For the third year running, ESL One successfully took over the 2006 Germany World Cup football stadium in Frankfurt with its festival offering: 22,500 attendees attended ESL One Frankfurt over the weekend, with a further 7.3 million tuning in online. Festival elements kept visitors entertained in between matches, whilst those watching from home were catered to with tailored broadcasts on television (Sport1, MTG’s ESportsTV, Nova Sport Bulgaria and Globo), numerous streaming websites and social media platforms.

Twitter and Facebook logged high level activity throughout the tournament: 7,918,746 organic impressions were logged on Twitter with an impressive 463,613 total engagements tracked. The ESL Facebook pages, which featured live videos with behind-the-scenes footage, garnered an astounding 23,503,353 total impressions with over 1.6 million video views. Main interaction drivers were content created around the festival elements available throughout the event.

“The fans are front and centre at ESL One Frankfurt – that’s what’s important to us here,” said Ulrich Schulze, VP Pro Gaming at ESL. “World-class Dota 2 action is what the players bring to the table – we at ESL made sure that between the cosplay competition, artists’ alley, balloon animals, airbrush tattoos, HTC Vive demos and more, there was a little something for everyone.”

The Dota 2 cosplay competition hosted at ESL One Frankfurt was Europe’s largest: 34 cosplayers took part, putting in an estimated combined total of over 10,500 hours work into their costume preparation. Winning competitors judged their construction times to be between 450-500 hours, marking monumental effort that was showcased around the stadium and on all major broadcasts.

Online, over 18.9 million sessions were created across the weekend with an average concurrent viewership of 93,391. Viewers through Twitch, HitBox, Azubu and HuomaoTV consumed a total of 4,418,772 hours of esports content, with peak concurrent viewership hitting 651,142.

For more information about ESL One Frankfurt, please visit the official website. Photography can be found on the ESL Flickr page, with VODs of the event available on YouTube.

The next ESL One event takes place in Cologne from July 08-10: the official Valve Major will award US$1,000,000 in prize money and feature competition between sixteen of the world’s best Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams. More information can be found on the official website.