympic Park, according to The Esports Advocate. The finals qualifier, the match that decides the second finalist, is held in the same arena the day before.

MBC has given the match its Sunday afternoon slot, the one the network uses for professional baseball and other major sports. The broadcaster also said it would assemble a commentary team aimed at viewers who are new to the game, and promote the event in its sports news bulletins.

The money is not public. The Esports Advocate writes that financial terms were not disclosed, and that neither the 2025 agreement nor the new one has established whether MBC pays a fee for the rights, shares the production, or works on a revenue-sharing or barter basis. Barter, in television, means airtime exchanged for programming with no payment.

Both sides commented on the renewal in general terms. Lee Jung-hoon, the Secretary General of the LCK, said the two-year contract gives the league an opportunity to reach more fans. Ahn Hee-nam, who heads sports planning and business at MBC, said in remarks carried by the Korean outlet MyDaily that the first broadcast had confirmed the possibility that the LCK is not content for a single generation, and that MBC would offer newcomers accessible commentary through 2027.

A first broadcast with a modest rating

The 2025 final is the only reference. Gen.G beat Hanwha Life Esports 3-1 on September 28, 2025, at Inspire Arena in Incheon.

On MBC, the broadcast drew a nationwide household rating of 0.4 percent, according to Nielsen Korea figures published by Daily Esports and quoted by The Esports Advocate. A rating of this kind measures the share of households with a television that were tuned to the program. It was higher in Seoul and in Daejeon, at 0.7 percent, stood at 0.5 percent across the capital region, and fell to 0.2 percent in Busan and Gwangju.

The same report gives two points of comparison from that day. MBC's evening news program, News Desk, drew 5.8 percent. A professional baseball game of the KBO, the national league, shown at the same time on the rival network SBS, drew 0.7 percent.

The Esports Advocate also notes that the 2025 final was played without T1, a team whose elimination, the outlet writes, had raised concerns about the audience before the match.

The streaming rights sit elsewhere

A television rating captures only part of the LCK's public: the online rights were sold separately. Riot announced in December 2025 that Naver and SOOP, two South Korean streaming platforms, hold the exclusive Korean-language live rights to the LCK for five years, from 2026 through 2030, according to The Esports Advocate.

Naver's own release, dated December 16, 2025, describes its side of the arrangement as a five-year strategic agreement with Riot Games. It covers the domestic broadcasting rights to the LCK from 2026, broadcast rights to two other leagues of the game, the LPL and the LEC, and to three international tournaments: the World Championship, the Mid-Season Invitational and First Stand. Naver also became an official sponsor of the league and obtained the naming rights to its arena in Jongno-gu, Seoul, renamed CHZZK LoL Park after Naver's streaming service, with seating zones and an operations booth in the platform's colors.

The same release announced what Naver presented as a first in South Korea: viewership drops, a system in which viewers who link their platform account to their game account earn in-game rewards for watching a given match. It gives no financial terms and does not mention SOOP.

An estimate has circulated. Daily Esports reported in January 2026, citing industry estimates, that the two contracts are worth ₩150 billion in total, about US$107 million: ₩100 billion from Naver and ₩50 billion from SOOP, or roughly ₩30 billion a year. Neither company confirmed it, The Esports Advocate writes: Naver said it could not confirm the terms and SOOP said specific amounts could not be disclosed. The estimate is not for the league's matches alone. It also takes in the Korean-language rights to Riot's international events and to the overseas leagues, the sponsorship of the LCK and the naming of the arena. For scale, Daily Esports set the figure beside the ₩135 billion that the streaming service Tving paid for three years of KBO baseball rights, a larger sum per year.

What exclusivity changed for viewers

The new streaming contracts removed one platform from the Korean-language live coverage: YouTube. It still carries highlights and behind-the-scenes videos, about 24 hours after Naver and SOOP, as well as the international broadcasts of the league.

The Esports Advocate relays figures from the data firm Softcon, first published by the news agency Newsis, that show how the audience has been split since. On January 23, 2026, a Friday, the LCK Cup match between T1 and KT Rolster peaked at 233,600 concurrent viewers on CHZZK, 232,500 on YouTube and 151,700 on SOOP. Concurrent viewers are the people watching at the same moment. A T1 match in February 2025, before the exclusivity, had drawn 730,000 on YouTube alone.

The replay tells a similar story. A highlight of the January match passed 610,000 views on YouTube, against 50,000 on CHZZK and 13,000 on SOOP, according to the same data.

The league's audience is also largely foreign. The advertising agency Nasmedia calculated in February 2026 that the LCK's live coverage averaged about 630,000 viewers per minute in 2025, and that viewing from outside South Korea made up more than 60 percent of the total.

A network under pressure, a cable deal about to end

The Esports Advocate places the renewal against MBC's accounts. The broadcaster's revenue for 2025 fell by ₩29.4 billion to ₩718.6 billion, with an operating loss of ₩27.6 billion, according to figures reported to the board of the Foundation for Broadcast Culture in March 2026 and published by the Korean outlet MediaToday. Advertising revenue fell by ₩21.5 billion to ₩243.5 billion. The network still reported a net income of ₩177.7 billion, which the report attributed to a national tax refund and to a gain on the sale of the headquarters of its Busan affiliate, not to its trading. Its 16 regional affiliates lost ₩53 billion between them.

The outlet draws its own comparison: the estimated ₩30 billion a year attributed to the Naver and SOOP contracts is about 12 percent of MBC's annual advertising revenue, and more than its 2025 operating loss.

Another window is closing. OGN, a channel launched in 2000 that produced South Korea's top League of Legends competition until Riot took production in-house in 2019, brought LCK matches back to cable and IPTV in February 2025 under a two-year agreement for 2025 and 2026, shown on weeknights at 11 pm. That agreement expires at the end of this season, and no renewal has been announced. SOOP, for its part, has promoted its own cable channel, SOOPTV, as a way to reach viewers on large screens, and Newsis reported that the channel's ratings more than tripled after the opening of the season.

What remains to be seen

The next broadcast is on September 13. The reference it will be set against is the 0.4 percent of 2025.

Other points are open, and The Esports Advocate lists them: whether MBC pays for the rights and on what basis, how the terrestrial window fits with the exclusivity of Naver and SOOP, and whether OGN's agreement will be renewed. The venue of the 2027 Finals has not been named.

The second year of the contract falls in a particular season. South Korea hosts the League of Legends World Championship in 2027, and the Korea Esports Association and Riot Games Korea opened bidding in March 2026 for the cities that will host its knockout stage, scheduled for late October 2027.

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