Esports World Cup 2025: Team Falcons Defend Title as Broadcast Production Ramps Up the Game By Adrian Pennington, SVG Europe
Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 7:30 am
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To no one's surprise, Team Falcons has won its second consecutive Club Championships at the Esports World Cup (EWC). However, the Saudi-owned esports organization was taken to the final week by seven other teams, giving the whole tournament a competitive edge it lacked when Falcons romped to victory with weeks to spare in 2024. Hosted for the second year in Riyadh, the seven-week-long tournament, which concluded on Sunday, Aug. 24, looks set to be not just an annual fixture on the esports calendar but a major attraction on the global sports scene. That's the masterplan anyway.
We've had decades now of esports, but it's really been the idea of competition towards conclusion of one specific tournament, said Mike McCabe, COO of the Esports World Cup Foundation, which is the event organiser. The Club Championship at EWC makes it bigger. Being able to create a longer, more connected story over the course of the seven weeks is something that we've really leaned into and we think is truly unique. This year, having it come down to the final week and be so incredibly close amplifies the whole competition.
EWC 2025 organised 25 video games competitions ranging from chess to 5v5 first person shooter title Valorant. All 200 clubs could field teams in every discipline with points and cash prizes going to the winners of each individual game out of a total prize pool of $70 million. The championship cumulative points total determined the winners of the Club Championship with the top 24 clubs splitting $27 million and the winner landing a $7 million pay cheque. Team Falcons were only victorious in one game (Overwatch 2) but had the strength in depth to accumulate high scoring positions in 21 other games.
When we launched EWC in 2023 our purpose was clear from day one; to elevate esports and make it more sustainable, said Ralf Reichert, CEO, EWC Foundation. After just two years, the Esports World Cup is no longer a bold idea; it's the foundation of a global sport. Within esports, EWC is the biggest so far in this industry. It's a unique club competition featuring the best games with the world's best athletes. What has happened at EWC 2024 and again here in 2025 is bigger than we ever imagined. And in 2026 [when EWC returns to to Riyadh from 6 July-23 August] we'll take it even further.
The stats speak for themselves.
EWC 2025 set new records with 750 million viewers and a peak of 7.98 million viewers during Gen.G Esports' victory in Week 2's League of Legends tournament. Some 340 million hours of content have been watched, outperforming 2024's inaugural event across the board (the comparative figures for 2024 saw 250 million hours of content streamed to 500 million viewers and a peak viewership of 3.5 million).
In addition, the competition and adjacent festival of gaming featuring myriad games-related activations for the public drew more than 3 million visitors to Riyadh's Boulevard City, topping last summer's 2.6 million.
The effort to attract a wider audience outside the esports community was centred on EWC Spotlight, a new global broadcast production managed by IMG. In total, 7,000 hours of live content were produced (proudly proclaimed to be second only to the 2024 Paris Olympics) across more than 800 channels and 97 broadcast partners, in 35 languages.
Read more Esports World Cup: IMG puts a Spotlight on innovation as esports goes mainstream
We have to remember that esports is very nascent, explains Viranda Tantula, who served as executive creative director for EWC2025's opening ceremony. It started out being very crude and it was only when Riot Games entered the picture, 20-25 years ago, that esports coverage jumped to being well produced. Since then, there's been a constant attempt to find the sweet spot between serving the core audience - the hardcore fan - but then also creating something that's appealing enough to bring new people in. That's where EWC this year is doing a pretty good job with Spotlight. For example, it introduces people new to each game with simplified heads-up displays. A little bit of simple explanation goes a long way.
For a casual esports observer like your SVG Europe correspondent watching the game live in the arena can be confusing and not a little overwhelming. The faces of the players remain largely fixed as they concentrate on the screen in front of them and viewers can barely see their hand movements - they are after all just sitting on PC chairs playing with a console. To bulk this up as a spectacle for fans in the arena, giant LED screens display the action in incredible detail.
Each player has a OBSBOT Tail 2 POV camera trained on their face, other RF and Steadicams rove closer to them on the stage all but blocking the action for the studio audience, but their attention anyway seems fixed on the screen displaying the actual game play. For two-person games like Streetfighter, chess or games culled from conventional sport like EAFC this is relatively easy to follow, but you'd need to have played a multiplayer title like Crossfire to follow what's going on. Data from each player's gameplay is translated into graphics on the main screen, game commentary is broadcast in the arena along with constant kinetic show elements, special effects and high-energy music amping up the level of excitement even in clearly one-sided competitions.
The director mixing the live action for the arena displays and live stream on Twitch and YouTube can choose from a bewildering array of feeds - which could include 10 in-game virtual cameras (one per player), an overall map&
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Esports World Cup 2025: Team Falcons Defend Title as Broadcast Production Ramps Up the Game By Adrian Pennington, SVG Europe 
