How the LCS Is Changing in 2025 (Americas League, Split Changes, Rosters)
The heads behind LoL Esports announced the LCS region’s consolidation in the latest Dev Update.
LoL Esports is a dynamic ecosystem that fosters the best pro-talents in League of Legends history. The current structure has had eight international regions for years. But 2025 will introduce major changes to the current landscape, one of which fuses the LCS, CBLoL and LLA (North and South American regions, respectively) into a singular group: the âAmericasâ league.
Follow our LCS guide to know what the Americas region will look like in LoL Esports, the reasons behind the change and the all-new uniform split format every region will follow.
How the LCS Is Changing in 2025
Big changes are coming to the League’s pro scene. In June’s Dev Update video, the President of Riot Esports John Needham and Head of Strategy Chris Greeley dropped the news of a big regional overhaul.
In the Esports section of the video, Needham stated the next phase of their plans for LoL Esports; a unified split format, a third annual championship, and more consolidated structures for APAC and the Americas.
The LCS, CBLoL and LLA CombineÂ
Three large regions in League of Legends Tier 1 play are getting merged to form a singular âAmericasâ region.
âThis should also concentrate player talent into our best teams,â LoL Esports’ President explained, âand improve the overall fan experience by making it easier to follow our sport.â
The team also proposed similar changes for SEA, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Macao, and Oceania to form an âAPACâ region. This mirrors the VALORANT Champions Tour’s model, another Riot-held event that Needham praised for its success.
While these regional changes will lessen the number of participating teams, Riot hopes to build a more robust ecosystem filled with the best of the best teams while having more exciting prize pools.
That said, it’s worth noting that the scene is about to get much smaller.
The Americas Structure in LoL Esports
The Americas region structure will have 16 teams made up of:
An LCS conference with six pre-existing teams
A CBLoL conference with six pre-existing teams
One LLA team for each conference
Another LLA âGuest teamâ for each conference that joins the Tier 2 ecosystem
With eight teams in both conferences, the newly proposed changes to splits will consider both LCS and CBLoL teams when competing for internationals. Here’s how:
Split 1 â Teams compete in their conferences for interregionals, where the top teams qualify for the new global tournament in 2025.
Split 2 â Top team from each conference secures their slot at MSI.
Split 3 â âAmericas Regional Championshipâ (or the season finals). The tournament determines three teams that go to Worlds. At least one team from each conference will participate.
New International Event in 2025
The announcement confirmed that a third global tournament would be added to LoL Esports’ structure.
The proposed event will see the strongest team from each region compete in a Round-robin before entering a Bracket Stage.
League’s new international tournament will take place in March 2025 using a version of Fearless Draft mode which bans previously selected champs.
A New Ecosystem
The 2025 season is set to reduce LEC, LCS, LCK, LLA, LPL, LJL, CBLoL, VCS and PCS regions into five global regions.
LEC
LCK
LPL
APAC
Americas
A new uniform split format will also be applied to make this aspect of League of Legends more digestible for newcomers. While this makes the ecosystem less saturated, it’s needed to make esports sustainable in the long run, which still holds the possibility of more talents joining the Rift.
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Paul started writing game guides and match predictions for ESTNN’s editorial team in 2022. Since then, he’s covered big-ticket esports events and the latest news on tech and AI.
