Image: Riot Games
League of Legends will be getting a new season-start tournament starting next year.
The League of Legends (LoL) esports landscape will be getting a massive shakeup in 2025 with the addition of a third international event and an accompanying split at the start of the year.
This as-yet unnamed event, which we will call the season-start tournament for now, will join the Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) and the World Championship in LoL’s annual slate of major international tournaments.
Aside from giving fans another big yearly event to look forward to, LoL’s new season-start tournament will also give the top teams from each regional league more chances to face their counterparts in other regions. This should help push the scene’s competitive level forward as lesser regions will be getting more reps against stronger competitors.
What to expect from LoL's new international event
LoL’s new season-start tournament will take place in March and feature five teams from the regional leagues in South Korea, China, EMEA, as well as the new multi-regional leagues in the Americas and APAC coming next year.
The event will start with regional play, where each of the five regions will determine their respective representatives. The six-day tournament proper will then begin with a round-robin format where every region will play every other region, with the Top 4 teams advancing to a playoff bracket.
In addition, Riot will be looking to use the season-start tournament as a testing ground for different competitive formats. The first innovation the publisher will be testing out is the new “Fearless Draft” during the regional and international rounds of the new tournament.
Fearless Draft will spice up the competition by effectively banning champions that were picked in prior games during a match. This should help bring more variety to the amount of champions being picked in pro play and introduce a more evolving metagame over the course of a tournament.
The results of the season-start tournament will also be used to determine seeding in the MSI. However, due to the expected changes being brought to the season-start tournament year-on-year, it will not provide automatic qualification to the MSI for the winning team.
The introduction of the season-start tournament will also introduce refinements to LoL’s seasonal esports format. As mentioned previously, the season-start tournament will be preceded by its own split that will determine qualification for it.
A second split will follow that will determine qualification for the MSI, which has been moved to July in order to accommodate the new season-start tournament. The third and final split of the season will then crown one seasonal champion for each region and determine qualification for Worlds.
"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," Riot Games said in a press release.
Aside from the introduction of the new season-start tournament, another major update to the LoL esports format in 2025 will be the introduction of new multi-regional leagues in the Americas and APAC regions.
