In the spirit of evolving LoL Esports towards a brighter future, we’re unveiling a series of enhancements for 2025 that we believe will make our sport more exciting and competitive for fans and pros:
- New, third international event;
- Innovative “Fearless Draft” game mode in Tier-1 play;
- Unified split schedule for all leagues;
- Proposed multi-region leagues in Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Americas;
- Experiment with “Guest Team” slots/promotion-relegation;
- New international event league slots.
This evolution will complement our new business model to keep LoL Esports both more financially sustainable and worthy of your time.
New International Event & Fearless Draft Mode
We’re incredibly excited to announce the creation of a new third international event for LoL Esports. Players, teams, and fans have been telling us they want more tournaments featuring competition between the best teams in the world, so we’re happy to find time in the calendar to add one. We’re still working on the event’s name and branding, but there are several details to share today.
At the start of the 2025 season, we will create a first split/global tournament across all regions. The initial round of the tournament will begin with regional play, with each of the five regions (more on this proposed change below) qualifying a single team for the international round of the tournament in March. Teams that advance to the international round will then participate in a round-robin format. We will see every region play every other region in a best-of-series! The top four teams from that round-robin then advance to a bracket, with the ultimate winner of the tournament being crowned at the end of the six-day international round.
As a season-start event, the new tournament/split will allow pros and fans to see everything the new in-game League of Legends competitive season offers. We expect to use this event annually to experiment with different competitive formats and inject exciting innovations into our early-season competition.
In 2025, we'll implement a version of “Fearless Draft” for best-of series in the regional and international rounds of the new tournament. In a best-of-series, Fearless Draft effectively bans champions picked in prior games in the series. This format helps shake up the matchups and provides more variety in the champions we watch our favorite pros play. LoL Esports has not implemented a new draft format in Tier 1 play in many years, and we can’t wait to hear what you all think of Fearless.
To ensure that our events stay connected, we will use the results from this first tournament to seed the Mid-Season Invitational (MSI). [Since the competitive formats we pilot in this tournament may change yearly–and likely look different than the rest of the competitive calendar–we will not auto-qualify the winning team into MSI.]
New Split Structure
With a new international event, we’ll also refine our regional split structure. Starting next season, all regions will begin with the new international tournament/first split. A second split then will qualify teams for MSI, which will move later in the calendar to roughly the beginning of July. The third and final split in each region will culminate with a Regional Championship to crown one season-long champion in each region. Focusing on a single-season Regional Championship makes the splits more cohesive and interconnected, raises the stakes for many of our regular season matches, and provides an enticing, season-long build-up to Worlds, our biggest event of the year.
New Multi-Regional Americas/APAC Leagues & Guest Team Slots
In addition to optimizing our business model with pro teams, we’ve also looked for ways to increase the competitiveness and stakes of our regional leagues overall. To that end, we’ll begin conversations with teams in seven of our regions around our intention to form multi-region leagues. LoL Esports fans clearly enjoy region-vs.-region battles and the fandom and passion tied to geographic pride.
Americas
The LCS in North America is seeing an upswing in sentiment and achieved its first year-over-year growth in viewership in four years. Brazil’s CBLOL is more popular than ever, with incredible fandom and viewership numbers. LLA in Latin America has seen an uptick in engagement this year as well, with growing interest in watching global leagues and other leagues including the LCS and CBLOL. Fans also have been actively participating in our multi-language broadcasts and co-streams and showing a growing enthusiasm for cross-regional competitions.
So while we’re pleased to see progress across these three regions, we believe we have an opportunity to combine forces in a new pan-Americas league that will be good for fans, teams, and pros. In this new proposed model, the LCS and CBLOL would now compete as North and South conferences.
Each conference would maintain six of its existing partnered teams, integrate one team from the LLA based on geographical alignment, and reserve one “Guest team” spot for promotion and relegation through the Tier 2 system, for a total of eight teams per conference. The Americas league would operate with a three-split season shown in the above graphic.
Here’s how the Americas splits would work:
- Split 1 - Teams would first compete within their respective conferences, with top performers qualifying for cross-conference play where a single team will qualify for the new global tournament;
- Split 2 - For MSI, the top team from each conference would secure one slot, a total of two Americas teams;
- Split 3 - An Americas Regional Championship would determine three teams advancing to Worlds, with at least one team from each conference.
One advantage of making the decision to restructure Americas is that we can experiment with innovations that our prior structure wouldn’t allow - in this case, by incorporating a Guest team slot in Tier-1 from the Tier-2 system. The best teams coming from Tier-2 would compete in a Promotion/Relegation tournament at the end of each Americas season against the existing Guest team from each conference. The victorious team would earn a slot in the respective conference for the following season, enabling continual fresh talent infusion and competitive dynamism within the league.
We’ll let you know later this year how this would work in 2025 (since we don’t have the system in place in 2024) and beyond. We believe this change will motivate talented players keen to navigate the newly enhanced pathway to top-level professional play.
In developing the newly proposed model, our goals are to capitalize on the strengths of each region, grow our existing fan bases, improve competitive play (and Americas’ results in international tournaments), and enhance the pathway to pro play. We’re hoping to forge a unique and vibrant competitive landscape that leverages our rich history and potential from North to South, creating something as distinctive as our fan community.
In the Fall, we plan to release further details on the selection process for teams in the North and South conferences, outline the competitive structure for each split, share how we plan to enhance cross-conference play, and provide updates to the Tier-2 system throughout the Americas.
Asia-Pacific
Since the formative years of the APAC LoL Esports ecosystem that saw Taipei Assassins win Worlds 2012, we’ve seen several regions form new leagues, including the Vietnam Championship Series (VCS). APAC is also home to the Pacific Championship Series (PCS), a league spanning Southeast Asia. Recently, the League of Legends Japan League (LJL) and the League of Legends Circuit Oceania (LCO) joined the PCS ecosystem from the playoffs, vying for berths to international events. The resulting cross-regional rivalry was fierce, resulting in some of the region’s most widely-followed matches to date.
Building on that foundation, we’re thrilled to launch a brand new league in 2025. It will bring together top teams from Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, Japan, Oceania, and the rest of Southeast Asia, aimed at showcasing regular inter-regional competitions with the best talent, diverse matchups, and fresh rivalries. With eight total teams planned for the league, we’re kicking off work for a new hybrid partnership plus promotion/relegation league model, and will provide details at a later date.
Meanwhile, the first lineup of guest teams competing in the league next year will be determined by the results of the 2024 PCS and VCS Summer Split Playoffs. This gives each team participating in the 2024 Summer Split of VCS, PCS, LJL, and LCO a chance to secure their spot in the new league. For future seasons, when the promotion/relegation league model is in effect, guest teams will have the opportunity to get promoted from their respective domestic leagues.
Competitive merit has always been an integral part of success for teams within APAC, and we look forward to using it as both the recruitment foundation of the inaugural year as well as a way to ensure dynamic competition, diverse representation, and an opportunity to give wider access to the new League across the APAC ecosystem.
International Event Slots
With a potential move to five total regions (Americas, LEC, LCK, LPL, and APAC), we’re taking a fresh look at our division of berths at our international events. Each region would have one slot at our new event (5 total teams), two slots at MSI (10 total teams), and three slots at Worlds. In addition, the MSI Champion and the second best-performing region would continue to earn additional Worlds slots for their leagues, bringing the total number of teams at Worlds to 17. Worlds 2025 would feature Play-Ins as a single Best-of-5 match, with the winner joining the other 15 qualified teams directly in the Swiss stage.
Trade-Offs
We believe strongly that the future we’re building towards will be a better one for fans, pros, and teams. The sport will be more streamlined and easy to follow, have more exciting events, and track toward financial sustainability including better support through our Global Revenue Pool (GRP). That said, it’s important to acknowledge that these changes came with us making deliberate trade-offs to be able to achieve this future.
Our proposal does reduce the number of teams within our Tier-1 ecosystem. Simply put, we have too many teams in Tier-1 to support sustainably. By reducing the number of teams, we’ll be able to focus support from the GRP by ensuring revenues are distributed among fewer teams, thereby increasing revenue per team. This should also help concentrate player talent, making it easier for fans to follow a streamlined ecosystem, and ultimately create more high-quality matches worth your time.
Building Towards a Bright Future
LoL Esports is experiencing several positive, momentum-building trends. Recent changes to our international event formats have created higher stakes and better cross-regional matchups, and they’ve clearly been well-received by our players and fans, as evidenced by the viewership increases and sentiment research from Worlds 2023 and MSI 2024.
We’re also pushing the boundaries of LoL Esports by developing innovative strategies that integrate entertainment, partners, and League of Legends, giving fans new ways to engage with our sport. Examples include co-streaming, Worlds Fan Fest, Hall of Legends, and more.
We believe changes outlined here will result in a more competitive and entertaining sport for fans and a more sustainable business model for our teams and Riot Games. We expect it’ll continue to provide us with unforgettable, epic moments as well. It will take time to prove these changes work, and we’ll closely monitor their impact and adjust where we feel it can be beneficial.
Thank you to all of our fans, pro players, and teams around the World. We look forward to seeing your feedback.
