Esports Foundation names the 40 clubs of its 2026 Club Partner Program

The Esports Foundation published on March 31, 2026, the names of the 40 clubs that make up its Club Partner Program for the year. The release, datelined Riyadh, describes a US$20 million program in its third edition that pays each selected club up to US$1 million, on top of what the Foundation calls strategic guidance and international exposure.

The Foundation is the body behind the Esports World Cup, the multi-game event held each summer in the Saudi capital, and signed its earlier releases as the Esports World Cup Foundation. A club, in its vocabulary, is an esports organization that fields teams in several games at once. The program is not a competition: it is a funding and marketing agreement under which a club is paid to grow and activate its audience around the event.

Eight of the 40 places were filled by direct invitation, on the strength of the final standings of the 2025 Club Championship. The others went through an open application that, according to the release, drew more than 175 applicants from around the world.

Esports Foundation release of March 31, 2026.

The 40 clubs on the list

The Foundation gives the list in alphabetical order, without ranking the clubs and without saying which eight were invited. It runs from 100 Thieves, Cloud9 and Sentinels to T1 and Gen.G, and from G2 Esports, Fnatic and Team Vitality to Edward Gaming, JD Gaming and Weibo Gaming.

The release breaks the selection down by region for seven territories. Europe has the largest group with nine clubs, ahead of China with six and North America with five. Southeast Asia has four, Brazil three, and Latin America and India two each. Those seven groups add up to 31 clubs. The remaining nine are covered by a sentence rather than a count: Türkiye enters the program for the first time, and clubs from Japan, Korea, the Middle East and North Africa and the Commonwealth of Independent States return.

Taken together, the Foundation says, the 40 clubs reach a combined audience of more than 300 million fans. That figure is the Foundation's own.

What a club receives

The headline amount is US$20 million for 40 clubs, which works out to an average of US$500,000 per club if the whole sum is paid. The release sets the ceiling at up to US$1 million for a single club, so the split is not equal.

The program page explains why. The money comes in two parts. The first is base funding: a six-figure amount that every accepted club receives to develop its organization and to activate its brand, its players and its fans ahead of the Esports World Cup 2026. The second is merit-based: additional payments tied to activities, campaigns and what the Foundation calls bounties, measured on performance metrics. According to the same page, that second part depends on how far a club's following and fan engagement grow before and during the event.

The page lists two further benefits that are not cash. Partner clubs get priority access to the Foundation's Superfan Program, which brings supporters to Riyadh, and they are offered collaboration with the Foundation throughout the year.

In return, the release says, clubs are expected to grow and activate their audiences across the season through content, campaigns and live experiences. It gives last year's output as a measure of what that means: in 2025 the partner clubs produced more than 300 million campaign views and engaged over 10 million fans through more than 370 initiatives. They also hosted more than 130 watch parties, which are public screenings of matches organized for fans, and brought over 2,000 Superfans to the arenas of the 2025 event.

How the 40 places were filled

Selection is annual. The Foundation says it reviews each club's competitive results, its fan engagement, its strategic vision and the marketing proposals it submits. No club holds a permanent place: the program page states that every participating club has to apply again each year.

For this edition, applications opened on November 18, 2025, and closed on December 18, 2025, according to the program page, which estimates that filling in the form takes about an hour. The page describes the process in three phases.

The eligibility rules narrow the field before that review starts. An applicant has to be a private business entity registered in its own jurisdiction. It needs a history of competing in several games, with results in domestic and international tournaments, and it needs strong brand equity and a substantial following on social media. Clubs apply alone: the page states that consortiums and partnered applications are not accepted.

With eight places taken by invitation, 32 were left for the open route. More than 175 applicants for 32 places means that fewer than one in five was accepted.

What membership does not give

The release makes the point directly, and the program page repeats it in its list of questions and answers, where the Foundation writes that the program gives no competitive advantage in the tournament. Partner clubs and other clubs play under the same rules.

The separation matters because the two things are easy to confuse. The Club Partner Program pays for audience work. The prize money of the event is a different pool, earned on results, and open to every club that qualifies.

Three editions, more than US$100 million

The Foundation counts the 2026 list as the third edition of the program, which its program page dates back to a launch in 2023. In its first edition the program had 30 clubs. A Foundation release on the 2025 edition said that 22 of those 30 had been invited directly and eight chosen by application, and announced the move from 30 to 40 clubs with US$20 million behind it. The 2026 edition keeps both of those figures and reverses the first proportion: eight invitations, 32 places by application.

That earlier release named China, Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa as the regions the program wanted to reach. The current program page names India, China, Southeast Asia and Latin America. India has two clubs in the 2026 selection.

Across the Club Partner Program and the Club Championship together, the Foundation says it has distributed more than US$100 million to clubs over the past three years. The sum mixes two kinds of payment: program funding, which rewards marketing work, and Club Championship prize money, which rewards results.

The release carries statements from both sides of the agreement. Joe Marsh, chief executive of T1, said the program gives the club a platform to build around its players and the moments of its season. Hans Jagnow, the Foundation's director for clubs, national teams and players relations, said the program reaches fans worldwide and changes the way they experience esports.

The Club Championship behind the invitations

The eight direct invitations come from the Club Championship, the ranking that sets the Esports World Cup apart from a single-game tournament. Clubs score points according to where their teams finish in each game, and the club with the best total across games takes the title.

Sheep Esports reported on August 22, 2025, that Team Falcons had secured the 2025 title with 4,900 points, four days before the end of the event, and with it a first prize of US$7 million. At that point Team Liquid stood on 4,200 points and Team Vitality on 4,050, with Virtus.pro and Twisted Minds also in the top five. The outlet noted that Falcons had competed in 21 of the 25 games of the event. It also set out the conditions of the ranking: a club needed a top-eight finish in at least two tournaments to be classified, and at least one tournament win to take the title.

All five of those clubs are on the 2026 partner list.

What comes next in Riyadh

The Esports World Cup 2026 runs from July 6 to August 23 in Riyadh, over seven weeks, according to the Foundation's release of January 20, 2026. It holds 25 tournaments across 24 games, among them Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, League of Legends, VALORANT, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Rocket League, Fortnite and EA Sports FC 26. The Foundation expects more than 2,000 players and 200 clubs from over 100 countries.

The total prize pool is US$75 million. Of that, US$30 million goes to the Club Championship, US$3 million more than in 2025, shared among the top 24 clubs, with US$7 million for the Club Champion. The individual game championships carry a combined total of more than US$39 million.

The Foundation expects 200 clubs and 40 are partners, so most of the clubs that travel to Riyadh will do so outside the program. For the 40, the months before July are the period the merit-based funding measures: the growth of their following and of fan engagement before and during the event. The qualifiers that decide which of them actually play, game by game, run on a separate track. The March 31 release mentions those of VALORANT, FATAL FURY, Street Fighter 6, Trackmania and Call of Duty: Warzone among the Road to EWC events.

Then the cycle starts again. Under the annual re-application rule, every one of the 40 clubs will have to apply once more to be part of a fourth edition.

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