Riot Games has announced its plans to consolidate the three Americas leagues, CBLoL, LLA, and LCS into one mega league, and the Brazilian community isn’t happy about their league being dissolved.
On June 11, Riot revealed its plans to merge the LCS, CBLoL, and LLA into a pan-America league similar to how it has set up its North American Valorant competition, VCT Americas.
The setup is different than the FPS league, however, as the plan is to host north and south conferences with eight teams in both. Notably, the conferences will keep six existing partnered teams from both the LCS and CBLoL, meaning two LCS teams and four Brazilian teams would be cut from the competition.
The LLA has it even worse, with only two existing teams joining the new mega league, one in the north conference and one in the south.
League of Legends’ esports community has been rocked by the news, as the changes signal a massive shift in the competitive ecosystem.
However, the Brazilian community doesn’t seem open to the change and is angry their league will soon be sacrificed for the sake of its floundering North American counterpart.
Replies to the massive update on social media have multiple fans saying, “Brazil doesn’t need LCS.” Photos of the LCS logo have been crossed out, as well.
“They want to convince me that killing our identity, extinguishing the CBLoL name, deleting 4 teams from our history, leaving a lot of professionals unemployed, devaluing the title with the implementation of 3 splits, increasing the chance of losing a good player to the NA is a GOOD THING,” Hugo Augusto ‘Galfi’ Garcia, a Brazilian coach said on social media via machine translation.
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While LCS viewership has continuously dropped for years, CBLoL has been one of the fastest-growing leagues in the world, outpacing its North American counterpart according to Esports Charts.
“What a shame, Riot will tell 4 CBLOL teams to leave, in a league on the rise to try to save the LCS. I find this very disrespectful towards Brazilian fans, being used to save the LCS. Now just hope it works,” former LCS and CBLoL player Loïc ‘toucouille’ Dubois said.
Freelance esports host and frequent LEC contributor Eefje ‘sjokz’ Depoortere pointed out that the Brazilian league has found this growth despite a lack of major tournament success, something the LCS has not managed to find.
Popular League esports streamer Marc Robert ‘Caedrel’ Lamont echoed this sentiment on social media.
“It is sad to see LCS failure impact and really hurt the CBLOL with this new change. Brazilian league was thriving and they’ve now just been pulled down out of no fault of their own,” Lamont said.
Riot have yet to respond to the outcry from fans following their announcement.
