Who even cares about the Esports World Cup?

The end of the second inaugural Esports World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is approaching, not that anyone cares.

Despite featuring some of the top teams and esports titles in the world, and Saudi Arabia pumping huge amounts of money into the prize pool and promotion of the event, EWC 2025 has fallen flat among esports enthusiasts around the world.

EWC and Esports Washing

Let’s bring up the elephant in the room first. Saudi Arabia is not a good country.

According to Amnesty International, Saudi Arabia is rife with human rights abuses including attacks on freedom of expression, discrimination against women and girls, discrimination against LGBTQ individuals, abuse of migrant workers, and more. In 2018, their government made headlines across the world for their brutal assassination of US-based journalist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi on foreign soil at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

As a result of these documented abuses, the Esports World Cup has rightfully faced allegations of sportswashing, whereby a nation will use large sports entertainment events and spectacles to distract from their human rights record. By hosting some of the biggest esports organizations and companies in the world, they paper over that reputation and legitimize themselves as a host-country for major events without ever changing their behavior as a nation.

This is disgusting behavior, but its all part of a bigger plan for Saudi. As Richard Lewis pointed out in his reporting on the EWC, the purpose of the EWC and other Saudi-hosted events like F1 is larger than just sports washing: Saudi Arabia is seeking to become the center of the sports and esports world in order to “extricate itself from relying on its oil to remain culturally influential.”

And if that is the goal, they are failing. Because absolutely no one I know cares about the EWC.

Partner Companies are Lowkey Ashamed of EWC

While some Esports World Cup events did okay numbers, like the MLBB Mid Season Cup and PUBG Mobile World Cup, overall, EWC events perform worse than other “S-tier” counterpart events in the same game.

The EWC just doesn’t have that magic.

That is likely in part because many organizations and companies involved in the EWC are low-key ashamed of it. Riot, for example, did not promote the EWC at all on its central channels for League or VALORANT. They were willing to take Saudi’s money, but they weren’t willing to fully own that decision.

Team Heretics won the VALORANT EWC, and that was a big deal for that individual team who had been chasing a trophy for a long time, but the VALORANT esports community barely batted an eye — the event did less than half the peak views of Masters Toronto. For League, while 1.1 million peak viewers may seem impressive, it’s around a third the peak views that MSI did.

No one in their right mind would call that success.

EWC Kinda Sucks at Promoting Itself

While a lack of promotion from partner companies can explain some of the failures regarding views and cultural impact, it can’t explain everything. Even where there is acknowledgement and promotion from partner companies, the reaction is likely not what Saudi Arabia is hoping for. 

When Team Falcons, the Saudi-owned org that spends exorbitant amounts of money on talent to validate Saudi Arabia’s competitiveness in the esports space, won the OWCS Midseason championship at EWC 2025 the announcement of their win barely broke 1,000 on the Overwatch Esports X account. Compare that to the championship winner announcement of a similar sized tournament, OWCS Dallas last year, which had 300% the likes and 6x the views on the post.

The EWC can pretend their numbers are good all they want, but when compared to similar events and similar moments across esports, they are falling well short of expectations because they are bad at promoting their own tournament.

Their social media promotion with players has been tragic. It’s riddled with TikTok formats from five years ago, and not a single piece of original creative content can be found. The tournaments are hard to follow. Their website is difficult to navigate, and they rely on an editorial strategy where they write recaps or previews of events — but fail to even post those on the feed. 

Speaking of the feed, they rarely provide enough detail on X for users to know what’s going on — often speaking in generics like “Team Secret is eliminated.” Eliminated from what? There are dozens of tournaments going on. If you aren’t already locked in, you won’t find much value on their public-facing channels. The promotional strategy behind the EWC is mailed in at best.

So who cares about the EWC? Apparently not even the EWC.

The EWC invests more money than just about anyone into their esports events, and I am just left asking where is that money going? Sure, they fund large prize pools, but having a lot of money on the line is just one element of a successful esports competition. If they want to earn viewers, they will have to do a lot more content and bring better strategy to the table.

But given their human rights record, I for one will continue to pray on their downfall now and into the future.

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