G2 Esports bench Dylan Falco and make Perkz LEC head coach

G2 Esports changed its head coach in the middle of the season, on the evening of a defeat. On Friday, July 10, 2026, the organization announced on X that Dylan Falco was moved to the bench and that Luka "Perkz" Perković would lead the team, Dot Esports and Sheep Esports reported. The post was short. "Perkz will be taking on the Head Coach role starting in EWC," G2 wrote, using the initials of the Esports World Cup.

The announcement came a few hours after G2 lost 3-0 to LYON at the Mid-Season Invitational, the international tournament that Riot Games, the publisher of League of Legends, holds in the middle of the year. It ends a run of five years in which Falco won 11 titles in the LEC, the top league of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It also hands the team to a former G2 player who has never been its head coach.

What G2 said, in two messages

The first message gave the decision and nothing else. Dot Esports noted on Friday that G2 had offered no detailed explanation, and that the change took effect at once. It was abrupt enough that some fans first wondered whether the post was a joke, Sheep Esports wrote. It was not.

The second came the next day from Romain Bigeard, G2's general manager, on his own X account. Sheep Esports reported its content on Saturday, July 11. Bigeard wrote that G2 had added Perkz to the coaching staff after the season's winter competition, because the organization felt the team needed a change to reach a level it had not yet reached. He wrote that G2 could not go on with two different coaching visions, and that it had chosen to back Perkz fully as head coach.

He was careful about the man who steps aside. The decision was not a criticism of Falco, Bigeard wrote, describing him as the best Western coach the game has had. Perkz, in his account, was simply the better fit for the present roster.

The two messages leave one point open. G2's word is the bench.

A decision taken hours after MSI

The timing gives the change its meaning. The Mid-Season Invitational, known as MSI, gathered 11 teams in Daejeon, South Korea, from June 28 to July 12, according to Riot Games' schedule. The LEC sends two of them: the finalists of its Spring Split.

G2 arrived as the Spring champion, and its tournament had a high point. On Wednesday, July 8, it beat T1 by three games to one, a result that put G2 in the last four. Two days later, LYON, the North American team, won their series 3-0. Both series were played to three wins, the format known as a best-of-five. G2 won no game in the second, and missed a place in the top three. The tournament went on without it: Riot Games' schedule set the lower final for July 11 and the grand final for July 12, two days after G2's exit.

Dot Esports linked the change to that uneven run. Bigeard's account, as Sheep Esports relays it, points further back. In his telling, the question was which of two ways of coaching the team should follow, and it had been there since Perkz joined the staff.

The season before that defeat was not a poor one by any ordinary measure.

First Stand shows how far the team had gone. Riot Games' format gives the LEC a single place at that tournament, reserved for the winner of LEC Versus, the league's opening competition. G2 held it, and reached the grand final in Brazil after beating Gen.G, a South Korean team, Sheep Esports wrote. A league title, an international final and an international top four in the first half of the year: that is the record on which G2 changed coach.

Eleven titles and a ceiling

The numbers of the Falco years explain both halves of the decision. The Canadian coach joined G2 ahead of the 2022 season, after working for Fnatic and Schalke 04, according to Dot Esports. With G2 he won 11 LEC titles, which makes him the most successful coach in the league's history, Sheep Esports wrote.

Outside Europe the results stopped short of a title. Sheep Esports counts three top-four finishes at MSI, the First Stand final of this year, and a quarterfinal at the 2025 World Championship as the best result at the game's main event. Bigeard's wording about a level the team has yet to reach reads against that record: a team that has won its league 11 times and has gone no further than a final abroad.

Falco was chosen for another bench this year. In April, the Esports Foundation's list of national team coaches for its Esports Nations Cup named him for Canada's League of Legends team, describing him as an LEC stalwart.

A former player in the head coach's seat

G2 has not gone outside for the replacement. Perkz is one of the best-known players in the club's history, and both outlets recall why. He joined as a rookie mid laner when G2 was promoted to the European league, and won the title in his first split, in 2016, Sheep Esports wrote. In 2019 he moved from the mid lane to the AD carry position so that G2 could sign Caps, who is still the team's leading player. That team won MSI and reached the final of the World Championship. He later played for other teams in Europe and North America, Dot Esports added.

His coaching record is short. Dot Esports describes his job before Friday as positional coach, a staff member who works with players on their individual roles, and calls this his first time as G2's head coach. In League of Legends the head coach carries the draft, the phase before each game in which the two teams choose and ban champions in turn, and sets the plan for the series. Perkz takes that on after a short time on the staff: Bigeard dates his arrival after the Winter Split.

For the players the faces do not change, only the order between them. The five keep a coach they have worked with since the spring. The voice that decides is no longer the one that led them to the Spring title.

Paris first, then the Summer Split

The new head coach has little time. His first event is the Esports World Cup, the multi-game tournament held this year in Paris, where G2 start on Wednesday, July 15, according to Sheep Esports. That leaves G2 a few days between its last series in Daejeon and its first under Perkz.

The league follows at once, and in the same city. The LEC Summer Split opens with a roadtrip, a round hosted by one of the league's teams. Karmine Corp receives G2, Movistar KOI and Team Vitality at the Adidas Arena in Paris from July 24 to 26, Sheep Esports reported on May 11. G2 plays Movistar KOI on the Friday, Team Vitality on the Saturday and Karmine Corp on the Sunday. Six series are scheduled over the weekend, two a day.

The setting is a large one for a first league weekend. It is the fourth roadtrip of the 2026 season, by the same report, and the arena is reported to hold between 8,000 and 10,000 spectators for sporting events. The outlet described the three guests, with the host, as the strongest teams of the Spring Split, which means Perkz's first LEC opponents as head coach are the league's other leading sides.

Those are three of the nine series of G2's regular season. Summer uses the same format as Spring, under the 2026 format Riot Games published for the league: ten teams, a single round robin of best-of-three series, then playoffs for the top six, played as best-of-fives.

What the Summer Split decides

The stake of the split is the one that matters most to an organization built to win abroad. Under Riot Games' format, the top three teams of the LEC Summer Split qualify for Worlds, the world championship of League of Legends. The announcement names the Summer standings as the league's route to the tournament.

Worlds will be played from October 15 to November 14, with 19 teams, Riot Games announced in March. Three of the places belong to the LEC. Two more are attached to MSI, one for its champion and one for the region of the runner-up.

That is the test G2 has set its new head coach. By its general manager's account, the club changed coach to reach a level it had not yet reached. To play at Worlds in October, it first has to finish in the top three of its own league, over nine series and a playoff bracket, with a head coach in his first weeks in the job.

For Falco, the announcement settles only the role he no longer holds. G2 has said he is on the bench, his general manager has praised him in public, and neither has said what comes after.

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