Note at 11:20 AM Pacific: Some portions of this article have been edited based on clarifications received from LCS staff.
The LCS is announcing a complete overhaul of the Academy and amateur competitive format, introducing sweeping changes that include heavy emphasis on tournament-style play, many opportunities for Academy and amateur teams to compete against each other, and extended protections and contracting guidelines to give LCS teams more incentive to invest in developing talent beyond the Academy level.
Overall, this structure is an enormous improvement and should bring many different benefits into the scene, even if it’s not perfect in some of the fine details.
You can read the complete announcement on the LoL esports website, or keep scrolling here for analysis of the key points and how they will affect and incentivize both LCS and amateur organizations.
Competitive Format
The format is a little complex, so you might have to go through it a few times to grasp the nuances.
LCS infographic illustrating the new Academy/amateur format for Spring 2021
Effectively, there is now a half-length Academy regular season in January/February, played alongside a series of “Tier 2” amateur tournaments (which the Academy teams are allowed to play in, up to 5 Academy teams per tournament).
Based on Academy season results, 6 teams are qualified into a capstone “Proving Grounds” tournament in March/April, while the other 4 Academy teams have to play their way through some “Tier 1” amateur tournaments to get into Proving Grounds.
Amateur teams that earn enough points from the Tier 2 tournaments will qualify into the Tier 1 tournament as well, and can try to qualify into Proving Grounds. There will be three Tier 1 tournaments during late February and early March, with the first two qualifying 4 teams each into Proving Grounds, and the last one qualifying a final 2 teams.
The Proving Grounds tournament will feature 16 teams who qualified via all these methods, and it will replace the Academy playoffs as the climactic event of the “split”.
Presumably, the summer structure will mirror spring, but starting in June, but this hasn’t been specified. And there’s no word on what will happen after August/September once the summer circuit has wrapped up.
Amateur Org. Incentivization
Amateur orgs are going to see a couple of big opportunities come out of this new format.
More Eyeballs
First, and most obviously, amateur teams will get more time in the spotlight as they compete against Academy teams in tournaments and try to earn the prestige that would come with beating them. There will be more tournaments, presumably with increased production value, and they’ll be playing against well-known brands and, if history is any indication, some very popular players on the Academy teams, as well.
One of the biggest struggles amateur LoL in NA has faced is the difficulty in getting people to watch and be excited about their competitions. This new structure will definitely help on that front.
Contracting Protections
Second, amateur teams can now benefit from identifying and developing talented players, by signing them to contracts and then selling those contracts to an LCS team during the year. Before now, there were no protections against an LCS team approaching a player from an amateur team and making them an offer, so the amateur teams could lose their best players without compensation.
It will still be pretty easy for LCS teams to pull talent out of amateur without having the players held up for ransom, though. Riot’s new rules specify the following about contract lengths with players in amateur:
Amateur team contracts may not be longer than one year, and may be amended (but not renewed or extended). Amateur team contracts must end before free agency to allow amateur players an opportunity to test the market and potentially find a spot with an Academy or LCS team.
I wasn’t sure whether this meant that both amateur and LCS teams could not sign players to their amateur teams for longer than a one-year contract, or whether it only applied to amateur organizations like Radiance or Zenith. On following up with Riot, I received clarification that it applies to all amateur contracts.
I understand why it’s necessary to limit amateur team contracts to one year and end them all before free agency, but it does hurt the incentive structure for orgs that want to invest into running amateur teams. If an amateur team can’t develop a player fast enough during the year to sell them to an LCS org before the season’s end, then the LCS teams can simply wait for offseason and pick up whoever they want without any added cost. And from the LCS team side, if they don’t promote their amateur players to Academy and re-sign them before the roster lock deadline, they can lose the players they have invested into, without compensation.
If LCS teams do want to sign amateur players mid-year to gain “control” of them, that will disrupt team synergy on both ends of the transaction, assuming the LCS team wants the player they’ve acquired to keep competing (which they really should). That’s not great for the in-game product, and it can lead to confusion for viewers if they only tune in occasionally and see big shifts in rosters, as a side effect.
In practice, all of this won’t really be different from what happens now, and it’s still better for amateur orgs than it was before. Also, almost as a footnote, the LCS press release mentions that there will be some form of incentive for amateur orgs if their players move up to Academy and LCS, but no specifics are provided. The quote is:
We’ve also put in place a system that will be used to compensate amateur teams for developing talent signed at the Academy and LCS levels. This will help ensure the ecosystem provides proper incentives for scouting talent and for the work that goes into making a player ready to make the jump to professional play.
I don’t know what this means, and no further details are provided, but at least this is encouraging in the sense that Riot recognized the “gap” in the system for the amateur teams and intends to try to fill it somehow.
There are more implications to think through and we’ll have to see how much the LCS teams capitalize on these opportunities, but I’m encouraged by what we’re seeing here and I think it will be a good shot in the arm and two steps forward for an NA talent development ecosystem that has desperately needed something to get things kickstarted.