Longtime Dota 2 tournament organizer ESL is updating its tournament structure for the upcoming 2025-2026 season and beyond, with comprehensive changes to how each of its competitions work throughout the year. ESL announced its intentions of revising the ESL Pro Tour (EPT) today, through a press release posted on their official website.
In the announcement, ESL details how the next EPT season will differ from how it’s been over the last two seasons, including the current 2024-2025 split.
Compressed Calendar
First and foremost, the EPT calendar is shrinking — with only a single ESL One branded tournament in spring serving as the “flagship event” of the season. This cuts the number of ESL One events in the season in half, as the current season and the one preceding it had both winter and spring ESL One tours. For example, this season had ESL One Bangkok in December 2024, followed by ESL One Raleigh in April 2025.
To compensate for the loss of one of these LANs, the lone ESL One event in the 2025-2026 EPT season will feature 16 teams, up from 12 as in previous editions. In turn, the group stage will go up to two groups of eight squads each, in order to accommodate the larger field. The rest of the format will remain as is.
Unfortunately for Dota 2 fans outside of Europe, this means that opportunities to attend ESL One events will no longer be there. Definitely sad news especially after the series finally returned to North America with ESL One Raleigh, only for ESL to pull the plug on hosting in-person tournaments in other regions. The same presumably goes for Southeast Asia, which enjoyed ESL One Bangkok last year.
Dream On
As for DreamLeague, ESL’s online tournament brand will still run three times throughout the upcoming season. However, each edition will have vastly different formats, in a bid to spice things up. DreamLeague Season 27, set to take place this December, will include a whopping 24 teams this time around — a huge number even compared to the 16 squads in previous iterations.
We're making major changes to the #ESLProTour for the 2025/26 Season and onwards.
Find out more 👇 https://t.co/BvFWdHULg4
— ESL Dota2 (@ESLDota2) July 3, 2025
It’ll also feature a Swiss group stage rather than the two-phase style that DreamLeague took on this EPT season, which means that every match apart from the grand final will be a best-of-three affair. Season 28 will revert to the classic 16 team field, though, and ostensibly the two-phase group stage we’ve come to know.
Season 29, meanwhile, will be quite the departure in this regard. There will only be a single group of 12 teams in this one, and no best-of-one matches. The group stage will be round robin, with four teams eliminated off the jump for an eight-squad bracket shootout.
Something for Everybody
The fun doesn’t stop there, because ESL is also committing to supporting the tier 2 Dota scene with a dedicated set of events, entitled DreamLeague Division 2. Details about the new venture are scarce at the moment, but what we do know so far is that there will be four tournaments under this umbrella, with a combined prize pool of $200,000.
ESL missed us so much they made DreamLeague Division 2 🫰 https://t.co/PxCszEz2jC
— OG (@OGesports) July 3, 2025
Also, DreamLeague Division 2 will funnel the best performers directly into the rest of the EPT, serving both as a way for less accomplished players to earn money playing Dota and as proving grounds for those looking to really hit the big leagues. Division 2 will however only host tournaments in Europe much like ESL One, though this is understandable as they will very likely be held online.
Given the discontinuation of the Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) and its regional leagues by Valve in 2023, this is a very welcome sight in my opinion. Dota 2 as an esport has always been very top-heavy, especially back in the days when The International had eye-watering prize pools of up to $40 million and change. Giving lesser known talents the chance to learn, grow, and become the next generation of Dota 2 pros is always a good idea in my book.
ESL will announce more details on the matter later this year — “as the 2025-2026 season approaches”, according to them.
Where’s the World Cup?
Curiously, the press release makes no mention of the Esports World Cup (EWC) — the very culminating event that the EPT leaderboard is even there for. As it stands, the ESL Pro Tour is chiefly responsible for determining which teams get invited directly to the EWC Dota 2 tournament, though it does still feature regional qualifiers as a sort of last chance for clubs to get in.
Weirdly enough, ESL didn’t touch upon this at all in the announcement. They did refer to the aforementioned leaderboard in their introduction to the changes to the EPT itself, but no direct references to the EWC were made in the post. Of course, it’s already a foregone conclusion that Dota will be featured in next year’s EWC, but I still think they’re remiss to not even talk about it in passing here.
With one fewer ESL One event, this presumably means that there will be fewer EPT points up for grabs as well, but it’s entirely possible that the organizers will adjust the amount on offer accordingly.
