The Esports World Cup (EWC) 2026 closed its third edition in Paris after seven weeks of competition, running from 6 July to 23 August. For the first time since the tournament launched, the action moved outside Saudi Arabia entirely, relocating from its home in Riyadh to Paris. At a media roundtable in the event’s closing days, Faisal Bin Homran, Chief Product Officer at the Esports World Cup Foundation, spoke candidly about the move, the tournament’s growth since 2024, and what esports needs to sit alongside football. Gulf Insider co-publisher Charlie Cooksey put two questions to Bin Homran during the session.
“We are proud of the project,” Bin Homran said, opening the discussion. “We had a short time to move between Riyadh and Paris, but we are very proud of the performance and the results we saw from the audience.” He added: “It was a big challenge, but thankfully all of them were overcome with the amazing team we have,” noting the Foundation is “looking forward to coming back to Riyadh next year.”
Asked how the third edition compared with the first two in Riyadh, Bin Homran said fan engagement had outpaced expectations. “We expected the quality of the project, but we did not expect the huge number of viewers to grow so fast,” he said, pointing to scenes of fans “chanting for their favourite clubs” that mirrored football stadium atmospheres. “I knew it was going to happen, but I did not know when.”
The final figures released by the Foundation bear that out. EWC 2026 drew 850 million viewers and 440 million hours watched over its seven-week run, with a $75,000,000 prize pool distributed across the tournament. More than 2,000 players from over 100 nationalities competed, with over 5,000 co-streamers carrying the action to audiences around the world: the kind of reach Bin Homran pointed to when he spoke of viewership “growing so fast.”
Redesigning the Fan Experience for Paris
Cooksey’s first question went to the heart of the Paris move: given that EWC owns its own on-site experience, what had to be redesigned for a Paris audience versus a Saudi one, and what had surprised Bin Homran about how European fans engaged.
His response set out two structural changes. The first was conceptual: swapping Riyadh’s “festival” format, where fans buy tickets as the primary draw, for a Paris “fan fest” model built around a “compelling experience after you watch” the action. The second was physical: consolidating venues spread across Riyadh into “a singular venue that has everything” in Paris, which “worked really well with the European fans,” who “want everything in the same place,” he said, noting even fans without tickets could still watch from around the venue.
What surprised him most was how easily European audiences could travel in. Paris hosted “the biggest counter-strike qualifier in history,” with 64 teams competing for just two to four qualifying spots, drawing Danish, German and other European players. “That happened because it’s in Paris,” Bin Homran said. “I think the training helped them a lot.”
Esports World Cup: The Road to 2034
Cooksey’s second question looked further ahead, to Bin Homran’s own prediction that by 2034 Saudi Arabia will host both the FIFA World Cup and the Esports World Cup: what genuinely needs to be true for esports to stand alongside football? Bin Homran didn’t walk back the comparison. “I believe by 2034, EWC would be as big as the World Cup,” he said, arguing the fan base already exists but that “media rights and other things” still need to be unlocked for the industry to become sustainable. He framed the Foundation’s mission as building an entire ecosystem: tournament operators, a club program, qualification, global hosting, national team structures, not for EWC alone. “Shoot for the stars, land on the moon,” he said.
Bin Homran also touched on the closely fought Club Championship, decided in the final week for the second year running, between Team Falcons and a Chinese rival: “China and Saudi Arabia,” as he put it. The race went down to the wire: China’s AG.AL were crowned 2026 Club Championship winners, taking home $7,000,000 and dethroning two-time champions Team Falcons. He compared the club-versus-player structure to Formula 1, recalling a conversation with driver Pierre Gasly: “This is the manufacturer’s trophy and this is the player’s trophy… he was like, oh, it’s similar.” On sponsorship, he described a “balance between Saudi sponsors and international sponsors,” naming Sony and Lenovo among the Foundation’s backers.
Riyadh, he reiterated, remains “the home of EWC,” with the Foundation looking ahead to next year’s return. But he was clear-eyed about what Paris had proven: “It can work anywhere.”
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