January 17th, 2023, Rishad Dsouza
LOUD, which won the VALORANT Champions event in 2022, won The Game Awards’ best esports team crown late in 2022. But they are still finding their feet as a global esports team in terms of size of fan-following.
YouGov Global Fan Profiles data shows that 3% of global esports followers are fans of the Brazil-based team. But the team has received an uptick in popularity since winning the VALORANT Champions event in Istanbul, which concluded on 18 September. LOUD’s popularity in August 2022 was at 1% but jumped to 4% in September and has hovered around that mark in the following two months.
Among fans who follow VALORANT esports events, LOUD’s growth in fan-following has been more explosive, rising from 2% in August to 10% in November.
LOUD also has a strong presence in the League of Legends arena, having also competed in the 2022 LoL Worlds. But LOUD’s fan-following among LoL fans is largely in tune with the global average among all esports fans, settling at 5% in November.
The team has created a serious fan-following in its home market, with one in five Brazilian esports followers declaring themselves as fans of LOUD (19%). It is the most popular esports franchise in the market, comfortably ahead of second-placed Team Liquid (14%).
It has a decent following among esports followers in Canada, India, South Africa, and Vietnam, where about one in 25 say they are LOUD fans. But the team is yet to make inroads into the UK market, where only 1% are fans.
Who are LOUD fans?
Comparing against the five most globally popular teams among VALORANT followers (Cloud9, FaZe Clan, Fnatic, G2 Esports and Team Liquid), we find that LOUD’s fan base is slightly more mature. Only one in four LOUD fans (24%) are aged 18-24 compared to a third of fans of the top five cluster (32%). A quarter of LOUD fans are aged over 45 (23% vs 15% of the top five teams).
Perhaps as a result of the slightly older make-up, LOUD features a higher share of higher-income fans (20% vs 17% of the top five).
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Methodology: YouGov Global Fan Profiles, which includes data from 51 markets, is based on continuously collected data from several sources, rather than from a single limited questionnaire. Respondents are aged 16+ years in China and 18+ years in other markets. Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample apart from India and UAE, which use urban representative samples, and China, Egypt, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco, Philippines, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, which use online representative samples.