The LEC is #JustGettingStarted

MSI 2019 made Europe and the LEC the No.1 region in world, and while G2 is basking in their glorious achievement the rest of the LEC squads are plotting to take out the champs.

A lot has happened in the offseason in Europe. Roster moves, trades and new signings happened in five of the ten teams. Let’s take a quick look at what went down around the league.

Champions G2, Origen, Misfits, Vitality and Splyce are fairly confident in their rosters and did not make any roster changes during the offseason. Although we praised Misfits a whole lot during the Spring Split, they ultimately flopped near the end of the season and missed playoffs. With no new changes coming to the roster let’s hope they managed to make their cohesion level super-saiyan. Spring finalists OG have nothing to be worried about. They did lose to G2 in Spring, but G2 is on a whole new level this season. When it comes to the rest of LEC, Origen is still an arm and a leg ahead of the competition. Both the Vitality and Splyce squads made playoffs in Spring, and were looking solid during the entire split. If a bit of polishing here and there happened during the offseason they are golden for Summer.

The Worlds 2018 finalists Fnatic had a lukewarm showing at Spring. After a horrendous start of the split they managed to rally just enough strength to get to Playoffs. Ultimately they fell to G2 and ended Spring in 3rd. During the offseason the team faced internal strife as jungler Mads “Broxah” Brock-Pedersen was informed he would be sharing his position on the roster with Academy jungler Daniel “Dan” Hockley. Seems Broxah was not too happy with the decision.

SK Gaming followed a similar decision style as Fnatic. Their change came in the Top Lane as Academy toplaner Toni “Sacre” Sabalić replaced Jorge “Werlyb” Casanovas.

ExceL broght some reinforcements in the botlane signing Petter “Hjarnan” Freyschuss and marking his return to the LEC.

Schalke 04 reunited two players from the bbq Olivers 2018 roster after signing Kim “Trick” Gang-yun to the roster and reuniting him with Lee “IgNar” Dong-geun.

The biggest roster change in the LEC comes with Rogue who managed to finish the 2019 Spring in last place. During the offseason they moved the academy squad: Finn “Finn” Wiestal, Kacper “Inspired” Sloma and Emil “Larssen” Larsson to the main roster, while Oskar “Vander” Bogdan and Kim “Wadid” Bae-in will have to share the Support role. How this new roster will fare in the LEC remains to be seen.

With all the roster swaps out of the way, let us put our analyst hats on and play a little prediction game.

The ultimate favorite to win Summer is G2. I can even predict they will go 15W 3L at the end of the regular season. Origen and Misfists should rally closely behind. While Misfits had a horrible Spring, I am confident the team will come out guns blazing in Summer and easily advance to playoffs.

Fnatic is a mystery at this stage. The team seems to have issues with internal communication and strife gnawing within. It is possible that they might rally hard and prove me wrong, but my guess is they will have a horrible split and roster changes as soon as the split is over.

Vitality, Splyce and Schalke04 should outperform the bottom side of the standings featuring Rogue, ExceL and SK Gaming but beyond that 1-1s versus Fnatic is a best case scenario and maybe a win stolen from Misfits, Origen. Eventually, two of the three will make it to playoffs and it should be a tiebreaker and a coin toss.

As stated, I have little faith in Excel, SK and Rogue. They probably need another 6-8 months to “git gud” and become stable.

In the end, all that remains is to see the Week 1 matchups and predict the likely outcomes.

The LEC action kicks off today at 18:00 CEST at Watch.lolesports.com