A new organisation is shaping the EMEA tier-two League of Legends scene. New Esports Org. (NEO) runs two of the ecosystem's key League of Legends competitions — the EMEA Masters and League of Legends Game Changers Rising (LGC Rising) — alongside a wider portfolio that already includes Evo France and the EVA Pro League. Its founders sat down with RFT to explain where the company came from, how it sees these properties, and where it wants to take them.
NEO was born out of a leadership change. Bertrand Amar, who had led Webedia's esports activities since 2016 and helped create the LFL, left the company at the end of 2025. The split was amicable and, by his account, strategically clean. Webedia wanted to keep operating French-focused products like the LFL, while the more international and riskier projects fit less neatly into its plans. "We wanted to build the NEO adventure on products that look further than France," Amar said. He framed the new company around that ambition, founded in partnership with Mathieu Dallon, one of the founding figures of esports and the creator of the Esports World Cup (ESWC).
That international outlook is the reason NEO took over the EMEA Masters. The competition mattered deeply to Amar's team, which had nurtured it for years — through the LFL, its second division, and side products like the Coupe des Étoiles — before eventually taking on the EMEA Masters production itself. When the move to create NEO took shape, the team flagged its intentions to Riot Games early, and the handover happened naturally. "It's a competition we're extremely attached to," Amar said, calling it a major pillar in NEO's development and pointing to its trajectory, including last year's qualification pathway toward the LEC.
A more condensed Spring, by design
This year's Spring EMEA Masters was originally built around a more compact format than previous editions, and Yoann Bouchard, NEO's director, laid out the reasoning. The EMEA Masters had traditionally grown split by split — the basic idea being a one-week first split, a two-week second split, and a three-week third, with stakes and team counts rising toward the off-season. But 2026 reshuffled those priorities.
