Saudi club Team Falcons successfully defended their title and collected $7 million in capturing the Club Championship. (Credit: EWC)

The Esports World Cup (EWC) drew the curtain on a second successful edition on Sunday (August 24) as the nascent competition seeks to position itself as the world's largest multi-title esports event.

Over 2,000 top players from more than 200 clubs and over 100 nations competed in the 2025 EWC across 25 disciplines, including League of Legends, Counter Strike 2, Dota 2, Valorant, EA Sports FC 25, PUBG, Street Fighter 6, and chess, with a record prize pool of $70 million on offer.

Go deeper with GlobalData

Data Insights

The gold standard of business intelligence.

Find out more

Discover B2B Marketing That Performs

Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.

Find out more

In addition to individual competitions, there was an overall Club Championship, where the best esports organizations competed for total points and additional bonuses across several titles.

Saudi club Team Falcons successfully defended their title and collected $7 million in capturing the Club Championship of Esports World Cup 2025.

According to the Esports World Cup Foundation (EWCF), the organizing body for the annual tournament, the 2025 EWC set viewership records in its second year, recording a total of 750 million viewers – peaking at 7.98 million viewers during Gen.G Esports’ victory in Week 2’s League of Legends tournament – and 350 million hours watched, outperforming 2024's inaugural event across the board.

In 2024, the EWC attracted 500 million viewers, with 250 million hours of content streamed, and a peak viewership of 3.5 million. The tournament also netted 2.8 billion impressions on social media.

This year, the organizers made a targeted effort to attract a wider audience outside the esports community through EWC Spotlight, a new global broadcast production managed by IMG. In total, 7,000 hours of live content were produced (proclaimed to be second only to the 2024 Paris Olympics) across more than 800 channels and 97 broadcast partners, in 35 languages.

With expanded circuits, increased international participation, and consistently rising engagement, the EWC has solidified its position as one of the premier global esports events, setting the stage for even greater numbers in the years to come.

This ability to attract a huge audience caught the attention of major global broadcasters, with several securing rights to the tournament to increase its visibility on more traditional platforms.

Hosted for the second year in Riyadh, the seven-week tournament was shown by the likes of DAZN, Seven (Australia), Sportdigital (Germany), Fox Sports (US), and BeIN Sports (MENA).

Through a partnership announced in July, IMG was brought in to oversee the production rights management and distribution of EWC broadcasts, including on international broadcasts via its SNTV joint venture.

SNTV was appointed to distribute daily video content to global media outlets via its Story10 agency arm.

Alongside managing the EWC’s content strategy, IMG crafted and produced over 50 hours of programming across the tournament, including live coverage, ancillary content for social media, and digital channels to help expand the event’s global reach.

“With IMG, they can bring a new audience and all of their learnings from traditional sports broadcasting and can help us explain the complexity of some of these games to a new audience, and that's something that esports has historically struggled with,” Mike McCabe, the EWCF’s chief operating officer, tells Sportcal at the New Global Sports Conference in Riyadh.

As well as securing major broadcasters, the EWC has developed a strong commercial portfolio, with over 15 sponsors signed up for this year’s tournament, comprising local and international partners.

Domestic sponsors included STC, SNB, Qiddiya, Aramco, and Saudia, while international brands such as Sony, Hilton, Amazon Web Services, Pepsi, Lenovo, and Mastercard also supported the event.

“The commercialisation of the competition is critically important,” McCabe states. “We're lucky that we have funding, but we also need to be self-sufficient as well, and the pathway to do that is nominally through sponsorship, that's our primary revenue stream.

“We have many existing domestic sponsors, but we've also invested more into our international sponsors, whether they be global sponsors like AWS and Hilton, or regional specific. We're getting a patchwork of sponsors from around the world, and we're excited and happy that we've been able to bring big global organisations like AWS, and it's the first time that Hilton has invested in esports, and they see a lot of synergy between the audience they want to reach and what we are creating here.

“In terms of other revenue streams, ticketing is obviously a big one, and then the merchandise that goes along with running an event like this, which will level up all of those different pieces.”

The next step for the EWC to grow commercially is to attract more blue-chip brands that are more commonly seen in traditional sports.

Asked how the EWCF can do this, McCabe replies: “The biggest thing is just showing them the evolution of gaming and the audience, that's who they really want to connect with, and so for us, there's a little bit of evangelism, for sure. The metrics are clear.

“We’ve been able to create a platform, and that's the intent. We have the greatest platform from a competitive, elite standpoint. Those two things allow brand immersion, engagement, and also the brand affinity with the best players in the world.”

The EWCF was formed as a nonprofit organization by the Saudi government in 2023 to create the EWC, replacing Gamers8, the Saudi Esports Federation’s previous esports festival in Riyadh.

When it was launched, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and prime minister, Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, stated that the event was part of a wider scheme to accelerate the country’s National Gaming and Esports Strategy, itself a scheme within the country’s Vision 2030 objectives of diversifying its economy, growing tourism, and creating jobs.

The move to launch the EWC was part of a wider government investment in esports, which included forming tournament organizer conglomerate ESL Faceit Group, investing in Chinese tournament operator and esports company VSPO, as well as buying stakes in various game developers.

In September 2022, the Saudi government-owned Savvy Games Group announced $38 billion investment plans in esports and gaming.

“Gamers 8 existed as an incredible multi-title event, but it wasn't at a global scale; it was very regionally focused,” McCabe explains. “Therefore, the direction that our board gave us was, we want to make this [the EWC] the biggest esports event in the world, and we want it to be a global beacon to help the clubs, players, and publishers.”

As a next step, the EWCF recently announced the launch of the Esports Nations Cup (ENC), a new national team tournament that will debut in 2026 and be held every two years.

The ENC is claimed to be the first event of its kind at this scale.

The inaugural edition will be co-developed with publishers and video game companies Electronic Arts, Krafton, Tencent, and Ubisoft.

The ENC will feature national teams from all major regions, including North America, South America, Europe, MENA, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, competing in both team-based and solo-player formats.

The inaugural competition is scheduled to take place in Riyadh in November 2026, before moving to a rotating host model.

The introduction of the ENC comes at a pivotal time for the esports industry. In recent years, esports has gone through a period known as the “esports winter,” during which some companies, teams, and leagues struggled.

​But the esports economy is still showing strength and is poised to skyrocket, and new spins on esports are keeping the market growing. Viewership for certain esports titles is changing, especially with the introduction of individual game streamers.

According to esports market intelligence group Newzoo, the global video game market generated $187 billion in 2024 and is projected to exceed $213 billion in 2027.

Research from data company Statista also claims that the global esports audience for this year is estimated to reach 640.8 million.

McCabe believes esports is heading in the right direction to become a lucrative industry after facing its challenges.

“It's on a journey,” he says. “Historically, it's been a massive loss leader; it's been a challenge. We've seen the investment has actually slid down a little bit over the course of the last few years. When we think about the longevity of it, for us, our objective is sustainability.

“If we could get to a point where the clubs are sustainable and people can have careers as athletes, then we're happy. What we aspire to, though, is that we're able to find a way that the rights get to the same pathway as sports, where there is scaled revenue for rights in the way that there is for traditional sports. So, that for us is an aspirational state versus the sustainability, which is our objective.”

The ENC will coexist alongside the Olympic Esports Games (OEG), which will debut in Saudi Arabia in 2027, with the competitions to be held in rotating years.

Earlier this year, the EWCF was named as the founding partner of the OEG and will deliver the event after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) agreed a partnership with the Saudi Olympic and Paralympic Committee (SOPC) to stage it in Riyadh.

That tie-up is set to run for 12 years, with the OEG to be held regularly in the Kingdom.

As founding partner, the EWCF will oversee game selection, tournament structures, and ecosystem engagement “to drive innovation in the development of the Olympic Esports Games.”

A joint committee of the IOC and the SOPC has been set up to steer the games. It is chaired by IOC member Ser Miang Ng and co-chaired by Al Faisal. The committee consists of six people, three from each partner, and is currently working to define the games that will be part of the first edition of the OEG.

“For us, the EWC is about building a pinnacle esports event, so we feel good about building qualifications, pathways, running incredible stages and broadcasts, and pushing the boundaries of technical execution,” McCabe says.

“OEG is the natural evolution, because it's nation-based, and we know that it needs to be annualised. We can't just do something every two years because people will drift away; you see that with other sports as well. And so, the idea is that we see it 100% as complementary – so one year would be ENC, the other year would be OEG, and then they would just rotate with each other.”

Despite both having national team elements, McCabe insists the OEG and ENC will remain separate products.

He adds: “We need that annualized programme for it to really work. It's tough to sustain without that, so that's the plan. We've got a unique opportunity with ENC to craft something brand new.

“The Olympics has its rituals and traditions, and they must be respected. People think about medals and that structure. We have an opportunity with ENC to do something completely different.”