No League of Legends team has ever won every trophy available to them in a single year. Bilibili Gaming were the latest to try, and the latest to fall short. Fifteen years of near-misses have produced a strange pattern — the step that breaks these teams is rarely the one anybody expects. Bilibili Gaming led Hanwha Life Esports 2-1 in the MSI 2026 Grand Final on 12 July. They had First Stand, LPL Split 1 and LPL Split 2 already banked. Two games later they were runners-up for the third time at the tournament, and the Golden Road was gone again.
That phrase belongs to Riot, who coined it for the feat other sports call a grand slam: one organisation winning every official Riot competition they are eligible for across a calendar year. Nobody has done it. The reason is partly that the target keeps growing. Until 2014 the checklist ran to a regional title and Worlds. MSI arrived in 2015 and made it four. First Stand joined in 2025 and made it five.
Ranking the near-misses depends on what counts as close. The Golden Road is a sequence, so the first reading is how far down the calendar a team travelled before the run died — everything won after that point completes nothing. The second reading counts games. This list follows the sequence, with the game count as the argument against it.
