At the end of July 2023, Kings League’s first Summer season came to a close when xBuyer Team defeated El Barrio 2-1 on penalties in the playoffs final. The event was hosted at the Estadio Metropolitano in Madrid, home to the Atletico Madrid football team since 2017.
Kings League is a seven-a-side football tournament established by former Barcelona defender Gerard Piqué and one of the most-popular Spanish streamers, Ibai Llanos, in 2022. It aims to be more dynamic and entertaining than traditional football, utilizing differing rules and featuring both football and internet personalities.
By utilizing content creators as chairpeople of teams, these streamers and online personalities support and showcase the league while supporting their own teams. Kings League has quickly taken over the live-streaming landscape to become one of the most-watched events of the year. How well precisely did it perform?
Split 2 Playoffs viewership
In a previous article, Streams Charts looked at the success of the Kings League during its regular season. In summary, Split 2 (Summer season) received less viewership across the board than Split 1 (Winter season). Hours Watched fell 28% and Peak Viewers fell 70%, but this data was taken prior to the playoffs stage.
Viewership dynamics for the regular season were stable, as in the previous article, but the playoffs stage received huge viewership compared to the regular season. The event's final between xBuyer Team and El Barrio claimed the most concurrent viewers for the season, reaching 1.38M Peak Viewers.
Hours Watched also received a 30% increase compared to the pre-playoffs data, ultimately amassing 32.49M Hours Watched for the entire Split 2: 7.6M of these coming directly from the Playoffs. This Kings League event lasted almost three months in total, meaning a 30% increase in total watch time for only three days of playoffs is particularly impressive. Average Viewers also rose to 374K for the overall event thanks to the 545K AV during Playoffs, which marks an increase from the regular season statistics but still falls below the 459K AV figure achieved during Split 1 earlier this year.
Although the second Split of the Kings League marked a downturn in viewership for the competition, the new deal with Mediaset España may have influenced this. In early May of this year, Piqué announced a deal had been made with the media company which would see both Kings and Queens League matches broadcasted on Cuatro, a free-to-air television channel for Spain. Both these events receive almost the entirety of their viewership from Spanish-speaking audiences, so it would make sense that a free broadcast on television could dilute the viewership for platforms like Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok.
Kings League Split 2 broadcast statistics
Speaking of platforms, let’s take a look at the platform breakdown for the Kings League’s Summer season. Twitch remained the most popular platform for broadcasts, netting a majority 61.6% share of all Hours Watched. However, this does mark a downturn for the purple platform compared to the first Split of the year.
Twitch’s overall share of Hours Watched has gone down, with YouTube and TikTok receiving slightly more viewership to account for this dilution. Although YouTube and TikTok received sizable viewership for the league, they still cannot compare to the purple live-streaming platform.
In terms of the most popular channels of the event, there’s not much to touch on here. The official King’s League streams for each platform were the most viewed broadcasts of the events, with their popularity coinciding with the platforms’ popularity.
Excluding these official broadcasts, the Kings and Queens of the community casters were, in order of Peak Viewers: ibai, rivers_gg, and xBuyer. Ibai, the mastermind of community events, was the most popular community caster of the league, reaching 186K Peak Viewers and amassing 1.2M Hours Watched. Rivers_gg, the most-popular female Spanish-speaking streamer, received 125K Peak Viewers, and xBuyer, the chairperson of xBuyer Team, also received 125K, but 500 fewer viewers than the queen of Hispanic Twitch.
Kings League 2023 viewership
In total, the Kings League seasons which took place in 2023 received 79.5M Hours Watched throughout the Winter and Summer seasons. This watch time for the event rivalled esports behemoths like the M4 World Championship or the MPL Indonesia Season 11. Both tournaments are some of the biggest in esports for the year, and the M4 World Championship is the most-watched esports event of 2023 so far, with 80.1M Hours Watched.
In fact, with a Peak Viewers figure of 1.38M, the Split 2 for this year would rank third in our listing of most-popular Special Events streams, falling behind Premios ESLAND. The Winter Split earlier in the year would out-rank Premios Esland and its 2.11M Peak Viewers is second only to ibai's Velada del Año 3 event. Regardless of whether esports or Twitch, Kings League is one of the most popular events, not only of the year but all-time.
Critically, Kings League achieved its total watch time in an acceptable amount of Airtime. Being a sports league with a season-long schedule, Kings League has an Airtime advantage over other special live-streaming events. However, it was live for less time than the MPL Indonesia Season 11, which received 73M Hours Watched in 205 hours of Airtime.
Compared to esports events like the M4, which receives huge international viewership, Kings League is operating for a Spanish-speaking demographic only. The events are streamed only in Spanish and their continued domination of live-streaming proves the power and passion of the Spanish community. Kings League recently announced they plan to expand their franchising operation into the LATAM region for the 2024 season, check out our article on this — which includes potential team presidents. With the huge attention Kings League is already receiving from a Spanish-speaking audience, the LATAM expansion could propel Kings League to the title of the most-watched event of all time.
Kings League can tick their first year of operation off as a success. Not only was the league supported by Spanish streamers and creators but their community casts and coverage of the events in the league help cultivate a healthy ecosystem for the viewership of these events. The unique tournament has already become one of the most-watched events in live-streaming for 2023, and we will just have to see if this form can continue into 2024 as the league continues to evolve and grow.
