December 11th, 2023, Lesley Simeon
South Korean esports team, T1, clinched the League of Legends World Championship for the fourth time this year. T1 beat Chinese esports team, Weibo Gaming at the 2023 edition of the championship.
We dive into YouGov data to see how popular T1 is at a global level and who exactly its fans are. According to data from YouGov Global Fan Profiles, T1’s popularity levels have remained more or less unchanged since January last year. The team’s popularity grew marginally in May 2022 and later on in August 2023.
Where are T1’s fans from?
Moving on to understanding who exactly T1’s fans are, YouGov data reveals that more than two in five T1 fans are from China (45%). The second-largest contingent of the team’s global fans come from India (14%). Vietnam (7%), Philippines (6%) and Indonesia (5%) wrap up the top five markets T1’s fans belong to.
Who are T1’s fans?
T1’s fans are more likely to be men than women, YouGov’s data shows. Nearly three fourths of T1 fans are men (74%). Women account for just over a quarter of the Korean team’s fans (26%).
Comparatively, fans of the top five globally most popular esports teams (Invictus Gaming, Evil Geniuses, Cloud9, Counter Logic Gaming, Excel Esports) are less likely to be male (62%). We refer to these teams as the ‘top five cluster’ in the chart below.
Digging deeper into Global Fan Profile’s demographic data, we see that nearly two in five of T1’s current fans (38%) are 18-to-24-year-olds. A similar proportion of 25-to-34-year-olds (37%) also identify as T1 fans. Consumers aged 65 years and above are the least likely to be fans of the team.
When it comes to income levels of T1 fans, nearly half of all T1 fans belong to the lower-income bracket (48%), followed by those in the middle-income group (25%). Less than two in ten T1 fans belong to the higher-income lot (17%). This distribution isn’t too dissimilar to that of the top five cluster.
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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.