The LCS Summer 2026 final between Team Liquid and LYON peaked at 279,217 viewers on 4 October. LTA North's Split 3 final drew 139,700 just over a year earlier. The audience for the league's final has doubled in thirteen months.
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Riot Games merged the LCS, the CBLOL and the LLA into one region for 2025, the League of Legends Championship of The Americas, with a North and a South conference. LTA North kept six LCS teams and added Disguised as a guest team, along with LYON, the Mexican organisation who still play in the league today. The format was dropped after one season and the LCS and CBLOL names came back in 2026.
The two biggest numbers that year came from matches between the two conferences. Cloud9 against LOUD reached 291,282 viewers in the Split 1 playoffs, when the final between 100 Thieves and Team Liquid only got to 170,313. The LTA Championship at the end of the season peaked at 318,462 for Vivo Keyd Stars against FlyQuest, and Brazilian streamer BaianoTV's co-stream alone reached 77,702.
Without the South, LTA North stayed well below that. Split 3 averaged 75,219 viewers over 62 hours and 55 minutes of broadcast.
The Lock-In started the year slightly up. LYON against Cloud9, a best-of-five for the First Stand spot, peaked at 184,969 viewers against 170,313 for the 2025 Split 1 final. Average viewership was close to 90,000 both years.
Spring was the weak point of 2026. LYON beat Team Liquid 3-0 in a final that peaked at 183,152, the lowest for a split played under the LCS name and 20% below the 228,268 of LTA North Split 2. LTA North Split 3 had peaked lower, at 159,144, but Spring's average of 63,949 was below all three 2025 splits.
The Summer average is back up at 82,121. All five of the most-watched series were playoff matches, starting at 159,543 for Cloud9 against LYON on day four.
Marc "Caedrel" Lamont co-streamed the Summer playoffs. His stream of the final peaked at 131,998 viewers, close to half of the 279,217 recorded for the series across all channels. He had already brought a large part of the Lock-In final's audience at the start of the year. In 2025, he also co-streamed the LTA North Split 2 final, where his channel peaked at around 60,000 viewers.
Average viewership moved a lot less than the peak. Summer 2026 is at 82,121, which is 9% more than LTA North Split 3 and 13% less than the 94,915 of LCS Summer 2024. The split was also on air for 96 hours and 25 minutes, over 50% longer than Split 3, so its 7.9 million hours watched should not be read against last year's total.
On paper, the LCS peak is back. It is the league's highest peak since the 370,178 of the LCS Summer 2022 final. It also ends three straight years of decline in the league's best peak of the year, from 387,072 in 2022 to 228,268 for LTA North in 2025. The week-to-week audience has not followed, with an average still 13% under LCS Summer 2024. Close to half of that peak also sat on Caedrel's co-stream, which leaves the league's best number dependent on whether he is live.
The CBLOL, the other league to get its name back this year, shows the same thing with a team in place of a streamer. With LOUD
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