In League of Legends we have a wild year ahead of us in 2025: teams made up of streamers, ex-professionals and content creators are now competing in the regional leagues. The German Twitch Frederik “NoWay” Hinteregger (32) is also playing, but the debut didn’t go so well. At least not in terms of play, there are more than enough spectators.
What kind of game was that? The until recently insignificant regional league of the UK and Scandinavia, the NLC, has now started its winter season:
Probably the most exciting team there, Los Ratones played on one side. The team’s coach and founder is the largest LoL streamer in the world, Caedrel. The team is stacked with early top players like Rekkles and Nemesis.
On the other side was the team “NORD” with the German streamer NoWay in the midlane, who at the age of 32 wants to know it again and who is playing competitively again after years as a streamer.
Former German LoL professional is now one of the most successful Twitch streamers – that’s NoWay
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NoWay comes under the wheels on its debut in the NCL
This is how the match went: The outstanding players were the 3 former elite players from Los Ratones: Nemesis in the midlane on Galio, Crownie as ADC on Corki and Rekkles in support. ADC Crownie played a sparkling clean 12-0-5.
None of the three died once, only Baus died six times in the top lane. He is known for his risky game.
At NORD, NoWay actually turned out to be a weak point, he couldn’t get a single kill on Viktor and died 3 times.
There was little to gain for NoWay. To be fair: His opponent Nemesis is 7 years younger, was still All-Pro in Europe in 2020 and is actually a player who can play in the LEC and doesn’t belong in a regional league:
How did NoWay work? The 32-year-old appeared highly concentrated and tense. He consistently stayed in his lane and kept up well with Nemesis there, but was unable to make any impact at the start of the game. It seemed as if NoWay was constantly vibrating under the tension.
When NoWay was at level 9, the already strong ADC Corkie simply picked him up in a 1:1 when he stopped by in the midlane. NoWay seemed surprised at how much damage Crownie’s ADC had already done and was no longer able to stay safe.
At that point, the NORD team, which was talking about itself strongly, was still doing well in the match. But Corki’s kill on NoWay brought Los Ratones to a 5:5 equalizer. From that point on, there was a snowball effect and the match was quickly over in 26 minutes.
Los Ratones got 15 more kills from that point on, but NORD only got two.
Huge rush of spectators for LoL
That was the real success: For months, Los Ratones has been hyped, celebrated and built up as the next biggest thing in LoL. At the start of the league, the match had around 160,000 viewers on English Twitch alone – via the channels of the players who play and stream at the same time.
The match was also broadcast by the league itself and NoWay’s German colleague, Agurin, who streams in English.
Not in the picture is the German Twitch with NoWay itself, which also brought another 25,000 viewers – not nearly as many as Caedrel’s almost 100,000, but still a chunk.
If you add all that up, an actually insignificant regional league game probably has almost 180,000 viewers on Twitch – that’s pretty impressive. This corresponds exactly to the expectations that everyone involved has of this campaign. Let’s see whether this interest in the NCL comes at the expense of the German Prime League. Here NoWay had a bit of a falling out with the league operators: In the German LoL scene there is an ugly clash between the big streamers on Twitch and the league