The ninth competitive season of the League of Legends became a real challenge for the western scene. After many years of the European and American regions sharing the same name, they've finally got their own leagues. Starting from 2019, Europe plays in the LEC while North America plays in the LCS – so no more NA!

Naturally we couldn't miss such an opportunity for comparing the achievements of both championships. In today's article we will therefore compare their results to each other, as well as to those of the last season.

Firstly, we should tell you about the current achievements of both regions. On average, the European Championship had more viewers than its American counterpart. However, the split's finals has still ended in a new record set by LCS – peaking at 599 thousand viewers. It seems that the battle for the Doublelift's sixth title has turned out to be more interesting than the process of testing the capacities of the new G2 botlane.

As for the regular season, the LEC's one is really more successful – which can be clearly seen on this graph:

In case of North America, the 6th and 7th week has managed to stand out. During these, the region has managed to exceed the Old World by a decent amount of viewers. At the same time, the beginning of the season itself was more successful for Europe, which managed to gather nearly 400 thousand viewers on its first days.

As compared to the last year, the growth is clearly visible – especially when comparing the statistics of the first week of the 8th season with the 2019's debut. The Fnatic guys are still seen as a distinctive feature that complements the popularity of this league – this team has kept the central role in Europe for many years, especially after taking the second place at Worlds 2018.

As for the Championship Series, its beginning was not that successful as compared to the last season. The decline in popularity can be observed both based in the average and the peak number of viewers. The only surprising thing is that TSM managed to remain the region's most popular tag in our statistics. This allows to draw some parallels with Europe's Fnatic, albeit without taking the second place in the World Championship.

Making a full-fledged splits comparison shows that each region faces a distinct situation. LCS shows a slight decrease in the average amount of viewers, but its peak amount rose to 599 thousand (which is 70 thousand viewers more than the last year). We should not that both finals were held with the participation of Liquid, whereas TSM has managed to get to the finals only in 2019 – giving extra advantage to the North America.

In case of LEC, we can observe a significant increase in the average amount of viewers – but when it comes to the peak amount, the past season shows better performance. This can be explained by the fact that, unlike the American case, only one "media"-powered team has participated in the finals, namely G2. As for the enormously popular Fnatic, it has stopped one step away from the finals, with the Origen guys taking its place instead.

Based on the data collected, we can say that the popularity of North America has seen a slight drop – but this did not affect the championship's playoff stage. At the same time, the opposite situation can be seen in Europe – this region has shown perfect performance during the regular part of the competition, but has started to underperform at the end of the split.