Expert says tough times ahead for professionals because teams are exploding

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In League of Legends, the salaries of professional players in the USA are set to shrink sharply, predicts e-sports expert Christopher “MonteCristo” Mykles. All teams in the USA league of LoL, LCS, are currently facing an explosion.

This is what the expert believes: MonteCristo said on the PowerSpike podcast on October 25th:

  • All LCS teams currently have to save costs and are starting with player salaries. Players will be told: Either you sign a new contract with significantly less money or we will release you and you will then be free agents
  • 2024 will be “wild” – a bunch of players will become free agents, but no more expensive import players will come to the USA. Teams would look to sign cheap amateurs from North America or low-cost players from other regions.
  • In the medium term, this would mean that the USA no longer has strong teams and falls back among the representatives of smaller regions in LoL – like Team Liquid, who have now been eliminated from the Worlds by a team from Vietnam. This could become the new “normal”.

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    Are there any signs that this is happening? It actually seems that the US LCS league from LoL is no longer profitable for the teams. With TSM and CLG, two big teams have already withdrawn from the LCS.

    There was even a kind of player strike before the start of the league, but the players quickly gave in when Riot Games made it clear that they would cancel the league if there were any more problems.

    What MonteCristo predicted also happened to the players on the Evil Geniuses Valorant team. They became masters, but they were told: If you want to stay, then only for significantly less money, otherwise you have to leave.

    Salaries have exploded in recent years, but income has shrunk

    Why is that? The salaries of players in the LCS have risen rapidly in recent years, with a lot of money being paid, especially for legionnaires like Huni and Perkz. This could have set off a general price spiral, with veterans like Bjergsen and Jensen demanding and receiving extremely high amounts of money from their teams.

    The focus seemed to be on the “attractiveness” of the players rather than their actual performance in League of Legends. The 2019 world champion Doinb, for example, sharply criticized this: “Too many” veteran professionals played in the USA just because they sold tickets.

    At the same time, the so-called e-sports winter has caused the teams’ income opportunities to collapse: it is becoming difficult for e-sports organizations to find advertising partners, especially for second-tier teams.

    There seems to be less and less money to be made from e-sports, while the teams’ expenses are increasing significantly with the salaries of the professionals.

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    Fans show little compassion

    How is this discussed? There is little sympathy for the US professionals on reddit. It is said that anyone who gets paid $400,000 a year to play a video game is overpaid. $100,000 should be enough.

    It should be noted that even the minimum of around $70,000 is still a lot of money if players receive food and accommodation at the same time.

    Especially when the performances are so weak and the money is invested incorrectly: US teams would rather put the sponsor money into buying “worn-out” Europeans and South Koreans than develop their own talent.

    People there talk about e-sports as a bubble that has burst.

    There is also little sympathy for the players on Twitter. Here we are talking about a healthy “reset” that has become necessary for salaries.

    The e-sports winter continues and is getting colder:

    LoL: E-sports are dying in the USA – 2-time champion is supposedly selling team and laying off everyone

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