When Origen team owner Enrique “xPeke” Cedeño Martínez revealed the identity of mid laner Yoo “NaeHyun” Naehyun for the 2017 Spring split, one quote in particular struck a chord.

“We ended up looking for European talent here,” xPeke said, “but we couldn’t find anyone who would fit us or would have the characteristics we would want, so we ended up looking at Korean mid laners.”

Having spent the offseason downtime after Worlds watching European National Leagues, I could think of several players worth investing in who might be less risky than a mid laner who finished his sojourn into the League of Legends Secondary Pro League with a 0-17 record. Rumors had circulated that Origen offered European Challenger mid laners an opportunity to join, but many of them rejected the chance.

Even if xPeke’s statement had a grain of falsehood to it, it reflects a deep problem with the perceptions of existing EU LCS team owners: there’s no worthy talent to develop in Europe, or rather, existing EU LCS organizations don’t want the burden of searching for it.

Naturally, part of the reason is a lack of incentive. There’s very little structure in place for organization owners and staff to support young players with no experience. The EU LCS season is extremely high pressure, and it’s hard to gamble on new talent that will require a steep time investment.

Though rookies like Jesper “Zven” Svenningsen and Luka “Perkz” Perkovic and, more recently, Rasmus “Caps” Winther and Barney “Alphari” Morris have debuted in the EU LCS with remarkable results, rough edges are evident. Many organizations still view rising stars as risks compared to stable, known players or the mythos of the Korean solo queue star, which hangs over the scene even after Heo “Huni” Seunghoon’s departure from Fnatic.

At the moment, the arena best suited for developing new players is the European Challenger Series, but Riot Games recently announced that organizations owning LCS teams will no longer be able to own Challenger teams in 2017 Summer. The announcement was brief, and few noticed it before theScore pointed it out in a news post.

“We’re introducing changes to rules around team ownership in two phases this year,” it said. “In Spring Split, ownership of one LCS and one CS team is still permitted, but starting from Summer Split, owning only one team within either LCS or CS will be allowed.”

Currently, this change will impact two LCS organizations that also own CS teams: Fnatic and Misfits. Yahoo Esports contacted both Fnatic Manager Finlay “Quaye” Stewart and Misfits owner Ben Spoont to discuss their motivations for owning a CS spot, despite knowing about the proposed changes well in advance of the announcement.

“We felt the reasoning behind getting into CS in the first place (viable active subs for LCS, scrim partners, developing new talent) outweighed any small profit we could get in the near-term,” Spoont said of his decision to retain the Misfits Academy spot.

View photos Broxah, new starting jungler for Fnatic, was recently promoted from the organization’s Challenger Series team to LCS (lolesports) More

Quaye echoed the sentiment.

“There were multiple goals with our Challenger project,” he said. “To have five full time subs that we believe could step up to the LCS team at any point was a large driver for us. I think right now that they have all proven that they are LCS caliber players so we have already been successful in this sense.”

Though other factors, like branding and the eventual payoff if the Challenger team does well, are certainly in play, both Spoont and Quaye chose developing talent as a major motivation for keeping a CS spot.

It’s easy to see why organizations would want to do this. 2014 was arguably the most dominant season of Korean LoL esports, and many have cited the use of sister teams and in-house scrim partners as a reason for their success.

Since then, Korean organizations have continued to sign extremely young players and train them in-house against their main team. Some of the most domestically successful imported Korean players (like Huni and QG’s Kim “Doinb” Taesang) have come from Korean “farm teams.” Before many stars returned to LCK this year, Korean teams have been able to replenish their talent pools at an alarming rate, and some credit this to the talent development infrastructure in place.

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