- Riot Games is introducing a Northern League of Legends Championship (NLC), with teams from Scandanavian countries as well the UK and Ireland.
- DreamHack will operate the NLC for three years, along with five national leagues from which teams will qualify.
- This represents the largest overhaul of the Nordic League of Legends landscape, and follows on from similar expansion of the German-speaking market.
DreamHack and Riot Games have partnered to introduce the NLC, a combined professional League of Legends competition for Nordic countries, UK, and Ireland. The inaugural online only season will start in June, feature 12 invited teams, and award a prize pool of 1M SEK ($100.1K USD) per split. It will culminate in a planned live final at the DreamHack Summer festival.
The NLC will be operated over the next three years by DreamHack. In addition, DreamHack will run five regional leagues to qualify teams to the NLC through a relegation-promotion system: four Telia Esports Series for Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, along with the UK LC. The top two teams for each national league will compete in the Telia Masters, with the top two teams of the Masters then playing the two bottom NLC teams in a Relegation Series.
The NLC is part of the European Regional League (ERL) circuit and feeds into the European Masters tournament. It is the latest endeavor to combine the competitive League of Legends scenes of multiple EU countries.
This year also saw the launch of the Prime League, which features teams from the DACH market (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). All ERLS are designed to add commercial value to regional esports markets, and develop talent that might eventually compete in the continent’s top professional league: the League of Legends European Championship (LEC).
