Esports World Cup 2026 names Paris Expo Porte de Versailles as its home

The Esports World Cup now has an address in Paris. In a press release dated Wednesday, May 27, 2026, the Esports Foundation confirmed Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, in the French capital, as the official venue of its 2026 edition, which runs from July 6 to August 23. The same release opened the calendar of ticket sales: passes for all 25 competitions go on sale on Friday, May 29.

The announcement closes the most visible gap left by the decision of May 20, when the foundation confirmed that the festival was leaving Riyadh for Paris but had not yet said where in the city it would be played. One building will now carry the whole competition program, from the first matches of the opening week to the last final.

Esports Foundation press releases of January 20 and May 27, 2026.

One site for the whole festival

The release gives Paris Expo Porte de Versailles four jobs at once. The venue is to host the competition arenas, the broadcast operations, the fan activations and what the foundation calls its festival experiences. In other words, the stages where the teams play, the production that sends the matches to viewers around the world and the side attractions for visitors are all planned on the same grounds.

That matters because of how the event is built. The Esports World Cup is not a single tournament but a festival of tournaments: about two dozen games each crown their own champion over seven weeks, with several of those championships running in parallel. When the foundation set out its plan for Riyadh in January, it described competitions staged across seven weeks and multiple arenas. In Paris those arenas now sit inside one venue.

The scale of what moves in is close to the one announced at the start of the year. The May 27 release counts more than 2,000 players from more than 200 clubs, the foundation's word for esports organizations, coming from over 100 countries. In January the foundation had written of about 200 clubs, and of 25 tournaments across 24 games, Fortnite and Trackmania among the new additions.

The release does not list the halls that will be used, the number of seats in each arena or the layout of the site. It names the building, what the building will hold and how the tickets will be sold.

Why this building

The foundation presents its choice through what the venue has already hosted, and three references stand out in its release.

The first is Paris Games Week, which the venue has hosted since 2010. The site is therefore not new to large crowds that come for video games.

The second is closer to the event itself. The venue hosted the TFT Open in 2025, a competition of Teamfight Tactics. Teamfight Tactics is also on the 2026 program of the Esports World Cup, which makes the building a known ground for at least one of the competitions it will receive this summer.

The third is the largest in scale. According to the foundation, Paris Expo Porte de Versailles was the largest venue of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The release uses the reference to place the esports festival in a building already used to a multi-week sporting event with an international audience.

For the organizer, the choice of a single large site also answers a practical question raised on May 20. On that day the organizer told HLTV that operational details for the new venues, along with broadcast scheduling adapted to European time zones, would be communicated in the coming days. The May 27 release settles the venue; the broadcast schedule is not part of it.

How the tickets work

The foundation sells access to Paris game by game. Each pass is tied to one title, and the release describes four products.

The Premium goodie bag holds a collector coin, a tote bag and a T-shirt, the release says. The Final Day Seating Zones apply to the championship matches of four games only: Valorant, League of Legends, Rocket League and Counter-Strike 2. Those are the titles for which the foundation sells a seat in a given tier for the deciding day, rather than access to the whole tournament.

A limited number of Early Bird tickets will be available, the foundation adds, without saying how many or at what price. Sales open on Friday, May 29, on the event's own ticketing page.

From weekly passes in Riyadh to game passes in Paris

The Paris offer differs in its logic from the one first put on sale for Riyadh. In its release of January 20, the foundation announced that tickets for the 2026 edition would be available from January 22. Its Early Bird range then included Weekly Access Passes, Premium Tournament Passes and Hospitality Packages, sold through five international ticketing partners: Webook, Platinumlist, Damai, Maiseat and Tixr. The same release presented the Esports Embassy as the event's premium on-site hospitality destination.

In the Paris range announced on May 27, the weekly pass does not appear. Access is organized around one game, either for its whole tournament or for one day, and the hospitality packages are not listed. The Premium Tournament Pass is the product that keeps its name from one plan to the other. The release does not say what happens to tickets bought for Riyadh between January and May.

The comparison with 2025 shows what the organizer is used to handling. According to its January release, the 2025 edition and its festival welcomed more than 3 million visitors over seven weeks in Riyadh, and the competitions reached 750 million viewers worldwide, with 350 million hours watched and a peak of 7.98 million people watching at the same moment during the League of Legends tournament.

The calendar inside the venue

The release also lays out the competition calendar game by game. Read week by week, it fills the building from Tuesday, July 7, to Sunday, August 23.

Some competitions straddle two weeks. Dota 2 is listed from July 7 to 12 and again from July 14 to 19, the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang Mid Season Cup runs across weeks three and four, and the PUBG Mobile World Cup has a first week from August 6 to 9 and a second from August 11 to 16. The FC Pro World Championship is played from July 22 to 26, and the Apex Legends event is the playoffs of the first split of the sixth year of the Apex Legends Global Series, from July 7 to 11.

The four games with Final Day Seating Zones fall at different moments. Valorant plays from July 9 to 12 in the first week and League of Legends from July 15 to 19 in the second. Rocket League follows from August 12 to 16, and Counter-Strike 2 closes the festival in the seventh week, with a last day on Sunday, August 23.

What the move to Paris kept

The venue announcement builds on the commitments made a week earlier. When HLTV reported the move on May 20, the Esports World Cup answered the site's query about the competitions. "All announced titles, tournaments, and competitive formats remain unchanged," it said, adding that a slight shift in the tournament schedule was possible.

The May 27 release keeps the frame of January: 25 competitions, seven weeks, more than 2,000 players and a total prize pool of US$75 million, which the foundation calls a record. That total is split in three, according to the January announcement. The Club Championship carries US$30 million for the top 24 clubs, up US$3 million from the year before, with US$7 million for the winner. The game championships share combined allocations of more than US$39 million. The remainder goes to club and player awards, including a most valuable player award for each tournament and the Jafonso Award, which goes to players or clubs that win a game championship after coming through a Last Chance Qualifier, and to qualifying events run by partner publishers and organizers.

What comes next

The first dated step is the opening of ticket sales on Friday, May 29, with a limited stock of Early Bird tickets. The event itself opens on Monday, July 6, and the first competition dates in the release fall the next day, July 7, with Dota 2 and the Apex Legends Global Series playoffs.

Several points remain to be published. The foundation has not yet given ticket prices in its release, the halls and seating capacity of each arena, or the broadcast schedule adapted to European time zones that it promised HLTV on May 20. The festival experiences and fan activations listed among the venue's functions are named but not yet described.

For players and clubs, the calendar now has both its dates and its place. From the opening week in July to the Counter-Strike 2 final on August 23, every championship of the 2026 Esports World Cup is scheduled at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles.

The .esports registry publishes Esports Observer, so the whole scene can read its news for free.