When you look upon the long history of League eSports, you will notice a trend: about three out of four of the big regions have won at least one championship. These three regions are the LEC in Europe, the LCK in Korea, and the LPL in China.

The missing region in this case, the one that has yet to win a World Championship, is the LCS in the North American region.

It’s an interesting thought, given that the birthplace of Riot Games and one of the largest MOBAs to date is in the same region that has yet to take home the Summoner’s Cup. Is it an issue of competitiveness? Is it an issue of resources?

Find out our thoughts below on why NA has yet to win a championship, and why now of all times do they suddenly have a fighting chance.

The eSports Scene

Let’s first address the elephant in the room: the type of games American players tend to play are primarily shooting games.

Statistics on US video game sales in the United States in 2018 have shown that the top two genres with the most sales are Action games and Shooter games, beating Role-playing games by a huge margin.

Furthermore, another statistic on the top eSports games based on 2019 tournament prize pools were topped by Fortnite with over 64 million USD, with Dota 2 second with over 46 million USD, and Counter Strike: Global Offensive with over 21 million USD. League of Legends only sat at over 9 million USD, next to Overwatch and mobile game Arena of Valor.

League of Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game which is rooted from the real-time strategy (RTS) genre present in games like Starcraft.

Unfortunately, these genres do not fly well with the American playerbase given that the reigning gaming corporations are the companies that made Call of Duty, Fortnite, Apex Legends, and other shooters and battle royale games.

The Playerbase

In 2017, based on the Riot API data gathered, the totality of the North American playerbase only sits at the top 4 out of the top 11 Riot-based servers, being beaten by Europe West, Korea, and Europe Nordic & East regions.

With a sample size of over 10 million League players, NA made up 10.8% or over 1 million players. The aforementioned regions had over 24.9%, 23.5%, and 13.6% of players respectively.

Comparing to the number of registered Fortnite users worldwide which went over 30 million, League of Legends is looking to be unpopular in terms of the playerbase in this region.

The Culture

If you’re a regular consumer of League of Legends media, you can never avoid the other elephant in the room that is the toxicity prevalent in the game, inside and outside.

A survey by Reddit user Celianna examined the community’s toxic culture with a survey among 3,784 respondents. The results were not unexpected, but the values were extremely surprising.

Over 98% of respondents have been flamed in-game, and 75% of them were flamed multiple times. In addition, 79% of players were harassed post-game, and 46% were harassed multiple times. Given the percentages, you can essentially not be exposed to toxicity unless you type /mute all at the risk of eliminating actual team communication.

There is yet to have a study—published or otherwise—that determines regional toxicity due to how biased the scores can turn out to be, but with Celianna’s study, one can ascertain that the League of Legends community is overall toxic.

Taking into consideration the playerbase mentioned above, it is certain that North America has to be included in the samples taken by the avid Redditor.

Concluding Thoughts

These points must have answered and have given context on why American League eSports seem to fall behind compared to other Riot-based regions.

Once again, the question is: Does North America have a shot at winning Worlds?

Be surprised: there could be.

GG Esports’ power rankings have put one of NA’s longstanding teams, Cloud 9, to second place. They are behind Top Esports, LPL’s rising stars, and above JD Gaming, the 2020 Spring Split champions. Imagine being ranked between these two powerhouses that demonstrated their League prowess in the recent Mid-Season Cup.

Cloud 9 won their domestic tournament’s Spring Season with an outstanding 94% winrate, and then proceeded to playoffs and beat Evil Geniuses 3-1 during Round 2, then FlyQuest 3-0 in the finals.

North America has not been in the limelight for an entire decade, and from my history of playing League of Legends, this is the first time I’ve ever heard of an NA team breaking records like no other.

Nothing is certain, and we have yet to see Cloud 9 play against the other regions this season due to the cancelled Mid-Season Invitational. We may be surprised by the time Worlds 2020 will start later this year, so keep an eye on this NA underdog.