"We don't plan to move away from our long-term partnership model with the teams" LEC Commissioner on a potential opening of the league

Last Monday, May 4, LEC Commissioner Artem Bykov gave a live interview to streamer and former professional player Marcin "Jankos" Jankowski, during which the two discussed the LEC and its format at length, roadshows and their potential expansion to other countries, the Spring Split schedule, as well as co-streaming.

One of the topics that comes up the most whenever the LEC is mentioned is a potential opening of the league. This is currently the case in the LCP (Pacific) and the LCS (North America) with Guest Slots, but according to the LEC Commissioner, it is not something that should happen in EMEA: “Currently we don't plan to move away from our long-term partnership model with the teams.”

However, Riot and the LEC remain open to more crossover competition between ERL and LEC teams following the positive reception to LEC Versus, but also after and ’s victories over LEC teams during the Esports World Cup EMEA Qualifier: “We would consider [it] in the future, but not moving away from our primarily long-term model with teams.“

Bykov also gave concrete numbers on how the calendar has grown. The 2026 season includes 78 show days, against 66 in 2025, a roughly 15% increase. The number of road trips has more than doubled, going from two last year to five in 2026, and each road trip is now a three-day event instead of two.

A less obvious adjustment: Mondays at the Riot Games Arena now run without an audience. Bykov explained that historically, only about 30% of Monday tickets had been sold, and Riot decided that the budget was better redirected into the road trip program, both to fund more events and to allow Riot to give bigger stipends to the host teams.

Bykov and Jankos revisited the question of format, particularly the possibility of seeing BO1 return in the regular season. "I wouldn't say that BO1 will never come back again," Bykov said, pointing out that the BO1 round-robin used during LEC Versus was a product of the very tight window before First Stand and not a structural choice. The Spring Split single round-robin in BO3 is here to stay, both because fans and players asked for it, and because road trips need to be scheduled close to a year in advance, which is harder to do with a more flexible format.

The Commissioner was also asked why the LEC doesn't simply move to a double round-robin like the LCK. His answer was that direct comparisons miss the point: "The way how the esports ecosystem works in Korea is just fundamentally different from how it works in EMEA or how it works in NA." He did, however, mention that online play could become a useful supplement in the future if Riot wanted to experiment with longer formats without inflating costs.

On the schedule itself, particularly criticized this Spring Split because of the significant disparities between teams (KC played six matches in just three days during week five), Bykov was unusually open about the issue. "We're also not happy how it worked out. We underestimated the exact impact of how all the little tweaks worked out. That's something we are looking to change for 2027."

He listed the factors that combined to produce the imbalance: teams now pick their own road trip weeks, road trips have grown from two to three days, the LEC representative at First Stand is allowed to start the regular season in week 2 to recover, and Mondays without an audience have to be spread evenly across teams. Summer Split, he confirmed, is already laid out differently.

A large part of the interview focused on road trips. Bykov was clear that the program's current geography reflects market reality: Karmine Corp and host the events because France and Spain are the LEC's two biggest markets in fan terms (France is the most-represented nation among LEC players and Spain is third), and because the two organizations have the local venue networks, sponsors and team-owner personalities (Kameto and Ibai) to make events of that scale work.

He also detailed something rarely spelled out publicly: how a road trip is actually produced. The host team handles the venue, ticketing, the on-site fan experience and partner activations. Riot handles the broadcast and the competitive operations, and ships hardware from Berlin to keep the playing conditions identical to the studio. The two sides plan each event together for close to a year, with Riot providing stipends and helping the team unlock sponsor activations.

To make the program scalable, Riot has built a dedicated "touring kit", a shared pool of stage hardware (monitors, audio, the parts of the setup that are competitively sensitive) that travels from city to city. Other equipment, like cameras, is rented locally.

There is also a business reason for staging road trips during the regular season rather than during playoffs. A host team's revenue at these events is largely driven by sponsors, and sponsors need a guaranteed appearance to commit. A regular-season home game is guaranteed. A final is not. The LEC Versus final in Barcelona was a deliberate test of that model. “It was a good test,” Bykov said. The Spring Split final will be played at the Riot Games Arena, but the Summer Split final will be hosted away from Berlin as a major offline event. Bykov justified the difference by the weight of the Summer final as the last LEC event before Worlds, which Riot wants to use to build momentum for the qualifying teams.

Asked what he would change if he had no limitations, Bykov gave his most ambitious answer of the interview: "I would love a world where each LEC team does a road trip across EMEA." He insisted these events would not all need to be 5,000- or 10,000-seat arenas, just live LEC action made accessible to fans across more of the region. He also confirmed that the host team itself decides which opponents are invited, in order to build the storylines they want.

Co-streaming, the program of which Jankos is a part, also remains a key piece of the LEC broadcast strategy. "Co-streaming continues to be a big part of the LEC strategy," Bykov said, adding that no major changes are planned in the near term.

He did walk through the program's evolution year by year. The first year was limited to a small group of team-affiliated streamers. The second year saw a wider list of team co-streamers added. The third year, the current one, was the first to include co-streamers without any team affiliation. On G2's recent decision to onboard six or seven co-streamers at once, Bykov said it fit within the program's deliberately flexible design: "It's part of their strategy."

The conversation ended on the international stage. Bykov, who attended First Stand in Brazil, was visibly proud of G2's run there and said he expected the team to head into MSI with high expectations attached, both internally and externally. For any second LEC team that qualifies, however, he was careful to set the bar at a more measured level. International competition, he said, is "tough", and the priority for the less experienced rosters who could make it through will be exposure on a major stage rather than results.