The Biggest Esport Teams Ranked

Article by : SlotsUp Team Dec 1, 2020

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Updated: Dec 8, 2021

Esports has fast become a billion-dollar industry with thousands of teams competing for the best rankings, the biggest players and even bigger rewards.

We’ve analysed 50 esports teams to determine who comes out on top. We scored them on a variety of different factors, using a points-based system to determine who is the ‘most successful’ team in the current league.

The following factors were taken into consideration:

• Money Makers (combined score of):
  • Highest earning teams of 2020
  • Highest earning teams overall
• Hardest Working:
  • Number of official tournaments teams won
• Social Media Influence:
  • Highest numbers of followers and subscribers combined on the official team Instagram, Youtube and Twitter profiles.
• Google Search Volume:
  • The team that has had the highest number of Google searches worldwide

This, when put into our scoring system, gave us an overall tally in which we used to rank the teams highest to lowest:

Team Liquid comes top of our index with a total of 46.6/60 points, and Fnatic just one point behind on 45.6/60. Both were high scoring across the board, but Team Liquid’s top 3 position in this year’s earnings meant that they secured the top spot in our overall index.

Some teams came higher in different aspects of our study than others. To see who came top in each factor we looked at, we have broken them down into different categories.

MONEY MAKERS

The real money adds up when you are part of one of the top esport teams in the world.

We combined the index score for money earnt in 2020 and the index score for overall earnings, to see which teams are fast becoming the biggest money makers in their field.

Team Liquid came out on top here with 2020 earnings of $1,318,843 and overall earnings of a whopping $35,700,948. Followed by Team Secret with 2020 earnings of $1,077,571 and overall earnings of $12,078,078.72.

HARDEST WORKERS

The team that keeps winning is not the most talented but the most hard-working.

We looked at how many tournaments each team has had to play and win to achieve the global success they currently experience.

Team Liquid may have earnt a lot of money, but this has not been an overnight success. The team has got where they are by winning 1839 official tournaments to date. The top 10 hardest workers are the teams who have put in maximum effort for the best results.

SOCIAL INFLUENCERS
In the world we live in today, social media followers can give you a huge leg-up, especially in the respect of sponsorships and deals.

Though just missing a top 5 spot in our overall index, FaZe Clan came far out on top for social influence with a combined (Youtube, Instagram and Twitter) following of 23.7 million.

Followed by Team Solomid in 2nd place with a combined following of 7.4 million.

MOST GOOGLE SEARCHES
Seeing which teams had the highest amount of Google searches gave us an indication of popularity and showed a wide-reaching interest in these teams.

First place went to BIG, who are creeping up to almost one million searches every month.

Next up was OG with 452,000 searches per month followed by Alliance who came 3rd with a respectable 316,000.

Most Valuable Players Ranked

We all know that these teams would be nowhere without the best players on their side.

So we took the top 10 teams (according to our index), and their top player of 2020, to see how they ranked against one another. We took several factors into consideration including social media presence and earnings. See who came out on top:

Who is behind the screen? Players are usually known best, or even sometimes solely, by their player ID’s they use within the game. These are the ID’s our Top 10 players are known by:

• Jesper Wecksell Player ID: JW
• Clement Ivanov Player ID: Puppey
• Håvard Nygaard Player ID: rain
• Danil Ishutin Player ID: Dendi
• Luka Perković Player ID: G2 P3rkz
• Anthony Colandro Player ID: ZexRow
• Tyler Latham Player ID: Skadoodle
• Sumail Syed Hassan Player ID: SumaiL
• Ivan B. Ivanov Player ID: MinD_ContRol
• Jesse Vainikka Player ID: JerAx

Jesper “JW” Wecksell and Håvard “rain” Nygaard both play CS:GO and our research found that CS:GO was the esports game that has earnt the top teams the most money on average.

Clement “Puppey” Ivanov and Danil “Dendi” Ishutin are both Dota 2 players.

Our map shows where these top players are based around the world:

Sources: esportsearnings.com | youtube.com | Instagram.com | Twitter.com | Twitch.tv | socialblade.com | ahrefs.com

Methodology: The Ultimate Esports Index takes a seed list based on the top 50 earning esport teams of 2020 and uses a variety of factors to determine who comes top when all of these factors are taken into consideration.

Using a weighted scoring system, each team was measured on 5 factors:

• 2020 Team Earnings
• Overall Team Earnings
• No. of Official Tournaments Teams have Earnt From
• Social Media Followers (Combined following Youtube, Instagram, and Twitter of Official Team socials)
• Google Search Volumes

We then looked at the top players for 2020 for the top 10 clubs in our index and used a six-factor weighted scoring system to rank them – giving us both the top 10 clubs and players for esport.

Disclaimers: Top Players based on the top earners for their current teams in 2020*
*OG 2nd highest-earning player used as top earner (Johan “N0Tail” Sundstein) had been banned from Twitch.
All Data correct on: 18/11/20