Chris Greeley: "There's never been a better time to be a League esports fan"
Photo Credit: Riot Games
On the occasion of MSI 2026 in Daejeon, RFT sat down with Chris Greeley, Global Head of LoL Esports at Riot Games. Few people are better placed to answer the questions fans have been arguing about: Is the closed league still the right model? Has the calendar become too crowded? Why can't tier two find its footing.. He talks candidly about self-inflicted wounds, the experiments that worked and the ones Riot had to walk back, the delicate art of changing a 15-year-old esports without breaking it.
What's your day-to-day mission, if you can explain it a bit?
The overall goal is to bring League of Legends esports to fans. That's it in its most compact form. We want a really entertaining broadcast. We want to be a great place for organizations to operate and for pro players to aspire to build their careers with us, and ultimately to deliver an exciting, entertaining, and competitive sport and product to fans.
What has changed the most in your role over the past few years you've been in charge?
From a fan perspective, we've begun to embrace third-party events more. Up until 2017 there was a third-party ecosystem — we had IEM and some other events running. Then in 2017 we closed a lot of that ecosystem off. We went into partnerships in the LCS, the LPL, the LEC, and so on. For a long time we were content to just run everything that touched League esports.
But we've drifted away from that in a couple of ways:
Team Homegrounds (LCK, LPL) and road trips in the LEC
Things like Red Bull League of Its Own lean into creators and streamers — events like what we've seen with Caedrel and Jinxy.
So the biggest thing for us has been figuring out how to open things up. The KeSPA Cup last year had Western teams. So it's about finding more opportunities for third parties to help contribute really amazing experiences for fans and teams.
Do you think that right now the closed league is a brake on the ecosystem's growth, or is it still the right foundation?
It's a model that worked really well in 2017 when we rolled it out. It gave teams the thing they were looking for, which was stability. As we've gone on, the ERLs are a great example of a system that helped develop teams — half the current LEC teams were former ERL teams who bought into the LEC. So the LEC is a pretty good example of a semi-closed ecosystem: it's hard to get in, but the ERL still provides a path, both for players and for team ownership. The LCS has guest slots and promotion/relegation. CBLOL does as well. The LCP does as well.
We're always looking at what the model looks like from a performance perspective.
Are the partners and teams we have now the right ones to be there? Are they delivering the most value and entertainment for fans? Are they in the best position to keep operating?
We made a bunch of changes in the LCS. Not all of them were great. We reduced the league from 10 to 8, then two more teams left, and we opened up guest slots. Knowing what we know now, maybe we'd go back and change some of those decisions. But ultimately we want to keep evaluating each of our regional leagues independently. I don't think you'll ever see us come in and say: 'partnerships are gone everywhere, we're buying everybody out and restarting the ecosystem.'
So you'd say it won't ever happen?
I don't think so. But there's a lot of room between where we are now and a total nuclear reset of the ecosystem.
We're looking at a lot of different things. Even the experiment in the LEC, was super exciting and gave fans a lot to watch. We're going to keep iterating on things like that and find different paths to open up parts of the ecosystem, while still respecting the commitment and investment a lot of teams have made over the past 15 years.
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Has the format become too crowded for teams, and maybe even for the average viewer?
The biggest problem we have is actually discoverability. We had Soop — along with one of the LCK teams and one of our media sponsors — spin up a tournament on about three days' notice. When we realized we had a bunch of teams from the Americas boot-camping, we reached out to all our regional leagues and asked, "Who's not qualified for MSI, who might be in the region and might want to play?" Then we handed that over to Soop, who said, "If you want to run something, we've got time in the calendar, go ahead." Cloud9, FlyQuest, LOS — that kind of stuff is exciting.
Take the Asian Invitational. Last year they had a cricket walking back and forth, they did the whole opening ceremony in hoods and masks. It was super entertaining and delivered something I don't think we're delivering with our international events. You always watch T1 and BLG play, and it's super entertaining, it's the absolute height of League of Legends. But what you're not watching is the number-four LEC team against the number-four LCP team. That stuff also has a place in the ecosystem. It's good for those pro players.
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It shouldn't just be the same 15 to 20 pros every year who get to play on the international stage and get that experience.
We've talked about what it looks like to play more parallel competition, sort of like the English Premier League, which we did this year with the EWC qualifier. We weren't running it, but we were open to it happening. And what does it look like to have more mid-level competition, and how do we find pockets in the calendar where those teams and pros still get to go out and play? So I'd expect the calendar to get more crowded. It's about creating more competition and more content for fans so we don't wind up with "oh, it's three weeks until the next event, I guess I have nothing to watch." How do we take those spaces and fill them with something that's still interesting and productive for fans?
So for the top teams from every region — T1, BLG, G2.. — is the calendar going to stay this crowded, with a lot of competition every year? Would you say that stays the baseline for now?
That would be my guess. But the idea is to find some balance with teams and pros, because even after Worlds ends there are still teams off playing in Red Bull events and doing sponsor obligations. The window for actual vacation has gotten pretty short if you make every international event. So we're trying to find that balance, while also trying not to take our foot off the gas.
Tier two around the world seems to be losing a lot of momentum and lacking a clear direction, to me. Do you share that assessment?
There are some gaps, for sure. I don't know that we've had a clear global answer where we can say, "now we've figured out how to fix tier two." The overall issue with tier two is that it's hard to attract money into that ecosystem. "Why support a tier-two ecosystem when I can support a tier-one ecosystem?" is what we've heard a lot. And the answer isn't just, "all right, let's subsidize everything" — that gets out of hand really quickly, back to how we used to operate. And I don't know that the ecosystem was much better when we were subsidizing.
We're working on a couple of things. There's a Pan-Asian developmental league we're working on that I believe is now playing, called the ADL — the Asian Development League.
We're working on other initiatives around how to get more tier-two teams to play each other internationally. So if we can find ways to mix regionals ecosystems, we think development will increase. And the answer looks different in every region.
The approach we've had in Europe for a long time with the ERL is going pretty well — a lot of players and teams have been able to come up through it. We've seen less success with the tier-two system in North America, for example; we've had some stops and starts. We were hoping promotion/relegation would be more of a solve, but it hasn't been. We have some plans — we've been talking to the team there and working through some things. Overall, we're trying to find a central global strategy that also takes into account how different each of our regions are, and how their developmental paths have grown over 15 years.
At MSI you introduced the right of selection, where the first seed can select both the pick order and the side the team plays on. What's your assessment so far of the right of selection since the start of the year? Are you happy with the new formula you introduced at MSI?
We're pretty happy with the way pick selection and side selection have worked this year. It's added some strategic depth to the game overall. Those are the things we're trying to do. It's really difficult to take a sport that's been around for 15 years and mess with it without it feeling gimmicky. What if you allowed someone to sub a player out in the middle of the game? What if there was a timeout? What if there was a moment where there was no fog of war for 10 seconds and then it came back? Would those make the games more interesting? Probably. But part of that is like releasing a lion on stage to fight a player — it doesn't necessarily increase the competition or make it feel better.
So fearless draft added real competitive depth. Separating pick/ban from side selection added competitive depth. We got good feedback on the coach comps piece. We didn't roll it out to the rest of the world afterward because we're not all convinced it's going to add competitive depth. There's still a lot of work to be done there. We tried it in the LCK Cup [and in the LCP Split 1 & 2]. So we're still collecting feedback and want to keep doing trials on that.
You're not removing the idea of coach comms, though — it's still on the table?
It's still a possibility for the years to come. We haven't thrown it away. Fearless developed for almost two years before it moved into tier one. After talking to a bunch of teams and pros and understanding the landscape, we felt good about letting that one out into the wild. But in other situations we really want to test things and see how they play out. Sometimes you get data back and go, "oh, we messed up here, we need to roll this back." But we do a lot of homework. We spend a lot of time with the game devs and the balance folks. We talk to teams and pros — people who have a much better sense of what it's like to be on the ground prepping for matches or standing on stage doing pick/ban. We want to understand not just the impact we hope will happen, but the impact they can predict: "if you do this, here are the good things, here are the bad things, can you mitigate the bad things?" And if so, maybe it'll work.
The US remains one of the most commercially important markets, yet League is declining in viewership there. Do you feel a danger or an urgency to turn things around, or is it much more chill than we'd think?
For full disclosure, I ran the LCS for a number of years. It's a product very near and dear to my heart. I spend a lot of time talking to Mark and to Carlos, who runs League of Legends in the Americas, about the directions they want to go. And I still talk to the NA team owners to understand what they're looking for. There are a couple of issues. One is that some of the most popular players in the region — who helped define League of Legends in North America — retired.
I'm certainly not saying those guys leaving caused the decline, so please, Doublelift, don't tweet at me.
But there were a lot of really strong fans, and when those pro players retired without something else for them to immediately latch onto, it became a nice opportunity for them to say, "well, I've had a good run here."
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Some of the wounds have been self-inflicted. The LCS to LTA to LCS thing — I'll get roasted online for it, but obviously we took all the data we had and said, "all right, we're going to start something new and it's going to be cross-regional." And when we did it, fans said, "this was a terrible idea, we don't know why you did this." So we took the opportunity to roll it back and bring the brands out. But obviously fans left during that period. We even had some big brands leave — TSM, CLG, and two or three others have left the league. Some of that was with our encouragement, some was us buying slots back, and some was just on their own. That left some holes as well. When you were a 10-year fan of a team and then the team doesn't exist anymore, it creates an opportunity for you to stop watching.
What we've seen, interestingly, isn't that fans have stopped watching — they've just stopped watching the LCS. They're watching the LCK, the LPL, the LEC. We can chart a lot of that from survey work: we've just re-diverted the fandom into other places. They're still showing up for MSI and Worlds. So the real question becomes: how do we bring fans back? Part of it is getting rid of the doomer loop we've seen on social for five-plus years now.
People have been saying the LCS is dead since 2020, 2021 — and in those years our viewership was going up, and people were still saying "this league is dead." So we're trying to find a way out of that loop.
The team has a lot of things they're working on for '27 and '28. They've got a couple of other things they're cooking on that I hope get to see the light of day this year. we talk a lot about the strategy for bringing fans back. A lot of it is: how do you give them something to care about? It can't just be "we're going to hang out and hope LYON makes it to finals or wins MSI this year." You can't pin your hopes on the competitive pieces. But when you've been a fan for 15 years and you've made one MSI final and one Worlds semifinal, why are you even watching if there's no hope?
Would you say the main focus is bringing old fans back, or bringing new fans in?
You want to do a bit of both. It's much easier if you had a fan who watched the LCS for years and has now wandered off to watch the LCK — how do you bring those folks back? They've watched before, and there's definitely some nostalgia hiding in them that wants to come back out. At the same time, as new fans come to League of Legends, how do you direct them into esports and get them hooked on a team? Part of it is giving people a reason to be a fan — of a player, of a team. What stories are you telling? How are the teams connecting with pros? Fandom is a complicated topic, but we haven't given up on the LCS. We've tried to do a lot in the last year or so to better empower the team that works on it every day — to get out of their way a little with bad decisions and let them run. Part of it is just rebuilding from some of the hits the product has taken over the last couple of years. But the team is feeling good about it.
You've talked about pro players retiring, are you scared of the day Faker retires?
Sure, who isn't? He transcends the sport right now. He's sat down with the prime minister and the president of Korea. The Asian Games are coming up in a couple of months. At the last Asian Games, the story everyone came back with was that in the tent where all the athletes were eating, Faker had a super long line of conventional sport athletes waiting to take a picture with him.
So we're not prepared for Faker to retire, and I don't know that we ever will be.
He's the Michael Jordan of esports right now. At some point — Faker, if you're listening — I hope he decides to stay connected to the ecosystem: own a team, be a manager, a coach, a spokesperson. You're born with the audience.
No one is eclipsing Faker, and I don't know that anyone will for some time. So we want to keep telling great stories and see those performances come out where you can look around — Faker's had some pretty good teammates over the last couple of years, and we've seen great pros on other teams in other regions coming up as well. So we're still excited. We're not shutting the sport down when he walks out.
Format changes come almost every year, sometimes every split. It's genuinely hard to follow — for a newcomer trying to get into LoL esports, or even for old fans reconnecting who see the format has changed so much.
We're constantly cooking, trying to find something that feels good for fans. I don't know that we're searching for a perfect format — I don't know the perfect format exists, especially in any given year. This year we have Asian Games, which is going to affect our split three. The LCK and the LPL are already playing six nights a week; there's no way to get more games into that calendar. So at some point you just have to make a format change to accommodate both split three and Asian Games. We see a lot of stuff like that pop up from time to time, so we try to be as nimble as we can. There are some formats we try where we go, "ah, this didn't feel great." Or we take feedback from fans who say, "I didn't like this part of the split, but this part was great," and we go, "okay, let's change the part people didn't like."
It makes it hard to build real history and player dynasties. Is Riot ultimately aiming for a stable, unified format for readability and narrative?
It's a fine balance: how do you keep putting something out that feels fresh and entertaining, where fans say "this is cool, I'll keep watching," without making so many changes that people say "forget it, I can't watch." You find more stability in international events, outside of play-ins — there's tons of thrash for play-ins, we're always changing something there — but the main format for MSI and Worlds hasn't changed since maybe 2023. First Stand is only a two-year-old event, and we went into it the first year with the goal that fans would tell us what they hated, and we'd change it and try to make the event better — which I think we did.
So I don't know that we're looking for perfect.
I appreciate the stability argument — I've made the same argument myself when we've talked about this stuff. But the idea is finding the right level of change where it still feels new and exciting.
Some of the most entrenched sports in the world change from time to time. I'm an American baseball fan — they've changed the height of the pitching mound, added pitch clocks, done all sorts of things that make historic comparisons harder. But that's part of the fun of being a sports fan: who's better? I'll stick with basketball — who was better, LeBron, Kobe, or Jordan? People argue about that all day, and it's a fun argument to have.
Over the past few years, we've often heard that 2027 will be the year of change for the League of Legends ecosystem. Can you confirm there'll be some movement next year on the League esports ecosystem?
There are changes every year, as you noted. But there's nothing coming in League esports in 2027 where you're going to flip a table and say "whoa, they've changed everything." We're definitely not aiming for that.
If you had to give an average viewer one reason to believe in the future of LoL esports, what would it be?
That's a tough one, because I know what I'd tell someone on my team, but I don't know that it's the thing that gets fans excited. There's a lot of exciting competition coming — and not just Riot competition. And I say this a lot; if you go back and watch other interviews, I say it often, but I always mean it: there's never been a better time to be a League esports fan. The sport keeps progressing and moving forward. We're starting to see new great pros and stories emerge, the competition has never been more exciting, to be candid.
Rapid Fire Questions
A rapid-fire round to close out — yes/no answers, with optional context.
Will closed league still be the reference model five years from now?
Maybe.
Is promotion/relegation ever conceivable globally in League?
Maybe.
Is the current calendar too crowded? You can add context if you want.
If you make every international event, and it's a year with Asian Games, and you're also at EWC, and you're on the national team for ENC — there are probably only a handful of people for whom that's a pretty crowded calendar. For the vast majority of teams, the calendar is not too crowded. And as a fan, I still find weeks where there's no League esports to watch. So I'm trying to solve that last problem without making the first one worse.
Will tier two get an overhaul?
Maybe.
Is fearless draft here to stay?
Probably.
Does the US market concern you?
Always. Even when it's doing well.
Does the aging audience worry you?
Yes.
Is Riot aiming for a unified LoL Esports format long term?
No.
Are you broadly optimistic about LoL esports over the next five years?
