T1 leads most-watched esports teams of 2025

T1‘s League of Legends team once again finished the year as the most-watched esports team globally, topping the 2025 rankings by total livestream watch time across all major titles and platforms.

The annual ranking, published by Esports Charts, aggregates hours watched from tournaments and official broadcasts across PC, console and mobile esports, providing a broader view of audience attention than game-specific lists. Battle royale titles and Chinese streaming platforms are excluded from the data.

The leaderboard was dominated by three ecosystems: League of Legends, Counter-Strike and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB). However, while the overall leader remained unchanged, the rest of the top 10 saw significant movement, particularly from Counter-Strike teams entering the upper tier for the first time.

For the fourth consecutive year, T1 claimed first place overall. The Korean organisation accumulated just over 196 million hours watched in 2025, outperforming the second-ranked team by approximately 65%.

What stood out was that T1’s viewership dominance came despite a relatively inconsistent domestic season. The team’s best finish in the League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK) regular season was fourth place. Once again, however, T1 peaked on the international stage, securing its third consecutive League of Legends World Championship title after starting from the earliest phase of the tournament.

Behind T1, Korean teams continued to shape the top 10. Gen.G finished second overall after another highly consistent year, winning the LCK Season, the Mid-Season Invitational and the Esports World Cup. Its campaign ended in familiar fashion at Worlds, where it was eliminated by T1 in the semifinals.

Hanwha Life Esports placed sixth, buoyed by a strong start to the year that included winning the LCK Cup 2025 and its first international title at the First Stand Tournament. Meanwhile, KT Rolster completed the Korean contingent in seventh, driven by its run to the Worlds Grand Final that significantly boosted its overall watch time.

Counter-Strike 2 saw a notable resurgence in the 2025 rankings, matching League of Legends with four teams inside the top 10. The highest-ranked Counter-Strike representative was Team Vitality, which finished fifth overall.

Vitality delivered one of the most decorated seasons in Counter-Strike history, winning back-to-back Majors and lifting nine tier-one trophies. Its viewership performance marked the strongest showing for a Counter-Strike team in the overall rankings since NAVI’s peak in 2021.

Further down, Team Spirit, MOUZ and Team Falcons rounded out positions eight to ten. While each followed different competitive paths, their combined presence highlighted the increased turnover and depth at the top of Counter-Strike esports during 2025.

The rankings once again highlighted the rise of mobile games in the APAC esports market. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang also played a major role, with two Indonesian teams finishing inside the top four. Indonesia remains the largest MLBB esports market, regularly delivering million-plus concurrent viewership figures for domestic and international events.