The long-hinted merger for American League of Legends has come at last, with Riot Games today confirming the LCS, CBLOL, and LLA competitions will soon be consolidated into a new dual-conference Americas League.
The league will be split into two conferences—North America and South America—with the LCS and CBLOL teams taking part in each separately—not too dissimilar to how the leagues are split currently. The LLA, however, will lose its classification as a tiered region in the ecosystem and will be given a slot in each of the Americas conferences.
The merger, unveiled in a Riot Dev Update on June 11, is part of Riot’s grander plan to simplify its tier-one ecosystem across League esports. The final result will see top-tier competition in the Americas mimic that of sister title VALORANT, with its American Champions Tour made up of players and squads based in both continents.
It’s just one of multiple large mergers made ahead of the 2025 League season, with Asian subregions outside of China’s LPL and Korea’s LCK coming together next year. The American and Pacific regions will follow in the footsteps of Europe and the Middle East, which saw its subregions consolidated in 2022.
This means professional teams from Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, Japan, Vietnam, and Oceania will all compete in a new multi-region league.
How this will impact each new-look league when it comes to each’s international representatives remains to be seen. But Online Esports expects the Americas competition to retain three candidates for the World Championship and potentially even expand to as many as five slots—basically taking over the current Brazil and Latin America seeds.
The APAC division could inherit all four qualification slots from Asia-Pacific’s already semi-combined PCS (two) and Vietnam’s VCS (two). But Riot will more likely move some of those slots to major regions.
Several pundits hinted at the news on June 10. Former League coach and analyst LS believes the future of the region is “very good” but added the decision is likely to be polarizing. Cloud9 chief executive Jack Etienne simply tweeted a GIF of his hands up in front of flames.
Exact details, like the effect this merger has on international slots, the future of the LLA, and how the Challenger circuit will be integrated with the new American League were not shared but are expected to be revealed as the summer rolls on.
The 2024 LCS Summer Split begins this Saturday, June 15.
