Everything You Didn't Need To Know About The 2021 LEC Spring Split
The seventeenth split of European top tier League of Legends gets underway on Friday night (January 22), making today a brilliant time to give you all the facts you never needed to know about the two-month-long competition.
IN IT FOR THE LONG RUN
Martin “Rekkles” Larsson and Marcin “Jankos” Jankowski are the most tenured players competing in the LEC this year, having played in every LEC and EU LCS split since Spring 2014. The next nearest player is Oskar “Vander” Bogdan, who missed Spring 2017. Speaking of Vander, he’s also the oldest player in the LEC at 26 years and 274 days old.
The youngest player competing in the LEC this split is Jean "Jezu" Massol, SK Gaming’s new ADC. Both Jezu and Tobiasz “Agresivoo” Ciba were promoted from Misfits Premier to an LEC team in the offseason, but the most preyed on academy roster was AGO ROGUE - four of their five starting players were signed to LEC rosters. Astralis signed the most players from teams in European Regional Leagues at four.
A CHANGE OF FACE
Three teams rebranded in the offseason - Rogue, Excel, and Astralis. Astralis also changed their name from Origen as part of a company-wide branding alignment, making them the second LEC team to do so.
More players have returned from the LCS this offseason than any other, with Yasin “Nisqy” Dinçer joining Fnatic, Sergen “Broken Blade” Celik joining Schalke and Erik “Treatz” Wessén joining SK. Unsurprisingly, no players native to “the retirement region” have been imported. Two players have, however, been imported from the nearby TCL and LCL - MAD Lions’ İrfan Berk “Armut” Tukek and Astralis’ Nikolay “Zanzarah” Akatov.
All of the LCK presence, at least on starting rosters, has been removed from the league as Han “Dreams” Min-Kook left for FlyQuest Academy, and Kim “Trick” Gang-yun retired from competitive play. Rekkles, Vander, Dino “LIMIT” Tot, Elias “Upset” Lipp, and Andrei “Odoamne” Pascu are the only players to have been transferred between two different LEC teams in the offseason.
Click to enlargeKEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY
G2 Esports have fifty-five LEC and EU LCS splits between them. SK Gaming has the least at three - the only player on their roster with prior LEC experience is Janik “Jenax” Bartels.
FC Schalke 04 Esports is the least regionally diverse team in the LEC, with three players from Germany. Excel Esports and SK Gaming each have five players from different countries on the starting roster. Misfits does too, but I expect Vander will be starting as often, if not more than Petr “denyk” Haramach come the halfway point of the split.
GIVE ME A TIME AND A PLACE
Every team plays eighteen games in the group stage, and ninety games will be played in total over the course of the split. G2 Esports plays both the opening game (against MAD Lions) and the closing game (against Excel Esports)
Following the tradition of the last few splits, Fnatic will play in the last match of the evening eleven times over the course of the group stage. The earliest they will play is 6pm GMT, both times against SK Gaming, on February 13th and March 6th. Excel Esports will open the day eight times, the most of any team, and SK Gaming will never play last (I guess it’s after Jezu’s bedtime).
Like last split, both the first and last week have an extra day of matches on the Sunday. What you might not have noticed is that both weekends have exactly the same schedule. Week 3 and Week 6, and Week 4 and Week 7 are also identical.
If, like me, you can’t wait for the start of the second-best league in the world at 5pm GMT on Friday, check out our League of Legends category for more GGRecon articles covering all regions.
Images via Riot Games