“Starting a new event is scary”: Head of LoL Esports discusses First Stand, third-party events and Esports Olympics – aboba.ru

Prior to the 2025 World Finals, Riot Games revealed its plans for the League of Legends esports international ecosystem in 2026. 

This included major updates to tournament formats and the continued expansion of global events. 

Alongside these developments, Riot is also exploring third-party international events and potential nation-based tournaments. As such, conversations around the Esports Olympics — and other global collaborations — continue to evolve.

“I actually don’t know what the IOC is thinking about where they want to take Esports in the Esports Olympics going forward,” said Chris Greeley, Head of League of Legends Esports, in an interview with Esports Insider.

He added: “I think nation-based competitions are super interesting. There was a time when I thought it didn’t make a lot of sense, but I’ve come around on it a lot.”

Before the League of Legends World Championship Finals 2025, Greeley sat down with Esports Insider to also discuss the upcoming season’s international structure, including its decision to host Worlds in Texas and New York.

Greeley: So, First Stand next year we’ll have eight teams, so that format will change a little bit. We’re expanding from the five that we ran this year. We’ll be including Brazil independently since CBLOL is back, and we’ll be bringing a second seed from both the LCK and LPL.

The Worlds Finals next year are in New York City — that’s a cool one. We’re going to two cities Worlds next year: we’re going to do Play In, Swiss, Quarters and Semis in Texas. The other option would’ve been to do Play-In/Swiss at the studio in LA, but combining it all into one venue gives us the opportunity to reach more fans, even though we will only be in two cities for ’26.

Greeley: So last time we were in North America was 2022. We did the Play In stage in Mexico City, which was great. Great venue, great fans, and a lot of excitement, which was fantastic. 

That was the same year though that we had also planned to go to Toronto and we had to change at the last minute and move our semifinals to Atlanta, which was a great host city. Very sad for fans in Toronto where we have a lot of players and the real piece there was just logistics and visas and that makes sort of multi-country hopping in the Americas really difficult. 

So there is also a big travel burden on teams if we fly everyone down, for example, to Chile or Brazil and a 13-hour flight to get back up into the US. So we would have to do a sort of full South American Worlds, which could be super interesting. It’s just that logistically we have done so many events in North America sort of all over both Canada, the US and Mexico, that it’s logistically much easier for us. 

Then we have our vendors, and it’s easier from a budget perspective as well. Even though it’s a little bit more expensive to do a show in the US, you sort of know who to call for all the things that you need. We do have great teams on the ground in Brazil and in Latin America, but they’re also much smaller than the teams we have on the ground in the US. That makes the show a little bit more difficult.

But that’s where we have great events, like First Stand, that we’re able to take to Brazil next year, and we’re looking aggressively for more third-party opportunities.

People who want to run events like…I don’t know if you watched any of the Asian Invitational this year? The cricket was awesome, and their opening ceremony. So Asian Invitational was something that we had started talking about back at First Stand when sort of all the regional leads and my team came together to figure out what the future should look like and we thought ‘wouldn’t it be great if we had a tournament where the teams who didn’t qualify for an international event could go and their players get more exposure?’

We get to tell more stories, we create more rivalries. Teams and sponsors get more exposure, fans get more League, which is just a good thing. We are really happy to find partners who are willing to come along with us on that journey and operate the event for us.

So I think we’re looking for more events like that, more opportunities to get more teams from more regions involved. It’s just that if you’re a perennial sixth-place team and you never go to an international event, it’s a much different existence in our ecosystem than if you’re G2 and you’re at every international event. So it’s a good balance for us and one that we really want to strive to be more inbound on.

Greeley: I mean, I’ve certainly heard from fans, and they’ve been very strong and passionate, and I think (LTA South) performance in the LTA finals was definitely understood. But I don’t know if we’re looking to make an immediate change for 2026. It’s something I think we tend to give out international slots over a longer period of time, but it’s something we’re definitely going to keep our eye on. 

We’re excited to make sure that Brazil is at First Stand and that they’re able to continue to send teams and can express that fandom, and we’ll keep watching how all of that evolves as we look at changes for future international events.

Greeley: I think I told you in our last interview that starting a new event is scary, especially a smaller one. It was only seven days, five teams. I think one of the things we heard from fans was that the event felt small and didn’t feel overly competitive. Especially Hanwha Life Esports was in some kind of form, and just ran everybody over at the event. Even Korean fans were like ‘this just isn’t fun to watch.’ But we got amazing stories out of it. 

It was the start of the CTBC Flying Oyster story that we got to follow all year, all the way into quarterfinals last week. I think we got to see a lot from KC, and it was great to see that team. They fell off in the beginning and then had this great resurgence, and they played such a great tournament as well. So I think there were a lot of good things that came out of First Stand. 

Obviously, we tried some things with our HUD that fans didn’t love, but we’ve used that as an opportunity to engage more directly. I think it got much better at MSI. I’ve heard almost no complaints about it at Worlds. I think people like where it has generally landed, and I think the team working on it was really vocal about getting out on social media and just showing some work, and they’re like, ‘do you like this? Do you not like this?’ And those folks have told me they got a lot of really great feedback. From that, First Stand is still somewhere where we want to experiment. 

We will be announcing today that we’re going full Best of Five for First Stand next year. So we’ll get more games, which I think will be great. We obviously have more teams now, so the format will have to change a little bit. We’ll talk about that a little bit at season start, but we talk about trying new or bigger things for First Stand since it’s a place we often start. It’s like: ‘well, what if we took First Stand and did X?’ So we’ve got some cool stuff sort of on the whiteboard for 2027. Don’t know if we’re going to be able to kind of pull it all off, but it’s big and ambitious, and I think fans will love it. But going to, I don’t know if we’re actually going to be able to deliver it. 

So we like where it landed. We hope fans enjoy it more this year than they did last year, and that’s sort of the goal every year. MSI this year broke all of our viewership records for the rest of the world. We saw a lot of really good feedback on the way that the format has evolved, and the competitiveness has evolved. We want to keep kind of hitting that mark for all of our events, but First Stand being so new and so young, we’re just trying to find the right spot for it to fit in the ecosystem and for it to have its own identity going forward.

Greeley: I actually don’t know what the IOC is thinking about where they want to take Esports in the Esports Olympics going forward. 

I’m not sure if there’s someone else at Riot having those conversations, but sort of post the split, it’s just a big question mark for me. I think nation-based competitions are super interesting. There was a time when I thought it didn’t make a lot of sense because you were essentially just in a world where you’re expecting a Korea versus China Final. It would look like the Asian Games, and we already have the Asian Games. And then I went to an EMEA Masters event in the finals in France a couple of years ago and saw the fandom when it was a Spanish team and a French team.

Greeley: Yes, it was. And just the energy in the building, you sort of realise the finals match doesn’t matter. It’s all of the matches in between, which is kind of the way fandom sometimes works at Worlds.

NA and EU fans sometimes live for the NA vs. EU matchup, even if it’s in Swiss and not in the Finals. So being able to maybe lean into some of those rivalries, whether they’re intra-Europe or something like Brazil and Canada, which we find great, and I think the Canada vs US match would also be great. A lot of those players are teammates, so having them play against each other would be interesting. So I’ve come around on it a lot. I just don’t know how that’s going to express itself in League of Legends and where that comes out. 

We’ve talked about everything from Euro Cups to America’s Cups to the full kind of World Cup of League of Legends. We don’t have any; that’s not the plan on the whiteboard, but it is something that we’re continuing to talk about in the background and looking for the right opportunity.

Greeley: We’re adding Brazil to both of them, so well, I guess we’re adding the LCS extra slot back to both of them, so you can take it any way you want. But there’ll be 11 teams at MSI this year. 

So the Play-In will still be four teams, but we’re only going to qualify one out of the Play-In into the bracket. We haven’t worked out seeding yet. That’s going on behind the scenes right now. We’ll have 18 teams at Worlds next year. We’re still working on how that’s going to play out, but the rest of it will stay the same. Best of five double elimination bracket for MSI Swiss into Knockouts for Worlds, but it’s just the usual.

Greeley: No double elimination coming for Worlds.