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French president Emmanuel Macron congratulates League of Legends team Karmine Corp on EU Masters victory
French president Emmanuel Macron learned a little more about League of Legends and esports yesterday evening after congratulating the new EU Masters champions, Karmine Corp (Kcorp).
EU Masters is an intercontinental tournament between the best LoL teams from across Europe outside of the region’s primary competition, the LoL European Championship (LEC).
The LoL French League champions Kcorp dominated the entire tournament and managed an impressive 3-1 win over the United Kingdom’s BT Excel – the academy of LEC team Excel Esports and champions of the NLC which features both British and Nordic teams.
Kcorp has cultivated an extraordinary following, partly thanks to the huge fan bases of Kabel ‘Kameto’ Kebir and Amine ‘Prime’ Mekritwo – two very known content creators and streamers in France. The latter is also a rapper.
The French broadcast for the tournament regularly outperformed the English stream as a peak audience of around 377,000 people tuned into the grand final with around 300k of those coming from the French stream. That is a monumental growth in viewership for EUM compared to the 144k who tuned into the Spring finals last year and the 61k viewers the year before.
Kcorp, who have two French players in top-laner Adam ‘Adam’ Maanane and Lucas ‘Saken’ Fayard, were congratulated last night by the French president who reached out to founder Kameto on Twitter.
Roughly translated, the congratulatory message from Macron read:
‘Dear Team Karmine Corp, You won’t be surprised if I tell you that I am not an expert in League of Legends, but I wanted to send you this message after learning of your beautiful victory. As European Champions, you put our flag in the spotlight. You showed all of Europe that the French have talent in esports. So a big congratulations to the whole team!’
After the 2019 LoL World Championship final was hosted in Paris, the country clearly has a lot of love for the esport.
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