The PES League World Finals 2016 was PES League’s biggest World Finals event to date. The two day long event took place in Milan, Italy on the 27th & 28th of May and saw 33 regional finalists play a total of 121 matches in their battle for the title of World Champion!
Players competed in a live tournament on Friday the 27th of May before taking to the UEFA Champions League Festival Stage on the Saturday. Here the tournament’s two finalists went head to head in a nail-biting pitch side match before the UEFA Champions League Final.
The Tournament
Jelly designed, developed, and manages www.pesleague.com, the official UEFA Champions League e-sports event. Over 125K PES League users from across the globe competed online for the chance to travel to Milan, playing close to 1.27M qualifying matches in the run up to the World Finals.
Last year’s World Champion, Walid Rachid Tebane, joined eight previous regional finalists and 24 brand-new contenders to compete for a cash prize of €15K and the opportunity to lift the PES World Final trophy live in front of the crowd on the UEFA Champions Festival Stage. In addition, the winner and second place finalist competed for tickets to go watch the UEFA Champions League match AND the privilege of playing a PES 2016 exhibition match live in front of the San Siro Stadium.
The Live Stream
The PES League World Finals tournament stages were streamed live on www.twitch.tv on the 27th of May 2016. Jelly’s technicians captured video footage from multiple games occurring at the same time; feeding this into the live stream which was presented by Jelly Community Managers Graham Day & Toby Lee, alongside special guest presenters Adam Butcher, a professional eSports presenter, & Osman (Oz) Idris, a well-known spokesperson within the PES community.
Jelly’s on-going partnership with Twitch secured the World Finals a spot on the Twitch TV homepage, garnering the channel over 92K views. The Twitch stream was shared over all Jelly operated PES Channels resulting in a 36% increase in Twitch following and over 10.4K individual comments in the Twitch chat.
The Festival Stage
PES League World Championship finalists, Walid Rachid Tebane (Usmakabyle) and Guilherme Fonseca Agostini (GuiFera), took to the UEFA Champions League Festival Stage on the 28th of May 2016. Jelly’s guest comperes, Adam Butcher and Osman Idris, warmed up the crowd by providing them with a steady supply of PES merchandise before Usmakabyle and GuiFera went head to head for the title of World Champion. After a tense 90 minutes of in-game match time, returning champion Usmakabyle was crowned World Champion for the second consecutive year.
San Siro Stadium
Following the final match on the UEFA Champions League Festival Stage, Usmakabyle and GuiFera played one final exhibition match at Milan’s San Siro Stadium. This match was played pitch-side before the UEFA Champions League Final, exposing the PES brand to an audience of 72K potential PES players. The match was streamed live on the UEFA Stadium TV Video and published on Official PES.
In addition to this, the PES League World Finals featured across a range of European media platforms including Eurogamer.pt, K eSport, Qoly Football Magazine, and IGN Greece & Brasil.
Reaching the Masses
Jelly’s Community Management team worked non-stop in the build up to, and throughout, the event to ensure PES League’s most effective social media campaign to date.
Over the course of the event Jelly reached 30.4M twitter users, securing the brand a total of 1.4k new Twitter followers and 48K twitter interactions. PES League also garnered an additional 3K new Facebook followers, making a total of 3.2M Facebook impressions. This was supplemented with partner promotion from PES League partner brands UEFA and PlayStation.
