Inside Riot’s Esports Vision: Chris Greeley on What Comes Next for LoL Esports

Prior to the League of Legends Worlds Finals in Chengdu, we had a great chat with the Global Head of League of Legends Esports, Chris Greeley, to talk about the current trends and evolution of the LoL Esports ecosystem, including First Stand, the promotion/relegation model in regional leagues, Fearless Draft, and why Worlds 2026 will only have two venues next year in North America.

Davide: First of all, welcome. I wanted to first talk about 2025 as an esports season.

What were the biggest takeaways from the three-split structure being applied to all regional leagues? And did the three-season split achieve what you guys set in terms of goals?

Chris Greeley: Yeah, I think the biggest takeaway was we maybe in places tried to get a little bit too cute with our formats. I think some actually landed really well. The LCK format this year was fantastic, from the LCK cup into the combined split.

I spent a lot of time talking to the teams in the LEC and the LTA about the way their formats landed and the pro player and fan feedback we saw… We’re really happy with where they landed for next year. So overall, I think we’re happy with the three split structure. It allowed us to open up a third international event with First Stand, which we’re continuing to iterate on.

I thought the competition was good across all three splits; it gave us great stories. It was great to see some teams peak early and some teams come back late in the season. I thought it gave us another story beat with a third international event. So overall, I think we’re feeling good.

First Stand in 2025 and going into 2026

Davide: About the way First Stand landed, what were potentially some of the challenges you guys faced while setting up and designing the whole tournament? What were some of the learnings that you guys picked up this year?

Chris Greeley: Yeah, I mean, we started off with this design of like ‘All right, we’re going to have every region send one team to first stand, two teams to MSI and three teams to world’. And on a whiteboard, it’s like a very pretty narrative arc for us.

As we got into it and we were experiencing First Stand, we realized that fans don’t actually care about our pretty narrative arc, they just want a good event. It was hard to have a great event with only five teams and only a week. I really enjoyed First Stand. I thought there were some great stories. I thought the Oyster story no one expected, right, and seeing their performance was awesome. I think they picked up a lot of fans.

I thought KC sort of falling off and then the resurgence was such a good story for both that fan base and the region with Caliste. So I thought there was a lot of good stuff there.

But it’s scary to put out a new event. Fans have such high expectations for our competitions and you really don’t want to get it wrong. So we took a lot of feedback from it, including from LCK fans who were like, hey, this was kind of boring to watch because our team was too good and went back to the drawing board to figure out, all right, how do we don’t want it to feel like a bad version of MSI. How do we create this event that feels like its own thing, can stand on its own, but is still really entertaining for fans to watch and still feels like something pros want to attend? Because the last thing you want is an event where pros are like, ‘Well, why would I want to? I don’t want to travel for this thing. I’d rather not win’.

So I think we have got a bunch of, I think, good developments for First Stand for next year in Brazil, and we’re just going to keep iterating on it and listening to fan feedback and seeing what feels good and what doesn’t, so that ultimately we can get it into a good spot. I don’t think 2026 is First Stand’s final form, but I do think it’ll be a good step on the road to figuring out what that final form looks like.

Davide: There are two things I wanted to talk about First Stand. There was a scheduling issue that was a little bit too narrow. Some of the leagues struggle because they had to, like, basically rush after their [first split]. And then obviously the second thing is about the regions. So, obviously, we have eight teams next year.

Instead of giving the extra slots to the LPL and the LCK, are there considerations being made as to whether other leagues will get more slots?

Chris Greeley: Yeah, we’ve talked about a lot of ways that those slots could ultimately get handed out. We looked at a couple of different things, right? It was the top two performing teams at Worlds who won other international events. Every metric we had, we looked at it and we’re like, well, it’s just the LCK and LPL, so let’s not lock ourselves into a metric… Let’s see how this feels, right?

If it feels good with eight teams and two from two different regions, we can kind of figure out what the qualification looks like. And if we do it and we realize this didn’t work or it wasn’t fun, we don’t have to worry about it because we’re not just going to iterate again. We’re going to jump in, see how it feels this year. Hopefully good, but I guess we’ll see.

#FST2026 is coming to São Paulo! 🇧🇷 pic.twitter.com/IQGneCCWpA

— LoL Esports (@lolesports) November 7, 2025

The scheduling thing was a tough transition for us to go from two splits to three splits. We spent a lot of time talking to the regions about their formats and trying to get them to a place where it didn’t feel like we were just taking the old format and trying to run it faster three times. And some of that, like I said with Korea, worked really well. Some of it in other places we tried to be experimental and didn’t like the way it felt.

I think next year it’s still a tight schedule, you know, going from splits into international events and back. We still have, we still try to carve out a little bit of space for EWC. There are some other third-party events you’ll see in the calendar next year towards the end. And we have, you know, Asian Games next year, which is what I was referring to, plus there’s always Demacia cup, and you know, some of the things that come out from sponsors. Red Bull always throws a great event in the off season. We had the Asian Invitational this year that I think we’re going to look to run back next year as well… we’re still talking through that. So I think it’s always going to be a packed calendar. It’s just a matter of figuring out some of those scheduling and logistics pieces.

Asia Invitational and the opportunity of having more cross-regional competitions

Davide: You mentioned Asia Invitational. We saw that it turned out to be very interesting. We saw a lot of special and unconventional matchups. And also the formatting was super great… The grasshopper and stuff like that really stood out for me.

Are there plans, I guess, to bring more cross-regional competitions in the future that are kind of closer to the Asian Invitational, but include other regions as well?

Chris Greeley: Yeah, definitely. I think we started talking about what turned into the Asian Invitational during First Stand this year when we sat down as a leadership team to figure out where we wanted things to go.

It was this idea that you have teams in every region who go to every international event, or almost every international event. And then you’ve got a group of teams in the middle who are trying and who sort of haven’t cracked through, or they crack through and then they don’t make it back the next year. So we have all these team brands and all of these player stories that we’re just not getting to see… What would it look like if we were able to do that?

And we had this concept of a tournament that was just everybody who didn’t make it to Worlds. So as a proof of concept, we ran it this year with teams from the LCK, LPL, and LCP. We would love it to be bigger; we’d love to include all regions. It was a third-party-run tournament this year, so there are some hurdles there. But whether it’s expanding that tournament or figuring out something where we can bring in the other regions, I think it would be a great opportunity for those teams and players.

I loved watching the Asian Invitational, and I thought it was super entertaining. You get to see a lot of matchups you would otherwise never see. And that stuff pays dividends in the long term.

If those teams improve and wind up on a world stage, you now have storylines that can go back. You know, remember when these two played at the Asian Invitational three years ago? Now look at them. They’re on a world stage playing against each other. That’s really rich storytelling for us. So we’d love to continue to foster those kinds of opportunities.

Promotion/Relegation Model in LoL Esports

Davide: Speaking of region, regional leagues and regions as a whole, we saw the 2025 season come up with LCP and LTA, and the whole concept of bringing more guest slots and teams from, similar to the VALORANT model, which brings teams from Ascension into the Tier one competition. How do you see the system for league evolve over the years, because obviously there’s always been the talk of franchising being involved, that being a big factor in how the whole ecosystem is set.

Is Riot’s vision planning on bringing more [teams], making the Tier one competition more open?

Chris Greeley: I don’t think we want to move too far from where we are now. I think the split one in the LEC next year will be like sort of an interesting test of what the competition looks like, how fans react to it. You know, I know there’s been some pushback from fans and from LEC teams, you know, as we’ve had those conversations. So we don’t want to dive in too far too fast.

I think it’s an interesting model in the LCS and CBLOL, where we have those promotion and relegation slots back, but we spent a lot of time talking to those team owners to make sure that they still, you know, understand that they’re valued partners and we want to treat them that way. So we’re, you know, it’s a little bit different in every region.

I think access to competition is a good thing. Tier two is a problem we haven’t fully figured out. It’s like, still very much a developing area. This is one way that I think tier two gets a boost… You know, the ERL system in EMEA is just so good and those rivalries are deep and the competition is really exciting, but we haven’t been able to manufacture that in North America.

So I think promotion, relegation there gives us some opportunities we otherwise wouldn’t have to continue to keep teams interested and invested in the Tier 2 system. But at the end of the day, there has to be some payoff for them. There’s not a lot of sponsor money that flows into Tier 2, and we’re not providing subsidies at that level either.

So we have to figure out something, a model at that level that feels more sustainable long term, so people don’t feel like they just have to come in and take a bet on, like, ‘Oh, I hope we have a good year and we can make it to the LCS, because then we’ll be okay. But if we don’t, then what?’ That’s not sustainable either.

Fearless Draft

Davide: Moving on to Fearless Draft, we saw that it’s been confirmed that it’s coming back next year. Community response has been overwhelmingly positive. I wanted to ask you two things. The first is if you guys had the chance to talk to teams and players, and if you were able to share with us what their feedback was on the format.

And then, do you see an evolution of that Fearless Draft? Because during this year, some creators, including LS, have been talking about the Ironman format.

Do you think that could potentially be another thing that will be brought in the near future?

Chris: Yeah. Feedback from pros and teams was good. If it wasn’t… these were the conversations we were having back in split 1. If the feedback wasn’t overwhelmingly positive, we wouldn’t have kept it for the whole year. Because at the beginning of the year, we made a promise to teams that this was one split, one international event.

And then we would see how it went at some point in the future. So to go back on that really required a lot, and teams, for the most part, really enjoyed it.

I think the only real complaint we had from some teams was that we didn’t build a roster based on fearless. So [some teams] may have taken a player who has a shallower champion pool, knowing that we just wouldn’t be very good in split 1, but now that it’s the full year, there’s only so much you can do about that. I think overwhelmingly the community wanted it.
Pro players enjoyed it. I think they got the opportunity to be more creative. I don’t know if we would have seen Game 5 mundo without Fearless and all the great memes that’s brought up. That stuff’s all been great.

We’ve definitely seen the conversations on adjustments to Fearless. I don’t love Ironman for a best-of-five. I actually think it’s super interesting for a best-of-three because it puts a best-of-three in the same position that you’d have in a best-of-five. Feedback from teams and pros hasn’t been overwhelming about that.

I think it creates a lot of constraints. So we’re focused on a couple of other minor changes, not to Fearless, but overall that we’re going to see if we can roll out in time for the season, and we will talk about those at season start.

I think we’ll go back to experimenting with Fearless back in Tier 2 the same way we did originally to get Fearless up and running. We did try a lot of different variations in Tier 2 and wound up sort of landing on the ones that felt best and we had the best reactions to. I think Fearless is awesome. The last thing we want to do is screw it up by trying to over-engineer it.

We want everything to feel competitive but also be entertaining at the end of the day. So if we can make some adjustments and continue to develop it, we’re certainly going to.

GRP and the financial sustainability in LoL Esports

Davide: Switching gears to the, I guess, business, financial side of things, the global revenue pool, the GRP, was introduced this year. I know you cannot go into details, but can you share with us anything about the early results that you saw this year?

What was the impact like for both teams and bells for players this year?

Chris Greeley: Yeah, so you know, we’re on track to hit the forecast that we shared with teams at the beginning of the year.

It’s funny because people were asking this question at MSI, and I was like, well, we only sold one skin so far because it was just the first stand skin at that point. We’re really heavily like sort of backloaded: Hall of Legends, Worlds winner skins, all the worlds stuff.

So all of the results we’ve seen so far have been really positive. I think it’s a good incentive for us too to continue to innovate around the kind of things that we’re attaching to esports and asking fans to buy.

Now that it’s tied more directly to the economic impact on the teams, we are spending a lot more time on how do we innovate in the future to make sure that the things we’re putting out are really interesting to fans. I think the team-designed emotes last year and this year are a good example of that, of places where we said ‘All right, how do we get the teams more involved in the process?’

We’re working on a bunch of stuff for the future, trying to find things that are compelling for fans, feel really good for teams and hopefully can continue to add to the revenue pool.

More Live Esports Events in the future?

Davide: Overall, I wanted to also touch upon revenue diversification because obviously, we saw that live experience, live events like T1 homeground, LEC roadtrips this year were incredibly successful.

Do you think that having more localized events, show matches and stuff like that is a potential way of having more revenue diversification for both teams and Riot Games?

Chris Greeley: Yes. I think it’s a great opportunity for teams to get out like homegrounds roadshows, build fandom, sell merchandise, you know, get fans in the building [and] be able to attach sponsors to it. I think that’s been a great opportunity. We definitely want to continue to do that stuff. It used to be really hard for teams to run even third-party events, right, if they wanted.

We used to have very strict rules on, if you want to do an event with a sponsor, you can, [but] you can’t have another professional team there or you have to do mixed teams. You have to play with, you know, play with fans. We didn’t want to replicate the things we were doing in competition at third party events. We’ve moved really far away from that at this point.

I think we’ve been really encouraging to the teams of if you want to do something cool, let us know what it is and how we can help, and let’s figure out ways that we can deliver more to fans. Because ultimately, if you’re restricting a team’s ability to have a show match in the off-season, you’re hurting the team, but you’re also hurting fans, right? Because they don’t have that opportunity.

So we’re trying to find a lot more ways that we can open that stuff up. I think it’s great for everybody involved. Like the roadshows and homeground are a complete win across the board. It’s good for the teams that are running it and the revenue that they can generate.

I think it’s good for Riot because we now have essentially a production partner who’s shouldering a lot of the work for us. And it’s good for fans who get a show delivered to them in a place and at a time where they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to have a live experience, connect with other fans and be able to connect with the pros and teams.

Where LoL Esports is headed

Davide: It’s been 15 years of League of Legends Esports. What are, like, the key goals for the upcoming, I wouldn’t say 15 years, [it’s] probably a little bit too much, but the next three to five years in terms of what we are trying to achieve?

Where are we moving? In what direction are we moving towards?

Chris Greeley: Yeah, I think the homeground and roadtrips are a really good example of our two big goals. We want to meet more fans where they are. We want to do more stuff on the road. We want to do more stuff, big or small, where fans can interact with each other, fans can interact with teams and pros.

You know, right now, if you’re an LCS fan and you don’t want to travel to LA, you don’t get to see any regular-season LCS matches. And there’s just one roadshow, so we want to find ways to change that stuff and get out there more. And then the flip side of that is we have 59 teams across the world.

Some of them are making money, a lot of them aren’t. And we really want a sustainable ecosystem. If teams are making good commercial decisions [and] they’re doing good business, they should be making money.

We want to continue to support them, to open up those revenue streams so that they can not only be profitable, but find more ways that they can connect their team and their players with fans as well.

Worlds 2026 is coming with only two venues

Davide: It was announced that Worlds will be going to North America next year in Texas and NYC. What was the rationale behind choosing two cities as the hosting venues for the event?

#Worlds2026 is coming to Allen, TX and New York City! 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/EEl6jrJQUC

— LoL Esports (@lolesports) November 7, 2025

Usually, we’re used to having at least three of them. We had them three this year in China. We had them three last year in Europe. And then we also had four of them in Worlds 2022.

What was the decision behind that as well?

Chris Greeley: Yeah, so the alternative would have been LA to Texas to New York.

And in LA, we would have been in the Riot Games arena and played on campus at Riot for all of play-ins in Swiss, which is what we did when we were in Europe… Berlin wound up being the first city, where we saw a lot of feedback from fans that it made Swiss feel too small.

I think Swiss felt great. This year in Beijing, we had 1500 people in the JDG arena. I think we want to continue to find ways we can to have more fans in the building. Swiss, to me, is one of the most exciting parts of Worlds, and we want to get as many people in as we can to watch it. So we had the opportunity in Texas to extend that show in a way that worked within our logistics and our budget.

So rather than having three cities for the sake of having three cities and doing a smaller show for Swiss, we decided to move everything into Texas and then our finals in New York. But in Worlds 2027, we’re still aiming for the same model as this year, back to three cities. But, you know, we wanted to prioritize next year [and] make sure that we just had Swiss in a bigger venue.

I have one last question. Is there any player that stood out really like stood out for you a lot this Worlds?

Chris Greeley: I think Guma’s (Gumayusi) been amazing. You know, I think he’s carried a lot of the matches pretty hard. It’s really hard to ignore Faker. He’s just so good. So I think like those have been the standouts for me on T1, like BDD and like watching him play, you know, throughout quarters and semis has been really exciting too. I’m so curious as to how today is going to go, and really looking forward to seeing it all resolve perfectly.

Davide: Thank you a lot, Chris. I guess it was wonderful talking to you.