We ended last year on a high with the news that the LCS is the third most popular major sports league among 18-34 year olds in the US . We’ve been busy preparing for the upcoming competitive season and excited to share some of what we’ve been working on with all of you.

The 3 LCS teams will qualify for Worlds 2020 via the new LCS Summer Playoffs instead of the old path of Regional Qualifier and Championship Points

Academy Rush, a new show, will air on Fridays at 5PM PT and will feature 4 Academy games played simultaneously and the 5th and final game shown in full

LCS

During the regular season, LCS will be expanding to 3 days a week with games on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays at the LCS Studios. Each Saturday and Sunday, there will be 4 LCS games followed by an in-studio Academy game.

Mondays will feature the 2 marquee match-ups of the week. We’re calling this new broadcast night Monday Night League. Before Monday Night League games, we’ll be broadcasting 3 Academy games live from the LCS Studios.

ACADEMY

Similar to the last split, Academy will have 5 remote games on Fridays during the regular season. However, we’ll be changing the broadcast format to feature multiple games at once and calling this new show Academy Rush. Academy Rush will feature shoutcasters and analysts jumping between all of the Academy action to show you the biggest plays and highlight moments from all 4 games followed by a final and 5th game shown in full.

Academy Rush ensures you don’t miss a single big moment from Academy and helps you track upcoming talent in NA in a format that makes it easy to keep an eye on the stars of tomorrow. It can be a big time commitment to watch all 10 Academy games in a single week across multiple channels on top of the LCS broadcast. We hope debuting this new broadcast format will allow LCS fans to easily keep up with all the Academy action on a single channel.

For Academy players, gaining stage experience is a key step towards a starting spot on an LCS roster. In Summer 2019, organizations really benefited from giving their Academy teams valuable stage time after LCS matches on Sundays – with this in mind we decided to take it one step further and expand stage time for the Academy teams by featuring one Academy game after the LCS matches on the weekend. On top of that, 3 Academy games will be played on-stage every Monday. Through these changes, every Academy team will have an opportunity to play on stage every week.

Format: LCS Playoffs and Worlds qualification changes

Throughout 2019, we continued to analyze and evaluate both the LCS and Academy formats to meet the goals of the League. For the 2020 Season, we made some changes to the Playoff formats and how teams qualify for the World Championship. Every format has trade-offs but the new Playoff formats should more consistently lead to the best teams ending up at the top while still leaving open the possibility for a miracle run. Critically for all of us fans, we’ll get to see the top teams play more marquee matches than ever before.

LCS

Regular Season: LCS will continue to operate on a 2-split format with a 9-week regular season and Best of 1s.

Playoffs: The LCS format will be changing for Playoffs, which will take place over 4 weeks with the specific format changing between Spring and Summer.

Spring Playoffs

At the conclusion of the Spring Split regular season, the top six teams from the regular season will advance to a Best of 5 bracket.