LoL esports 2025 schedule: all new changes (2024)

LoL Esports 2025 year will bring huge changes to the biggest esport in the world, with new looks for domestic and international competition.

Implementing new draft systems, mergers of domestic leagues and a new international competition, Riot Games promises 2025 will change the face of competitive League of Legends.

LoL Esports 2025 new international event

After a decade of stubborn refusal, Riot Games has finally conceded that international play is the best for LoL esports.

As rumored, there will be an additional international tournament to fill out the year. This as-of-yet unnamed tournament will take place between early in the year roughly around late February. It features a domestic stage to determine one representative from each of the new five regions (explained below).

The five qualified teams will compete in a round robin of international play, with the top four moving on into a bracket. This smaller six-day international tournament will be sate appetites early in the year, before the big events of MSI and Worlds.

This tournament will also feature Fearless Draft. Currently in experimentation in various leagues around the world, Fearless Draft is a mode that applies to best-of series by limiting a team’s ability to pick a champion more than once over the course of a series.

The exact implementation is unknown. There are some variants of Fearless Draft. For example, the LPL in China currently uses a model where a team’s pick only affects their team, so if Team A picks Lucian they cannot pick Lucian again. However, another model means that if Team A picks Lucian, neither Team A nor Team B can pick Lucian.

While the intent is to increase champion pick diversity in pro play, there must be caution. For example, Team B might choose to sabotage Team A by picking five mid lane champions (with the intention of losing that game in the series) solely to limit Team A’s mid laner later in the series. This would be a worse viewing experience.

New Splits and Schedule

Related to the new event, all regions will implement a new schedule. Instead of the current Spring/Summer dual splits employed by every major region except LEC, all regions will now adopt the LEC three-split-plus-championship schedule.

For the LoL esports 2025 schedule, the domestic winner of Split 1 will qualify for the new international tournament. Then after Split 2, the top two from each region qualify for MSI. Finally, Split 3 has a domestic championship which sends at least three teams to Worlds.

LoL Esports 2025 combines for new Americas region

For the 2025 season, Riot Games is combining the LCS, CBLOL and LLA into a single Americas league, divided into a North and South conference.

The North and South conferences will each retain six teams from the LCS and CBLOL franchised teams respectively, and then add one LLA team each. Finally, the North and South conferences will have a “Guest” team spot which is subject to a promotion/relegation system. This “Guest” slot will feature a team from the Tier 2 system. In total, this brings the North and South conferences to eight teams each.

Although combined into one Americas region for the sake of competition, in practice the dual conferences are given higher importance. For example, the MSI and Worlds representatives for Americas will guarantee one team from each region.

This format change is likely to capitalize on the ever-growing popularity of the CBLOL and invigorate the ailing LCS/LLA regions.

In a similar fashion, the VCS, PCS, LJL and LCO combines into a single APAC region ecosystem. This modifies the global LoL esports landscape for 2025 into five regions: Americas, EMEA, China, Korea, and APAC.

Each region gets one representative at the new tournament, two at MSI, and three at Worlds. An additional Worlds slot is granted to the top two regions at MSI, for a total of 17 teams at Worlds. A single best-of-five qualifier will replace the Play-Ins stage to bring the Worlds teams down to 16 for its Swiss Stage.

Currently, Riot Games has not explained how they will determine the two Play-Ins teams.