In this article
Riot Games published the awards of the 2026 LCS Summer Split on September 1: which trophies exist, who votes for them and on which day each result comes out. The page, signed by the LoL Esports staff, names no winner. The LCS is the North American league of League of Legends, and its regular season still has one weekend to run.
The list is longer than the one of the spring. Two awards that cover the whole year, for the best newcomer and for the player who progressed most, join the three kinds handed out in June. The method is unchanged: a panel votes, and the public votes too, with a weight the league states in one sentence.
Five awards on four dates
The league presents the awards as a recognition of the players and coaches who stood out during the Summer Split. A split is the name the league gives to each of its competitions in a year. The results are spread over four dates, one week apart.
The first date, September 10, carries two awards: the Coaching Staff of the Split, which goes to the coaches of one team, and the Most Improved Player of the Year. The three All-Pro Teams follow on September 17. An All-Pro Team is a line-up of five, one player for each of the five roles of the game, and the league names a first, a second and a third. The Rookie of the Year, the award for the best first-year player, is announced on September 24. The Summer Split MVP, the most valuable player, closes the series on October 1.
Related readRiot's 2026 code of conduct: what it asks of LoL and Valorant playersMost of these awards carry the name of the carmaker Kia, the sponsor that also gives its name to the league's final weekend. The page gives no criteria of eligibility for any of them: it does not say how many games a player must have played to be a candidate, or what makes a player a rookie.
| Date | What happens | Who is concerned |
|---|---|---|
| September 4 to 13 | Fan vote | All-Pro Teams, Summer Split MVP, Rookie of the Year |
| September 6 to 9 | Panel ballots | Broadcast team, third-party media, team representatives |
| September 10 | First results | Coaching Staff of the Split, Most Improved Player of the Year |
| September 17 | Second results | First, second and third All-Pro Teams |
| September 24 | Third result | Rookie of the Year |
| October 1 | Last result | Summer Split MVP |
Riot Games, LCS Summer Split awards page, September 1, 2026.
Who fills in a ballot
Riot describes the electorate in one line: the votes come from a panel that includes the LCS broadcast team, third-party media and representatives of the professional teams. The ballots of the panel are open from September 6 to 9, four days.
The page gives neither the number of voters nor their names. The league did publish both for the previous split. The awards page of the Spring Split, dated May 19, links to a document that shows every ballot, line by line, and it gives the measure of the panel.
That document holds 29 ballots. Eight come from the Riot Games broadcast: seven named people, and one ballot filled in collectively under the name of the broadcast team. Eight come from LCS players and eight from LCS coaches, one player and one coach for each of the eight teams of the league: Cloud9, Dignitas, Disguised, FlyQuest, LYON, Sentinels, Shopify Rebellion and Team Liquid. Four come from third-party media. The last line is the fan vote, one ballot in 29, or about 3.4 percent of the total.
Riot Games, 2026 LCS Spring Split ballots, linked from the Spring awards page of May 19, 2026. The Summer panel has not been published.
Each spring ballot had 21 lines. Fifteen were the All-Pro Teams: a top laner, a jungler, a mid laner, a bot laner and a support for the first team, then for the second, then for the third. Three were a first, second and third choice for the Coaching Staff of the Split, and three were the same ranking for the MVP. The document lists the choices of every voter and shows neither a points scale nor totals, so the way the rankings are converted into a result is not public.
Related readRLCS 2026 roster rules: the majority-of-residents requirementThe fans count once
The public votes on the league's fan vote site from September 4 to 13. Three awards are open to it: the All-Pro Teams, the Summer Split MVP and the Rookie of the Year. The two results of September 10, for the coaching staff and the most improved player, are left to the panel.
Every fan vote together weighs as much as one panel member
Riot writes that fan votes count as a single collective ballot. In the spring that ballot was one line among 29: it filled the fifteen All-Pro places and the three MVP choices, and was marked as no vote for the coaching staff.
The two voting windows do not match. The fan vote opens on September 4, before the last weekend of the regular season, and stays open for ten days. The panel votes later and faster, from the last day of that regular season to September 9. The fan vote therefore closes four days after the panel's ballots, on the second day of the playoffs, and three days after the first two results have been announced. Those two results are the ones the public does not vote on.
The spring followed the same idea with other lengths. The panel's ballots were open from May 18 to 25, eight days, and the fan vote from May 20 to 29, ten days. Fans who voted then were entered in a draw for a trip to the LCS Championship, according to the spring page.
The spring calendar was looser in one respect. That page placed the start of the Spring Playoffs on May 23 and 24, so the panel could still vote during the first playoff weekend, and the fans for five days after it. The semifinals and the final were played on June 13 and 14 on the campus of Arizona State University in Tempe, two days after the MVP was named.
Related readVCT 2026 match-day rules: arrival times, pauses and gear for playersWhat the spring vote produced
The results of the spring are on the league's page, and they show what the summer vote will be compared with. Cloud9 won the Coaching Staff of the Split, announced on May 27. The three All-Pro Teams came out on June 4 and the MVP on June 11: Vulcan, the support of Cloud9.
The first All-Pro Team took its five players from three clubs: Thanatos and Vulcan of Cloud9, Saint and Berserker of LYON, and Josedeodo of Team Liquid Alienware, the full name under which Team Liquid plays in the league.
Counted over the three line-ups, the fifteen places went to four of the eight teams. Cloud9, LYON and Team Liquid Alienware each placed four players, and FlyQuest three. No player of Dignitas, Disguised, Sentinels or Shopify Rebellion appeared on any of the three teams.
The spring had three kinds of award: the coaching staff, the All-Pro Teams and the MVP. The summer keeps them and adds the Rookie of the Year and the Most Improved Player of the Year, two awards whose names cover the season rather than the split. The fans gain one vote with them, since the rookie award is on the public ballot.
A vote taken before the playoffs
The calendar of the awards sits on top of the end of the season. Riot's primer for the Summer Split, published on June 15, describes a regular season played as a round robin of best-of-three series: every team meets every other, and a series is won by the first team to take two games. It opened on July 25 and 26, and its seventh and last week is played on September 5 and 6.
Related readWho Are the Women Redefining Esports at EWC 2026?The six best teams go on to the playoffs, which the primer schedules over three weekends: September 12 and 13, September 18 to 20 and September 25 to 27. Riot describes the bracket as an expanded lower-bracket gauntlet and presents it as the test teams face on the road to the Championship.
Set against those dates, the panel finishes voting on September 9, three days before the first playoff series. Its choices can only rest on the regular season. The fans, whose window runs to September 13, are the only voters who can still fill in a ballot once the playoffs have begun.
The LEC, the league of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, works on the same principle with another electorate. The awards page Riot published for it on February 23 lists professional players, team staff, journalists, broadcast partners and broadcast talent as voters, holds the Season MVP and All Pro votes before the playoffs, and asks each voter for three names. It requires at least six regular-season games to be a candidate and mentions no fan ballot. The LCS page states no such threshold.
From the last result to Duluth
The last award, the Summer Split MVP, is announced on October 1. Two days later the final weekend begins. The awards page places the LCS Championship in Duluth, Georgia, and the Summer primer gives the rest: October 3 and 4 at Gas South Arena, a venue in the Atlanta area that the league says is undergoing a major renovation.
More than a title is decided there. The three best teams of the LCS qualify for the World Championship, according to the primer, and the 2026 edition is played in North America. Riot's schedule, published on March 22, has it start on October 15 with a Play-In stage in Los Angeles and end on November 14 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
All the results of the Summer Split awards will be known before the first game in Duluth. The page announces no ceremony and does not say how the trophies are handed over. It also does not say whether the ballots of the summer will be published as those of the spring were.
The name this event could hold, on the bracket and everywhere else.
An example of the format. It does not mean the name is registered, used or endorsed by anyone named in this article.
Discover .esports →The .esports registry publishes Esports Observer, so the whole scene can read its news for free.
