RLCS 2026 World Championship: Where do the minor regions stand?

Rocket League Esports has not always been a diverse scene. Ten years ago, our first World Championship featured just eight teams from two regions. Now, the esport is proudly represented by seven regions going into the RLCS 2026 World Championship, but they are not all equal. Oceania (OCE), Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are the three regions coming into the tournament with only one representative. Beyond often isolated yet historic wins over international competition, these regions have struggled to consistently compete against the other regions.

It's not through the lack of trying. The minor regions are facing numerous challenges in an ecosystem that has grown and regressed since they were introduced into the RLCS. In this article, Sheep Esports guides you through the past two competitive years for these minor regions on LAN, what has gone wrong, and the issues they face getting up to speed with the titans of Rocket League.

Four teams have represented the minor regions at international competitions this season: PWR and Wildcard from OCE, TSM from APAC and Five Fears from SSA. While the latter three are set to appear at the RLCS 2026 World Championship this September, they have all struggled to use their limited opportunities at Majors, crumbling in the face of fiercer, more experienced opposition from the other regions.

PWR, featuring Angus "gus" Hall, Lachlan "Superlachie" Gordon, and Ezequiel "Fibérr" Aranda-Lovito, are the only minor region team to have won a series at a Major this season, albeit against their SSA counterparts, Five Fears. The only other international win between the four representatives was by TSM, who managed to earn a historic 3-1 victory over reigning World Champions, NRG, at the Esports World Cup.

These two series wins come from 27 series played by all four representatives during the Boston Major, Paris Major, and EWC meaning a 7% series win rate at international competitions during RLCS 2026. Across a total of 87 games played, the trio of regions came out with only a 16% game win rate.

Last season at the 2025 World Championship, Wildcard made the playoffs with well-earned wins over Dignitas and FURIA, while Virtus.pro defeated Shopify Rebellion and MIBR in the Play-In. Both runs were hugely significant and overshadowed what was the underlying trend of that season: disappointment. Minor region teams were struggling just as much before that tournament as they are this season.

A combination of the presence of Oceania’s second seed and the Swiss stage format that was used at the Majors meant that minor region teams faced each other on six occasions before the 2025 World Championship. If you discount these series, the minor region teams failed to win a single series against an international opponent outside these three regions.

Across the same three events last season, the Birmingham Major, Raleigh Majors, and EWC, they came out with a game win percentage of just 18%, practically on par with the 16% during the current season.

While chances seem slim for the minor region teams, again, there are brief glimmers of hope. TSM’s victory over NRG at the EWC, could provide the APAC team with a good launchpad coming into the World Championship. Likewise, Wildcard, the same team that finished 5th-6th last season, could be in a good place to repeat the same feat this season. Having missed the Boston Major entirely in February, they had to win the last Regional Open of the season to make the Paris Major before defeating their direct rivals PWR in a crucial tiebreaker to qualify for EWC and the World Championship. Five Fears, who open the tournament with a series against Mate y Tapa, a European roster that features two players Óscar "tehqoz" Arco competed with in the MENA LCQ last season, will be hoping for a fast start if they have any chance of making it a stage further.

It can be easy to write off these minor regions as simply being uncompetitive but the issues surrounding the growth and development of these regions run deep. It’s been five years since Psyonix introduced MENA, APAC, and SSA to the wider RLCS ecosystem for the 2021-22 season. While MENA has prospered both competitively and as a local scene, SSA and APAC have struggled to have an impact. While outside of their control, both regions have suffered from the scene shrinking to a tighter, budget-restricted version of the RLCS that existed when they were introduced. APAC, which once had two sub-regions and multiple layers of competition to reach LANs, was streamlined in RLCS 2022-23. The region also lost a guaranteed World Championship slot in RLCS 2024 alongside SSA, following the removal of the Wildcard Stage.

Oceania was drawn into the same mix of regions when it lost its second guaranteed World Championship slot following RLCS 2025, even when Wildcard earned the region its best result at a LAN since RLCS Season 6. This will be the first World Championship without two OCE teams since the region was introduced back in RLCS Season 3. While the sentiment behind having a more competitive field at the pinnacle tournament of the year makes a lot of sense, in the current ecosystem the consequences on Oceania as a whole feel too great.

In the long term, fewer OCE players will get the opportunity to compete against the world’s best, leading to a local scene that becomes more stale and top-heavy. Even the best in the region have to worry that a poor vein of form could leave you in the online wilderness for months. Organizations, who may have been convinced to gamble on a team, now know that their chances are even slimmer and that there is less potential return on investment.

The ultimate price was that the two top teams in the region, PWR and Wildcard, were so evenly matched throughout RLCS 2026 that it came down to a tiebreaker which guaranteed the winner $27,250 in prize money and spots at the EWC and World Championship. Angus "gus" Hall, who appeared at the Raleigh Major with PWR, missed out on what would have been a career-defining opportunity after losing to Daniel "Torsos" Parsons’ Wildcard. He was the first OCE professional to make his debut at an RLCS LAN since Finn "finn" Mawer at the London Major 2024, but he now has to wait months to build on this without OCE’s second slot at the World Championship to soften the blow.

There are other external factors that have plagued the minor regions. Primarily, the changes to the residency rules for RLCS 2024, while adjusted for this season, have proven to be largely damaging to the smaller regions. Imports, while they have their place in a scene, were allowed to siphon off prize money opportunities from domestic players. During RLCS 2025, not a single player born in SSA reached an RLCS LAN. Diego "VKSailen" Isla Serrano, a former RLCS player who had four years of competitive experience in Europe, led a Spanish squad under FUT Esports to earn over $60,000 during that season, money that would have otherwise reached the hands of players from that region. At the same time, domestic teams in SSA missed out on four LAN opportunities to gain valuable experience.

In APAC, imports like Nelson "virtuoso" Lasko, Cameron "Kamii" Ingram, and Leonardo Raffael "Catalysm" Christ Ramos were beneficial in raising the level of quality in the region. Yet, some of the region’s top prospects that may have been on track to feature on better teams never got that opportunity and drifted into relative obscurity.

Even if players from minor regions eventually reach an RLCS LAN, they are expected to magically improve every time an international tournament comes around, where for just a few days they potentially get to scrim in a major region. The picture is more complicated than that.

In an interview with Rocket Baguette after his EWC win against NRG, Nik Aiman Hakim "Sphinx" Bin Nik Azhar commented that “After RLCS finished in Paris, we had no practice. No team could scrim us because we are so isolated there is no one to scrim, all we have to do is free play.”

It is not uncommon for this to happen in the smaller regions. At the end of the regular season, teams that did not reach the final LAN events often disband or go on vacation. This leaves the remaining teams with limited opportunities to practice, unless their organizations allow them to bootcamp ahead of an event. That support is not always forthcoming. Organizations that invest in the minor regions can be economical at the best of times, looking to maximize their return on investment with the limited resources they have.

The challenges that face the minor regions are regularly glossed over for the bigger storylines and fan-favourite players. There is an expectation from fans that these regions should have been able to compete by now, years after entering the RLCS, but development is a slow process, even when opportunities are common and investment is high.

Beyond greater investment from Epic Games, the solutions are not obvious. Prodigies can bridge the gap, but they are few and far between. Instead, it will take the optimization of the scene to increase the opportunities available to these regions. At the moment, they are victims of an ecosystem that has its resources stretched, and they feel it the most. But there are signs these regions can be competitive, especially if they can recover their lost slots at LAN events. Both Wildcard and Virtus.pro showed last year that they can change the whole narrative of a season with just a few best-of-five wins at the RLCS World Championship. Wildcard, TSM, and Five Fears have the opportunity to that again this September.