LEC sets its 2026 awards: who votes for MVP, All Pro and Rookie

The players of the LEC will vote for each other's awards in 2026, next to their coaches, journalists and the people who broadcast the league. Riot Games, which runs the European League of Legends league, published the list of the season's individual awards on February 23, with the method of each vote. The first trophy comes within the week: a Finals MVP, the award for the most valuable player of a final, is handed out after the last series of LEC Versus on March 1.

The page, signed by the LoL Esports staff, names four kinds of award and no winner. It sets who may vote, who may be voted for and when each ballot is held. Riot presents the whole as larger than before. "This season will feature a broader awards program, particularly in Summer!" the publisher wrote.

Riot Games, 2026 LEC awards page, February 23, 2026; the total of eight is the count given by Sheep Esports the same day.

Four awards, eight trophies

The LEC year has three competitions, according to the format update Riot published on October 23, 2025: LEC Versus at the start of the year, then the Spring Split and the Summer Split. The awards are spread across them unevenly.

A Finals MVP is given after every championship match, so three times in the year. A Season MVP rewards the outstanding player of a regular season, the phase in which every team meets every other before the playoffs; it exists in the Spring Split and the Summer Split only. The All Pro vote names the best player in each of the five roles of a League of Legends team, and it too is held in Spring and in Summer. The Rookie of the Year, the award for the best newcomer, is given once, at the end of the Summer Split.

Three Finals MVPs, two Season MVPs, two All Pro votes and one Rookie of the Year make eight trophies. Sheep Esports, which reported the announcement the same day, counted them the same way: six individual distinctions and two All Pro teams.

How the Season MVP and All Pro ballots work

The two regular-season awards share one electorate. Riot lists it in this order: professional players, the staff of professional teams, journalists, broadcast partners and broadcast talent, the casters and analysts who appear on the show. Broadcast partners are the channels that carry the league in other languages.

For the Season MVP, each voter names three candidates. The player with the most votes wins, the page says. It does not say whether a first place on a ballot weighs more than a third, and it gives no number of voters.

The All Pro vote repeats the exercise five times, once per role: top lane, jungle, mid lane, bot lane and support. Each voter chooses three players per role. The result is three complete line-ups of five, ranked by votes. The first, which Riot calls Team 1, gathers the winner of each role and is announced during the playoffs of the split. The page does not say when the second and third line-ups are made public.

Both votes have the same calendar and the same threshold. They are held once the regular season is over and before the first playoff series, so a playoff run plays no part in them. A player must have appeared in at least six regular-season games to be a candidate.

The threshold can be set against the length of a split. Riot's October update describes the Spring and Summer regular seasons as a single round robin of best-of-three series among the ten teams of the league, so each team plays nine series. A best-of-three ends when one team has won two games and lasts two or three games. Nine series therefore make between 18 and 27 games for each team, and six games are a third of the shortest possible season.

The Finals MVP is voted right after the final

The Finals MVP works on another clock. The votes are collected shortly after the nexus falls, Riot writes; the nexus is the structure in each base whose destruction ends a game of League of Legends. That short delay is the reason the publisher gives for a panel smaller than the one of the season awards.

That panel is made of journalists, casters, broadcast partners, co-streamers and analysts. A co-streamer is a content creator allowed to show the official broadcast on a personal channel with their own commentary. The questions and answers at the foot of the page describe the group more closely: the analysts and casters on the desk that day, journalists and reporters who actively cover the LEC, and the broadcast partners covering the event in other languages.

The field of candidates is narrow by design. Every player of the winning team is eligible, and nobody else: the award goes to the best individual performer among the champions. Professional players and team staff, who vote for the season awards, are not listed among the voters of this one.

One Rookie of the Year, with stricter criteria

The newcomer award is the one with the longest rulebook. To be eligible, a player has to be active in the LEC at the time of the vote, to have played in at least two of the three competitions of 2026, and to have appeared in at least 50 percent of the scheduled games of each of them.

Three further conditions close the door on players who are no longer beginners. A player may take part in only one Rookie vote in a career. A player who has taken part in a Rookie vote in another region is out. So is a player who has played more than four splits, the word the league uses for each of its competitions in a year.

Riot's own example fits the limit exactly. A player who arrived in the Summer Split of 2025 and plays the three competitions of 2026 reaches the vote with four splits played, the most the rule allows.

The panel is the one that votes for the Season MVP: players, team staff, journalists, broadcast partners and broadcast talent. Sheep Esports described the criteria as more clearly defined than a year ago, and named Caliste as the player who precedes this year's winner.

Why LEC Versus has only a Finals MVP

LEC Versus, which ends this week, is the exception of the calendar: it has a Finals MVP and neither a Season MVP nor an All Pro vote. Riot explains it by the shape of the competition. The time between the winter break and First Stand, the first international tournament of the year, is short, the regular season is condensed, and players have fewer occasions to show their level.

The guide Riot published on December 16, 2025, gives the measure of it. LEC Versus started on January 17 with twelve teams, the ten of the league and two guests from the regional leagues below it, Los Ratones and Karmine Corp Blue. Its regular phase was a single round robin of best-of-one meetings over four weeks, which makes eleven games for each team. The top eight went on to a double-elimination bracket, in which a team is out after its second lost series, and the winner takes the only place of the EMEA region, which covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at First Stand.

The final is played away from the Riot Games Arena, the studio where the primer places the matches of the competition. Riot's program of Roadtrips, the weekends the league takes to an arena with one of its teams as host, places the LEC Versus Finals at the Olimpic Arena in Badalona from February 27 to March 1, with Movistar KOI as host.

What changes from 2025

The comparison with last year comes from Sheep Esports. In 2025, the outlet wrote, a single regular-season MVP was named, in the Spring Split, and it went to Upset. One All Pro team was selected, also in Spring. In 2026 both awards exist twice, with a second MVP and a second All Pro vote in Summer, which is where Riot's remark about a broader program in Summer lands.

The number of Finals MVPs does not move: three, as in 2025. Sheep Esports lists last year's winners as Vladi, after Karmine Corp's title at the start of the year, Elyoya in Spring and SkewMond in Summer. The winter competition already had a Finals MVP and nothing else a year ago, the outlet noted.

The Rookie of the Year remains a single award for the whole season. What is new there, in the outlet's reading, is the precision of the criteria.

The calendar of the votes

The first vote is the fastest one. On March 1, shortly after the last game in Badalona, the finals-day panel chooses the first Finals MVP of the year among the players of the new champion.

The two Spring ballots follow. The Season MVP and All Pro votes are held between the end of the Spring regular season and the start of its playoffs, and the first All Pro team is revealed while those playoffs are under way. A second Finals MVP is named after the Spring final. Two of the Spring weekends are already set away from the studio: Riot's Roadtrip program lists Évry-Courcouronnes, in France, from April 24 to 26 with Karmine Corp as host, and Madrid from May 8 to 10 with Movistar KOI.

The Summer Split repeats the three votes and adds the fourth. The Rookie of the Year is announced at its end, once every candidate's season can be counted against the criteria. By then the league will also have filled its international places: the Spring champion and runner-up go to the Mid-Season Invitational, and the top three of the Summer Split go to the World Championship, according to the October format update.

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