League of Legends: how Riot's Global Revenue Pool pays the teams

A team in a top League of Legends league earns money in many ways: sponsors on its jersey, merchandise, prize money, content. One stream, though, comes straight from the publisher. Since 2024, that stream has run through what Riot Games calls the Global Revenue Pool, or GRP.

The pool replaced a model that most of the scene had learned by heart: teams paid to enter a league and received half of what the league earned. The new one pays them in a different currency, the sales of digital items tied to League of Legends esports, and it splits that money according to rules Riot has set out in public, even though the totals stay private.

This guide explains how the system works as Riot has described it in its own posts: what teams gave up and what they received, how the pool is divided, where its money comes from, which leagues take part, how it has changed the way prize money is paid, and what the publisher has chosen not to publish.

Riot Games, text by John Needham, president of publishing and esports, March 14, 2024.

The deal teams signed in the franchise era

The leagues at the top of League of Legends esports are what the scene calls tier one: the LCK in South Korea, the LPL in China, the LEC for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the top leagues of the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region. Three of them, the LCK, the LCS and the LEC, run on what Riot calls a partnership model, which the scene often calls franchising: a team holds a long-term slot, a place in the league it keeps from one season to the next.

That slot had a price. In a long text published on Thursday, March 14, 2024, John Needham, Riot's president of publishing and esports, set out how the original arrangement worked. Teams committed to pay about US$10 million to take part in a league. In return they received half of certain league revenues. He was precise on that point: it was half of revenues, not of profits.

The same text says where those revenues came from. Most were sponsorship, the deals the league signed with brands for its broadcasts and events. A much smaller part came from media rights, the money broadcasters and platforms pay to show the matches. The aims, as Riot described them, were to give teams a long-term place in a league, to tie their interests to the league's own, and to let them share in its success.

For a team, the bargain was simple to read: a large participation commitment bought a seat in the league and a claim on its commercial income.

Why Riot changed the model

According to Needham's text, it did not grow fast enough. Revenue growth did not catch up with cost growth, and the cash reserves of the teams ran dry. Access to capital, the investors' money that had carried many organizations through the expansion years, also became harder to find. Leagues and teams, he wrote, were too dependent on sponsorship, a market that slowed when the economy weakened after the pandemic years.

Riot had already tried to soften the model before replacing it. The text lists what the publisher did: it applied minimum guarantees on league revenues, set well above the share teams were actually owed; it paid revenue shares earlier than planned; and it deferred the participation fees and spread them out over a longer period. It also introduced financial policies in several regional leagues to encourage spending at a scale teams could sustain.

The publisher placed the change inside its own difficulties. The same text mentions that Riot cut 11% of its workforce in January 2024, and states that the company invests hundreds of millions of US dollars a year in League of Legends esports. Riot also pointed to audience growth in 2023: average minute audience, the number of people watching at an average moment of a broadcast, rose 58% at MSI, 65% at Worlds and 16% across the regional leagues.

Riot's text set that audience growth beside revenue that had not kept pace with costs. The answer it proposed was to change what teams are paid from.

What teams receive now: a slot, a stipend and a share

The new partnership model covers three leagues by name in Riot's 2024 text: the LCK, the LCS and the LEC. Teams in those leagues keep their rights to their slots. What changes is the money that comes with them.

Each team receives two things. The first is a fixed stipend, a set payment from Riot whose amount the publisher did not publish. The second is a share of the revenue from what Riot calls League of Legends esports digital content sales, with content tied to MSI and Worlds, emotes and Worlds winner skins among the examples it gave. That revenue is gathered into the Global Revenue Pool.

Riot gave two reasons for building the model on digital sales. In its reading, they hold up better in an economic downturn than sponsorship does, and they have a higher ceiling, because sponsorship is limited by the number of slots a league can sell, the categories of brands it can sign and how far it can reach into a market. The second reason is practical: Riot wrote that separate sponsorship operations tend to produce conflicting terms or rights, while shared digital revenue lets teams and leagues join forces to maximize sales.

The publisher added three commitments on its own side. It said it would raise the standard percentage of esports revenue it shares, without giving the figure; release more League of Legends esports digital content each season; and contribute 50% of its other direct revenues, such as sponsorship and media, once it has recovered its annual investment in League of Legends esports.

How the pool is split three ways

The pool is divided into three parts before any team sees a payment. Riot named them shares and gave each its percentage.

The first part is the largest. Half of the pool goes into General Shares, which Riot's text says are allocated to tier-one teams.

The second part rewards winning. The 35% is paid in two tranches, one tied to how a team finishes in its regional league and one tied to where it places at the international events. A team's domestic finish and its international placements are therefore both counted in this part.

The third part rewards popularity. The 15% goes to teams for the fandom they build around their players, their league and their brand.

The split matters because of what came before. Until the change, Riot's text says, only the teams that played at international events, MSI and Worlds, shared in digital revenue: about 20 to 30 teams in a season. Riot said it wanted that revenue to stretch further across the tier-one ecosystem.

Where the pool's money comes from

Riot has never published a list of every product that feeds the pool, but its own announcements name several sources, each with the same mechanism: a share of the proceeds is set aside for the teams or for the pool itself.

Subscriptions are the steadiest source. In January 2025, LoL Esports said that paid subscriptions to its official Twitch channels would keep the standard revenue split between Twitch and its partners, and that Riot would put a portion of its own proceeds into the pool, which it described as supporting leagues and teams. The channels named were LCK Global, the LTA North, LTA South and LTA Español channels of the Americas, the LEC, and the English, Taiwanese and Japanese channels of the LCP. Subscribers get viewing without adverts, chat emotes, badges and in-game rewards when they link their accounts.

The same arrangement has followed the international events. The Worlds 2025 primer, published on September 30, 2025, and the First Stand 2026 primer, published on March 2, 2026, both say that Riot allocates a portion of subscription proceeds to the pool during the tournament.

Skins are the second source. A skin is a cosmetic outfit for one champion, the character a player controls; it changes how the champion looks and does nothing to how it plays. The Worlds 2025 primer said the Kinkou Xin Zhao skin was the first time a piece of seasonal storytelling was tied directly to team revenue sharing. For First Stand 2026, Riot said it would share with LoL Esports teams a portion of the proceeds from Warhounds Senna, sold as a standalone skin and in bundles with borders and chromas, the color variants of a skin, between March 18 and April 15, 2026.

The Hall of Legends is the third. It is an annual honor given by LoL Esports to one professional player, chosen by an independent panel of industry experts, and celebrated in the game with a pass and cosmetic collections. When Uzi was named its second inductee in May 2025, LoL Esports said that inductees and their teams receive a percentage of the revenue from the sale of those passes and bundles, on a prorated basis.

Not every item sold around an event goes to teams. The same Worlds 2025 primer said that all the proceeds of the Panda Pal Lux skin, sold from November 5 to December 3, 2025, would go to the Riot Games Social Impact Fund, with Riot adding twice the amount on top.

Fewer teams, bigger shares

A pool divided among more teams pays each of them less. Riot drew that conclusion itself three months after announcing the model.

In a post of June 11, 2024, LoL Esports said there were too many teams in tier one to support them sustainably, and that its proposal would reduce their number. One of the stated aims was financial sustainability, including better support through the Global Revenue Pool, by making sure its revenue was distributed among fewer teams.

The proposal reorganized the map into five regions: the Americas, the LEC, the LCK, the LPL and the Asia-Pacific region. In the Americas, the LCS and the CBLOL, Brazil's league, were to play as the North and South conferences of a single league, each keeping six of its partnered teams, for eight teams a conference. The Asia-Pacific league was planned with eight teams in total. The same post created a new international event at the start of each season, with one place for each region, and set two places a region at MSI, for ten teams, and a total of 17 teams at Worlds.

The two-conference Americas league, the LTA, was in place for the 2025 season. On September 29, 2025, LoL Esports announced that the LCS and the CBLOL would return as independent leagues in 2026, saying its communities had consistently told it they wanted their leagues back. The post describes the Global Revenue Pool as part of a broader revision of the business model of LoL Esports, meant to give it a stronger path to long-term sustainability, and says Riot saw value in testing new partnership models.

Prize money now comes out of the pool

The pool has also changed where prize money comes from. Riot announced the change in its season start post of January 8, 2026.

From 2026, the prize pools of regional splits, the blocks into which a league season is divided, are removed in the regions that take part in the Global Revenue Pool. Riot's reasoning was that, over time, the sums put into regional prize pools had produced comparatively small payouts for individual players, while the total investment had grown. The money is redirected, the post says, into deeper and more impactful areas, which it did not list.

International prize money stays where it was. The prize pools of First Stand, MSI and Worlds continue to be funded by the GRP, Riot said. Two leagues are left out of the change: the prize pools of the CBLOL and the LCP are not affected, because their partnership models differ.

In those regions, a split title no longer carries a regional prize pool. In the 2024 model, one tranche of the Competitive Shares is tied to regional league standings, and the prize money of the international events is paid from the pool.

The leagues outside the pool

The pool is not the same for every league, and Riot's texts mark the edges clearly.

The LPL, China's league, was not part of the proposal of March 2024. Riot said it was working with the LPL on how its business model might change. The CBLOL and the LCP, the Asia-Pacific league, have partnership models that differ from the others, the January 2026 post says, which is why their prize pools were kept.

That leaves the three leagues named in 2024 as the core of the system: the LCK, the LCS and the LEC, with the LCS restored to its own league from 2026. The Twitch subscriptions of January 2025, though, included channels of every region that was then part of the Americas and of the Pacific, and the international events draw teams from all of them. Riot's public texts do not give the pool's rules league by league.

How the pool feeds into salary rules in the LEC

In the LEC, the revenue a league expects to share also sets a limit on what teams spend on players. The league's Sporting Financial Regulations, or SFR, announced by LoL Esports on September 28, 2023, define the SFR Spend as the total salaries paid to the five highest-paid players of a team.

A team whose SFR Spend passes a line called the SFR Threshold pays the league 50% of the excess as a fee, and 100% of the part above 150% of the threshold. The floor, the lower line, sits at half the threshold. Half of the fees collected goes to the LEC teams that respect both lines, and half supports the second tier of League of Legends in the region.

The link to revenue is in how the threshold is set. Among the factors the LEC listed are the salaries of its players and the League Revenue Pool of the current year and of the years forecast. The stated aims were long-term financial stability, competitive balance, and an environment that players, teams and the league can sustain. The first cycle ran from Tuesday, November 21, 2023 to Monday, November 18, 2024, the dates on which LEC contracts for the 2024 season began and ended.

The LEC rules are the league's own. Other leagues set their own player spending rules, and the LEC thresholds do not carry over to them.

What Riot does not publish

The model is public in its structure and private in its numbers. None of the Riot posts on the model, from March 2024 to March 2026, gives the amount of the fixed stipend, the size of the Global Revenue Pool in any season, the percentage of each product's sales that goes into it, or what any team received from it.

The same is true of the commitments Riot made in 2024. The higher standard revenue share it promised has no published figure, and the 50% of other direct revenues depends on a condition, the recovery of Riot's annual investment in League of Legends esports, whose amount Riot has described only as hundreds of millions of US dollars a year.

Riot's other team game shows that the publisher can publish a total when it chooses to. On its Valorant esports pages, Riot said fans had helped generate over US$44 million for partnered teams through esports cosmetics in 2024, and that it shared US$100 million with VCT teams in 2025. The Valorant system has its own items and its own rules, and those figures say nothing about League of Legends. No equivalent total has been published for the League of Legends pool.

What the model means for a team's budget

Put together, the texts describe a team income built from layers with different risks. The stipend is fixed and comes from Riot. The General Shares depend only on being a tier-one team, and so on the size of the pool. The Competitive Shares depend on results at home and abroad. The Fandom Shares depend on how much fans engage with the team and its players. Prize money at First Stand, MSI and Worlds comes out of the same pool.

Each layer moves with something different. A strong season raises the competitive part; a popular roster raises the fandom part; a good year of digital sales raises all three, because every share is a percentage of the same pool.

The direction of the money has changed. Under the franchise model, teams paid in and waited for league revenue to grow. Under the 2024 model, they are paid from what fans spend on League of Legends esports content, and their own results and following decide a part of how much reaches them.

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