LR Nemesis on franchising: "Riot is on a massive clock. They’ll need to do changes sooner or later"

After the storm comes the sun, and Los Ratones are now staring into a ray of hope in the 2026 League of Legends EMEA Championship (LEC) Versus following two much-needed wins in Week 3. Still, the climb continues, and the team will need to put in twice the effort to stay afloat in the final week of the group stage. In an exclusive interview, midlaner Tim "Nemesis" Lipovšek sat down with Sheep Esports to discuss the team's progression, his drive to pursue professional play, and the challenges of franchising in Europe.

Tim "Nemesis" Lipovšek: "I think we’re getting better over time. Obviously, in the first week, we probably could have won two games easily if we had just played a bit better. Now we’re starting to play a little bit better. It’s still best-of-ones, so it can be a little bit random. You can get stomped really hard, or you can win really fast as well, and that applies to every team. We still have a lot of work to do.

Nemesis: Naturally over time, especially now, maybe because we’re trying a bit more, we’re just a little bit sharper overall as a team. We have improved a lot on things. For example, we don’t have to communicate every single thing we want to do anymore, because players naturally know what needs to be done on the map and stuff. With that said, there’s still a lot of progress to be made.

Nemesis: I would say everything, but we also play maybe a little bit different on stage, which is a big problem that every team has to face at some point. I would say being more decisive on stage, and in general, maybe the early game is our weakest area right now.

Nemesis: I’ve always kind of thought that if you’re a good player, you’ll naturally have strong opinions about how the game should be played and all that stuff. In any good team, the good players will lead the team. And the best-case scenario is that you have, let’s say, every role being a good player, then I don’t think coaches really have to do much. In League, when you have good players, the players will kind of lead the team.

Nemesis: Yamato is more of a leader, and he takes more of the leadership role and more initiative. Shaves is more the guy in the background, just talking to him. He doesn’t necessarily have to talk to us all the time, he gives his point of view, and then they take decisions together. Yamato is usually the one representing them.

Nemesis: If I’m not mistaken, we play next week on a completely different patch, and it seems to be the biggest patch of the season so far, especially compared to 26.1 and 26.2; those patches were a joke. With that said, I think the game will change a lot. I don’t think any team is going to stay the same week to week, and if they do, they’ll probably fall behind. We need to work on a lot of things. We need to adapt to the patch well, and we need to fix the mistakes, like today against NAVI, for example. It sucks that we lost, but it’s kind of obvious what we did wrong, which was mostly draft-related, and that’s not going to be a problem to fix.

Nemesis: It’s kind of hard to know because the world moves at a faster pace every single year. Especially if you look at it 10 years ago compared to now, the difference is enormous, and I’m very afraid to even make predictions on what I’ll be doing a year from now, while in the past people were making predictions about what they’d be doing 20 years from now. So I honestly have no idea what I’ll be doing.

Nemesis: To the LEC, maybe, but the LEC is very small. If you go into a national tournament, that’s a completely different world. There, you probably have to play five times better than here. Overall, it’s hard to say.

Nemesis: I doubt there will ever be a project like Los Ratones. The world we live in is that, as a player, I have to care about the roster—the players I’m playing with—as the number one priority, and everything else is useless. I don’t even look at it, nor do I care about it. It all just comes down to which players you have on your team, because that’s where teams are won or lost.

Nemesis: Professional play has higher highs, but streaming has more consistency. That’s the main difference between them.

Nemesis: I would say definitely yes. People have talked a lot about the good old days, when players could come together, create a random roster, and start winning things, then move on to bigger things. Los Ratones captured some of that, and that’s why it’s so fun for people to watch.

And yeah, franchising—not really a big fan—because of a lot of examples over the last few years when there’s been organizations that are constantly at the bottom, constantly doing random decisions that you don’t really understand. I don’t think that really creates a hype product to watch.

Nemesis: I think Riot is on a massive clock. They’ll need to do something sooner or later. They’ve been too slow at making changes, considering how fast the world moves. So personally, I do believe they’re on a timer to make changes."