Yesterday, the last team from the West was eliminated from LoL Worlds 2021: This is the first time since 2017 that only Asians are in the semifinals. 17 of the remaining 20 players at the League of Legends Worlds are South Korean. The coach of the last US team explains why that is, and why it will stay that way if nothing changes.

This is the situation:

• Yesterday Gen G. clearly beat the Americans from Cloud 9 3-0 in the last quarterfinal, so the 3rd team from South Korea is in the semifinals. The 4th team from South Korea, the “Church of Chovy”, is only eliminated because they had to play against another team from South Korea: against T1 with the “unkillable demon king” Faker.
• The South Koreans are so dominant at the 2021 Worlds that 17 of the remaining 20 players are from South Korea. That’s because only Koreans are playing in Korea. And the last team from China, EDward Gaming, has 2 Korean legionnaires in its ranks. With Viper, of all people, that’s probably the best ADC in the world.
• Before the Worlds, teams from Asia were highly favored to win the Worlds. But bookmakers thought that at least Mad Lions or Fnatic could halfway keep up – those hopes were quickly dashed. Not since 2017 has LoL been so firmly in the hands of teams from Asia as it is now.

“It’s extremely unfair”

This is what a US coach says: Cloud 9 coach Alfonso “mithy” Rodríguez explained why the West is so weak at a press conference after the defeat (via youtube):

“I think the way the whole league system is designed, it’s extremely unfair. The Korean teams are doing training matches against the LPL and against the LJL, against all these teams, and we’re only left with the teams from Europe and North America.”

Mithy, Coach Cloud 9

According to Mithy, Koreans could play against strong competition, while the best teams from Europe and the US can only play against comparatively weak teams. This is because time differences and restrictions prevent teams from the West from competing against the world-class Temas from Asia under competitive conditions.

One solution to the problem would be boot camps in South Korea. But there is little time for that:

“For a team from the West to do well, we would have to have boot camps in South Korea for an extended period of time and participate in tournaments there. But that’s very difficult because we have to play a lot of meaningless games in the spring split when we could actually do a boot camp.”

Mithy, Coach Cloud 9

It would be important, Mithy says, to allow LoL teams to “travel the world” and compete in “better and more exciting tournaments” at the international level.

Mithy believes that if nothing changes, it will be very difficult for the West to ever do well in such a tournament again.

Without the top team G2, the West looks very old in LoL

Is he right? From a US perspective, he’s certainly right. No team in the US has reached top level in LoL for years.

But his analysis doesn’t work so well for Europe: Europe had the last years with G2 a team that played for the world championship. Even without boot camps in South Korea.

And the performance density has become broader in Europe in recent years with the strengthening of Rogue and MAD Lions, it’s just that the performance peak is apparently dropping year by year.

Here’s how to explain G2’s extreme drop in performance over the last 2 years:

• G2 was in the finals of the Worlds in 2019 and on the way there, had eliminated DWG KIA – at that time they were still called DAMWON Gaming
• 2 years later, G2 didn’t even qualify for Worlds and DWG KIA looks like the best LoL team ever.

In 2019, G2 already had the “competitive toughness” that DWG KIA lacked back then. The young Koreans were considered “training world champions” but crumbled under the pressure of competition. However, G2 only had this advantage for 1 year. In 2020, they were eliminated without a chance against DWG Kia.

In Europe, it seems, there are problems with motivation and passion to improve even when you are “actually” already by far the best team on the continent. Especially under Covid, the stars apparently found it difficult to motivate themselves: The competitions took place without an audience, and the players apparently felt the ceiling fall on their heads.

When Mithy says the games in Spring Split were meaningless, it shows the problem of LoL teams to motivate themselves and work on performance throughout the year. It actually seems easier for teams from South Korea to do that, whereas in China in particular there are big fluctuations in performance for individual teams.

But Korea really seems to be the dominant region in LoL right now. Maybe bootcamps could change that in the long run. But in the short and medium term, the chances for teams from Europe and the US to make it to Worlds look bleak.

For 2022, a lot will depend on how G2 repositions itself. Otherwise, teams like MAD Lions, Fnatic, or Rogue would have to take a giant step forward. The US teams have a lot of money, but it doesn’t seem to buy international success.

LoL: Perennial champion allegedly sells half team and German coach – With price tag