Ici Japon Corp Esport to cease operations at the end of 2026

Ici Japon Corp Esport will cease operations at the end of 2026. The French club, known as IJC, announced the decision on Wednesday, October 7, 2026, Sheep Esports reported the same day. Its League of Legends team plays in the LFL, the French league of the game, which it reached in 2025.

The club gave more than one reason. One of them is the league itself, whose future, according to the announcement as Sheep Esports reports it, has become uncertain. The others concern the people who run the club: its chief executive is stepping away from management, and nobody has been found to take his place.

Sheep Esports, August 27, 2024, September 6, 2026 and October 7, 2026.

Why the club is stopping

The explanation came in a video on YouTube in which ElRodess, the co-owner of the project and chief executive of the company behind it, named the difficulties of the LFL as one factor in the decision, and made clear that it was not the only one, according to Sheep Esports.

The second factor is his own departure from the management of the club. The third is the difficulty of finding someone to take over that role. The club has a second co-owner, Benoît Theveny, a French content creator and entrepreneur whose work centers on Japan. Sheep Esports writes that he no longer seems to have the time, given his many activities outside esports, and that the project partly carries his name and the name of his company.

The announcement gives the end of 2026 as the date, which leaves the club in place until the close of the calendar year. It says nothing yet about what happens to the players, the coaches or the rest of the staff once it stops.

From Ascent to Ici Japon Corp

IJC did not begin as a League of Legends team. It grew out of Ascent, a project built around the events of the French streamer Zerator, and around two other games: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the Nintendo fighting game, and Trackmania, the racing game.

In late 2023, Ici Japon, the company of Benoît Theveny, partnered with Ascent, and the combination became Ici Japon Corp Esport. The name joined a media brand about Japan to a competitive structure that already existed.

The link with Japan went beyond the name. In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, IJC signed the player Neo Iwashita, a move that, according to Sheep Esports, strengthened the bridge the club had built between France and Japan. The club also invested in smaller competitive scenes, including outside France, and more recently in the competitive scene of the Pokémon Trading Card Game.

A fast climb in League of Legends

The club entered League of Legends in January 2024, in LFL Division 2, the second tier of the French scene. French League of Legends works with two levels: the LFL at the top and Division 2 below it, linked by an Up and Down, a series played between teams of the two divisions for places in the LFL.

IJC's first year in Division 2 was close to perfect. The club won both splits of the 2024 season, the two halves into which the year is divided, Sheep Esports reported in August 2024. It then went into the Up and Down of September 4 to 6, 2024, with a change in its lineup: it benched the support Raïto and promoted Advienne, a former player of the LEC, Europe's top league, who had first been due to serve as an assistant coach. Its opponents in that series were IziDream, described by Sheep Esports as its rival that year, and Aegis, who were fighting to keep their place in the LFL.

The roster named for the series was Patkica, Hadess, OMON, Deadly and Advienne, with Raïto as substitute. Raïto said the decision was a sporting one, taken with the whole team, though he had no real say in it, and that he hoped the team would still qualify for the LFL. Advienne could have refused the change, Sheep Esports reported, and chose not to, so as to give the other four a better chance of reaching the LFL, and possibly the ERL, the European Regional Leagues, as early as 2025.

The climb worked. IJC played the 2025 season in the LFL, and that same year appeared at the EMEA Masters, the tournament that gathers the best teams of the regional leagues of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Among its notable players, Sheep Esports names whiteinn and OMON, the latter already part of the team that had won Division 2 in 2024.

The LFL is one of those regional leagues, which sit below the LEC, the top league of the region. The EMEA Masters is where their teams meet each other. For the winter edition of 2026, the LFL was one of four leagues that sent four teams each to a tournament of 36, Sheep Esports reported in March. The edition began on March 9, and the French teams went far: Solary, the French champion, came back from two games down to beat MISA Esports 3-2 in the lower-bracket final on April 14 and met Galions, another French team, in the grand final. The tournament also carried a place in a qualifier against LEC teams for the Esports World Cup, reserved for its two best teams that were not academy sides, and Solary's win sent it there.

A league whose next season has not been announced

The reason IJC gives about the league rests on a simple fact: no one has yet said what the LFL will look like in 2027. Sheep Esports notes that the league has not announced whether it will continue next year, who would run it, or in what format.

The club does not present that uncertainty as the only cause: ElRodess placed his own departure and the search for a successor beside it.

IJC is not the first team to leave with these questions open. In early September, Joblife, the French organization led by the streamer Tomy, announced the end of its League of Legends division, after five years on the game, Sheep Esports reported on September 6. The outlet wrote that the decision had already been taken inside the organization, and that Tomy had added leaving League of Legends to the donation goals of his ZEvent stream, at the €10,000 mark. Joblife had spent three years in Division 2 before its promotion in 2025, and two years in the LFL. Across six splits there, it reached the playoffs twice, with a best finish of fifth to sixth place. It remains active in Valorant, where it played Stage 2 of the VCT EMEA in 2026 and fields a team in the Game Changers EMEA circuit, and in Clash Royale, which it entered in April 2026 with the French player Viiper.

The clubs that left before

Sheep Esports listed, in its report on Joblife, the clubs that had already left the French League of Legends scene before it. The departures go back three years.

Aegis, on that list, is one of the two clubs IJC faced in its Up and Down of 2024: it played that series to keep its LFL place, and left the scene at the end of the same year. Sheep Esports wrote in its Joblife report that the French organization would not be the last to go. A month later, IJC follows, with the rest of the year still to play before its own closure.

The pattern is not limited to France. In June, MISA Esports closed its League of Legends section after a third straight title in the TCL, the Turkish Championship League, another of the European regional leagues, Sheep Esports reported on June 19. In that last spring split, MISA won 20 of its 21 games.

What remains of the club's season

The announcement leaves the club running until the end of 2026, and its other activities with it. The Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Trackmania roots of Ascent, the signing of Neo Iwashita and the Pokémon Trading Card Game project all belong to the same structure, and the closure covers the club as a whole, not only its League of Legends team.

For the LFL, the decision removes one more team from a league that has yet to set out its 2027 season. It also closes a project that went from its entry into Division 2 in January 2024 to the LFL and the EMEA Masters in under two years.

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