Europe's crumble at Worlds : a disaster 3 years in the making

With Fnatic and G2’s losses this Sunday against Weibo Gaming and BiliBili Gaming respectively, Europe hasn’t managed to send any of its teams into the playoffs bracket. It was a common place observation to say that Europe’s level has been going down since the G2 and FNC golden era of 2018 to 2020, but very few expected the LEC to stop at the Swiss stage - especially since NA’s 1st seed, NRG managed to qualify. This event has caused even more shock as EU has always managed to place one of its representatives in top 8 since 2014 (GEN.G Peyz was 8 years old at the time).

The explanation for such disillusionment isn’t straightforward, in this article, we will attempt outlining the main points that led to the LEC utterly failing at Worlds 2023, while also re-contextualizing 2023 in the grand scheme of things.

2014 was the year that marked the end of the first generation of veterans in Europe, but we can’t say that 2023 was in the same way a last breath for a specific generation of players. Nevertheless, Europe’s talent that emerged in 2019-2020 couldn’t lead any project as successful as Fnatic or G2 finals’ run at Worlds. Which may come as a surprise as 2021 was a very promising year, with Rogue and MAD Lions making a name for themselves with two top-tier mid-jungle duos that would overshadow FNC and G2 : Inspired-Larssen and Elyoya-Humanoid.

But these two projects were plundered in the following year, Inspired would move to NA, Carzzy would move to Vitality and Humanoid to Fnatic. Although there were some tensions around these rosters after Worlds 2021, Europe’s top teams usually field long-standing core rosters, but neither Rogue nor MAD would get this chance. Another example of a strong potential not truly tested is Nemesis, benched prior to FNC’s best-of-5 against Top Esports in Worlds 2020, the Slovenian midlaner didn’t have a true shot to showcase his talents.

More recently, other examples can be cited, in the ADC role : Flakked and Unforgiven. 2022 was a season where many LEC teams tried to bring new blood in the ADC role, with G2’s and MAD’s choices being very promising, but both would eventually lose their place in LEC for 2023. Even though Flakked managed to reach Worlds and had a decent showing on the international stage, the same can be said about Unforgiven, but no teams decided to trust in them. On the other hand, older players such as Comp, Neon or Rekkles, despite not really being in shape, got a spot, with very limited success.

This second point directly channels from the first one, since G2 in 2020, no truly strong and dominant project has been successfully established. The instability of the rosters and the high amount of player movement was a deciding factor, but overall, many rosters were just poorly built.

The numerous failed superteams attempt speak for themselves, Vitality failed 3 times from 2021 to 2023 to construct a roster based around big names that would work. G2’s recruitment of Rekkles in 2021 was an absolute failure.

Also, many smaller teams didn’t really manage to be competitive, Astralis has been lower-middle to bottom of the standings since 2021, XL would only show a decent level in late 2022 and the same in late 2023, SK would also struggle a lot before 2023, with the amount of top rosters dwindling, the amount of good rosters also declined.

G2’s elimination this year at Worlds was largely seen as an issue deeply rooted in a lack of strong competition in LEC - in fact, G2 lost only 3 games during season finals, and no bo5 looked really close - while LPL and LCK teams benefit from a constant highly-skilled training ground.

But why have European rosters been badly built recently? And what exactly does that mean? Instead of simply citing the numerous examples, we are going to dive a little deeper into the team that symbolises the best of Europe’s struggles : Rogue.

As we said previously, after a very promising year in 2021, Rogue lost Hans Sama and Inspired to NA, but kept the Odoamne-Larssen-Trymbi core, losing its two main carries did hurt the team a lot nonetheless. The replacements were, on paper, lacklustre, but Rogue had in 2022 its best year so far with a convincing first place in the summer split and EU’s first seed for Worlds 2022. Larssen was the main actor of Rogue’s evolution, helping the team to make the transition from inspired - a hypercarry jungler - to malrang, who is more of a 2nd support, with great success. No one came close to him as he was undoubtedly the best mid in EU in 2022.

However, as Rogue qualified for Quarter Finals of Worlds in 2022, they got smashed by a not-so-strong JD Gaming, the team ceiling was visible but still showed a lot of good omens, Larssen, especially, managed to do very well against Yagao, while Trymbi also had a very strong Worlds performance.

Assessing Rogue’s improvement from 2021 to 2022, we can conclude that Rogue didn’t really step up one year after another despite keeping their core players, no EU team could follow up and Rogue’s unexpected roster changes were sufficient to keep pace for 2022. 2023 was hoped to be the final breakout year for Rogue, but surprisingly, they only made one change : bringing Szygenda in the Top Lane as a replacement for the outgoing Odoamne, and very quickly, Rogue showed their limits - especially its two 2022 additions : Malrang and Comp - funnily enough, the other team that decided to keep its core in spite of huge signs of dysfunctioning, Fnatic, was also heavily struggling.

Europe has made mistakes on two opposite levels : not doing the changes when it was needed, and not giving enough time for teams to develop. This has led to a huge gap of two years where no team would truly stand out as a dominant project, leading the LEC’s level to drop in comparison to other regions.

“Mentality” has many meanings, it is linked to training, mental preparation, in-game attitude, etc. We will address this topic, firstly by quoting Smash Bros player Leffen who said “You need to always aim for top 1, those who aim for top 1 reach top 8, and those who say they want to reach top 8, they don’t make it out of groups”. This attitude from Leffen was majorly due to the presence of 5 “gods” in Smash Bros Melee, that were thought to be unbeatable.

How is this quote linked to Europe’s situation in LoL? 2023 will answer simply, outside of G2 who - as soon as January - showed intentions on winning Worlds, no structure really seemed to simply believe it was possible. Fnatic is the best example of this “mediocrity”, in 2020, even though the historic British team convincingly reached quarter finals, it was seen as a failure, now, in 2023, right after WBG knocked FNC out of Worlds, FNC tweeted this :

If we look at prior years (2021 and 2022), did Rogue or MAD ever give the impression that they were here to take it all ? Moreover, with the exception of Vitality that always expressed huge ambitions, has any team that hasn’t reached Worlds showed intention of winning them ? On the other hand, taking a look at LPL and LCK teams that couldn’t qualify, it is clear that many of them ambitioned to win Worlds, plus, DRX’s 2022 victory showed the world that no matter your results, as long as you believe in your ability to win Worlds. You can do it, no matter how much of an underdog you may seem to be.

Another topic is scrims: Romain Bigeard, G2’s LoL General Manager, has posted throughout the year many scrim sheets with the winrate and the cancel rate. Winrate is very difficult to assess but cancel rate speaks louder than words, some teams reached a 50% cancel rate, meaning that half of the scrim block they would have against G2, they would not play the full amount of games.

French coach Nicolas Perez (NORD Esports in 2023 and now Giants Gaming) also mentioned his inability to use scrims to their maximum potential in the ERLs. He mainly implied that the last games of scrims (a scrim block is often 5 games - or double 3) were often useless as players didn’t care enough in the opposite team, and in addition, he added that finding night blocks, or 2v2 for Bot Lane, was very difficult.

The discipline gap from Europe to Asia seems enormous, and we could add this to the explanation of Europe’s failure in these worlds. Even if G2 managed to take scrims very seriously by never cancelling them and playing the full block as seriously as possible (once again, winrate is a bad stat to assess scrim seriousness), if other teams don’t follow the trend, G2’s efforts are rendered useless.

LEC isn’t doomed to fail forever and suffer the same downfall that Vietnam has. There are indeed several factors that can lead to a positive vision of Europe’s future at Worlds. First and foremost, the failure of current training habits is certain, whereas MAD and Rogue’s qualification to the Quarter Finals may have masked the LEC’s difficulties, this year, it is impossible to deny that Europe needs reform.

G2 could be an example to follow, both in discipline and ambition. No matter what the results have been in the end for the Spanish structure, many people in Europe believed they could have a good run at worlds, and G2 was, in fact, the only roster that thought itself as a potential winner.

Furthermore, even though talent has been poorly used by teams these last few years, we can’t say that there are no talents. Yike and Sheo’s examples in the Jungle prove that an ERL player can quickly rise to a very good level while maintaining high potential. In the ERLs, players like Caliste, Aetinoth, Isma, Takeset or Marky are strong candidates for future S tier players in LEC, and there are countless more examples (Vertigo, Vladi, Hid0, Myrwn, Six10…).

After the 2014 disaster, Europe had a very strong 2015 while everyone expected LPL to take over, placing both Fnatic and Origen - two mixes of new blood and experience - into the semi-finals of Worlds. 2024 will not be like 2015, but we can expect Europe to wake up faster than North America.