After over a decade of two international events highlighting the professional League of Legends circuit, Riot Games might be introducing a new tournament to test the best teams in the world.
Riot is reportedly adding a third major international event to League‘s competitive circuit in 2025, hosted between the Winter Split and Spring Split, according to esports journalist Alejandro Gomis. The location, format, and name of the tournament have not been revealed yet, but one team per major region will reportedly be invited to this event. It’s unknown if minor region teams will be invited to this event, but it’s “likely” that they will attend as well, according to the report.
Since this unnamed event will reportedly be taking place between the first two splits of the year, fans may finally get the chance to watch cross-regional play as early as March 2025. This does, however, suggest that the remainder of the competitive calendar will be pushed back to accommodate for the new event, meaning the Mid-Season Invitational would likely take place later, along with the start dates for the following splits in most regions around the world.
A new event could also mean major shifts in the format across the globe due to a necessary path to qualification for this event. Other leagues, such as the LCS, LCK, and LPL, might need to adopt a three-split format to accommodate the new event and the clear scheduling conflict it will have with a traditional Spring-Summer format.
There have already been big changes in the competitive League format happening around the world in recent years, such as the LEC swapping to a three-split format for 2023 and the LCS finally switching back to best-of-three series for regular season action in the 2024 Summer Split. We could also see significant moves for the rest of the major regions as the year moves forward, but no news on this has surfaced just yet.
Riot confirmed, according to Gomis, that there will be an update on the competitive schedule for 2025 in June, so League fans may only have to wait until the summer for confirmation on this new event.
