LEC Spring 2026: best-of-three season, two Roadtrips, no Monday crowd

The Monday match days of the next LEC regular season in Berlin will be played in front of empty seats. Riot Games, which runs the European League of Legends league, published its guide to the 2026 Spring Split on March 6, three weeks before the first series on Saturday, March 28. The format is the one used a year ago, and the changes are around it: Mondays in Berlin lose their live audience, a new rule changes what a team chooses before each game, and two weekends leave the studio for arenas in Spain and France.

At the end of the split, two teams will have earned a place at the Mid-Season Invitational, the international tournament of the middle of the year, which is held in Daejeon, South Korea.

The format returns from last year

Riot's guide describes a regular season in a single round robin: every team meets every other team once. It lasts seven weeks, and every meeting is a best-of-three, a series that ends when one team has won two games.

The league has ten teams in the Spring Split, the ten partner organizations of the LEC, according to the format update Riot published on October 23, 2025. Ten teams meeting once make 45 series in all. The match-day pattern in the guide adds up to the same number: three weeks of seven series and four weeks of six.

The top six of the regular season then enter the playoffs, where every series is a best-of-five, won with three games. The bracket is a double elimination, in which a team is out after its second lost series. Riot's guide ties that choice to what is at stake, the two places at the Mid-Season Invitational.

None of this is new. The October update had already said that both the Spring and the Summer Split of 2026 would copy the Spring format of 2025, a decision it presented as a response to feedback from the community, and it summed up the regular season in a few words: no best-of-ones and no best-of-twos. It added a practical reason. A format that stays the same from one split to the next gives a predictable calendar, and that makes it easier to take match weekends on the road.

From March 28 to the final on June 7

The regular season is played at the Riot Games Arena in Berlin, from Saturday to Monday. A normal match day has two best-of-three series and starts at 17:00 local time. On the Saturdays of the first three weeks there are three series instead of two, and the broadcast starts at 14:00. Riot's guide points out that the clocks move forward in Germany on March 29, the day after the opening series.

The playoffs keep the Saturday-to-Monday rhythm, with a single best-of-five on each match day. Their first series is on Saturday, May 23, at 17:00, and the last two fall on Saturday, June 6, and Sunday, June 7.

Tickets for the Riot Games Arena cost €15 each, and tickets for the Finals between €20 and €30, according to the guide, which says they are sold through the league's own ticket shop.

Why Mondays lose their audience

The change that concerns Berlin's regulars is the Monday. During the regular season, Monday match days will no longer have a live audience, Riot wrote. The series are still played and broadcast; only the seats stay empty.

The league gives two reasons, both about money and attendance. Monday shows have consistently drawn fewer people to the arena than the other days, and the cost of producing a show is the same whatever the number of tickets sold.

Riot sets the decision next to its other choices for 2026. The guide recalls that the league added matches with the new format of the Summer Split and raised the number of Roadtrips to five, and says that those improvements required adjustments elsewhere.

The measure is written for the regular season. The guide says nothing of the Mondays of the playoffs.

First Selection changes the choice before each game

The Spring Split is played under a rule that Riot calls First Selection, in force in 2026 at every regional and international League of Legends event the publisher runs.

Until now, a team that had earned side selection chose which side of the map it would play on, Blue or Red. With First Selection, that team makes one choice out of two. It can pick its side, as before. Or it can decide whether it picks first or second in the draft, the phase before each game in which the two teams take turns choosing and banning champions, the characters they will play. The opponent then takes the option that is left, Riot explained when it presented the rule on January 8.

The publisher gave its reasoning in the same text. Its analysis had found a variance in win rates between the two sides, and the change followed a review of data and feedback from professional teams. Making one side stronger would not have fixed what caused the gap, Riot wrote, so it chose to give teams more control over their own start to the game. The rule applies in all regions from the start of the 2026 season, and Riot said it would watch its effects through the year.

Madrid and Évry-Courcouronnes host the Roadtrips

A Roadtrip is an LEC weekend taken out of the Berlin studio and played in an arena, with one of the league's teams as host. Riot's presentation of the 2026 program, dated January 15, describes the idea: the host team chooses the place and shapes the event around its own supporters.

Two of them fall in the Spring Split. Movistar KOI host one at the Madrid Arena, in Spain. Karmine Corp host the other at Les Arènes de Grand Paris Sud, in Évry-Courcouronnes, in France. Both run from Friday to Sunday on weekends of the regular season, the Spring guide says, where a Berlin weekend runs from Saturday to Monday.

The dates of the two Spring events come from that January announcement. The guide of March 6 confirms the venues and the hosts and says that more details will be shared soon.

The 2026 program is larger than a weekend here and there. Riot raised the number of Roadtrips to five and lengthened each of them from two days to three, which makes 15 days of LEC matches away from Berlin. With the Summer Split Finals, whose venue had not been named in January, the league counts six arena events in the year. The first of the five, the LEC Versus Finals, was set in the Barcelona area, which the January text presented as a first visit for the LEC.

Two places in Daejeon

The Spring Split decides who represents the LEC at the Mid-Season Invitational. Riot's October update gives the rule: the Spring champion and the runner-up qualify. The guide speaks of two places and puts a decider on June 6, the day of the lower bracket final. The Split Finals follow on June 7.

Riot announced on January 8 that the tournament would be held in Daejeon, a first for that city, with the venue to be named later.

One European place is settled before the split even starts. The LEC has a single team at First Stand, the first international tournament of the year, and the October update reserved it for the champion of LEC Versus. Riot's guide to First Stand, published on March 2, lists G2 Esports as the LEC's team. The tournament is played from March 16 to 22 in São Paulo, Brazil, and it ends six days before the Spring Split opens.

What happens in São Paulo also weighs on the middle of the year. According to Riot's January text, a region's placing at First Stand affects its seeding at the Mid-Season Invitational, and the region of the winner receives a bye through the Play-In Stage, the opening round of that tournament.

The winter before, the summer after

The Spring Split looks plain next to the competition that preceded it. LEC Versus, which replaced the Winter Split, had twelve teams: the ten of the LEC and two guests from the EMEA Regional Leagues, the national and regional leagues below it, Los Ratones and Karmine Corp Blue. Its first phase, over four weeks, was a single round robin of best-of-ones, single games, with six of them on each match day, according to the guide Riot published on December 16, 2025. Eight teams reached a double-elimination bracket.

The guests were invited for that competition only. Riot's October update specified that they held invitations, not places in the league, and that they would play in their regional leagues and in EMEA Masters during the Spring and Summer Splits. From March 28, the LEC is back to its ten teams and to series of two or three games.

The Summer Split uses the same format: a single round robin of best-of-threes and playoffs of best-of-fives for the top six, according to the October update. Its top three teams qualify for the World Championship, which is held in North America this year.

Before any of that, the next information to come concerns the Roadtrips. Riot's guide says more details on the Madrid and Évry-Courcouronnes weekends will be shared very soon.

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