The NLC will split into UK and Ireland and Nordic leagues from 2027

Northern Europe has had one regional League of Legends league for the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Nordic countries. It will soon have two. In a post titled "A New Chapter for the NLC", published on its esports site on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, Riot Games announced that the Northern League of Legends Championship, the NLC, is being divided into two competitive tracks: one for the UK and Ireland, one for the Nordic countries.

The change is staged. Both tracks keep the NLC name for the rest of 2026, which Riot treats as a transition, and the separation becomes complete next year. "From 2027 onwards, they will evolve into two distinct regional competitions," the post says.

The NLC is one of the thirteen EMEA regional leagues, known as ERLs. They form the level under the LEC, the top European league, and Riot's own season announcement describes their main goal as developing young prospects. It is the tier where academy teams and future professionals play, which is why the way it is organized matters well beyond the eight teams concerned this spring.

What Riot announced on May 12

The post makes four points. The region is split into two tracks. The competitions stay under the NLC banner in 2026 and become two distinct regional competitions from 2027. GameWaves leads operations during the transition. And a shortened Spring Split with eight teams starts on May 25.

Riot presents the split as the continuation of a decision already taken. It recalls that a move toward a decentralized model was announced in late 2024, with more weight given to national competitions and local scenes, and says that after the Winter Split the change is going further.

The reasons given are general. The development of the regional leagues, the post says, has shown growing benefits from the decentralized model, and the new shape is meant to better support long-term sustainability and growth across the region. Riot also lists what it expects in practice: more local competitions, national champions, and live events closer to where players and fans are. The stated priorities for both regions are to develop local talent and to raise the level of play.

The post carries no quote from a named person, no figure on audience or cost, and no detail on how many teams each future league will hold. It does say that teams from both regions will keep competing for a path to EMEA Masters during the transition, and that existing NLC teams will have time to move into the new model.

One banner for the whole region until now

Riot's post looks back at where the league started. "When the NLC was originally created, it brought together the UK, Ireland and Nordics under a single banner," it says.

How that banner was organized is set out in an earlier post on the same site, dated January 1, 2025, which invited players to register for the 2025 spring season. It describes the NLC as the regional league for the Nordics, the UK and Ireland, made of first divisions for the region's best teams and, underneath, five national leagues. Each national league has several divisions for different skill levels.

Four of the five national leagues are Nordic and one covers the UK and Ireland together. The two tracks announced this week follow that line.

The same 2025 post explains how these leagues work for an ordinary team. A roster needs five players, with optional substitutes, and the majority of the team has to be in the country it competes in: a team in the Danish league, to take the post's example, needs at least three players based in Denmark. There is no rank requirement to enter. Matches are played weekly against teams of the same division, a season takes roughly one night a week, and it ends with playoffs that can promote or relegate a team, meaning move it up or down a division.

That is the base of the pyramid in Northern Europe: open national leagues at the bottom, a cross-border top division above them, and European competition above that.

GameWaves runs the transition year

For 2026, Riot hands the running of the NLC to GameWaves. The post describes it as the tournament operator behind Road of Legends, the regional league of the Benelux, and says it will lead NLC operations in partnership with local tournament operators. Those local operators keep running the domestic leagues. The post does not name them, and it does not say who operated the NLC before.

A tournament operator is the company that runs a league. Riot names the operator of a league in the same way elsewhere: its announcement of the 2026 ERL season, dated November 27, 2025, said the Spanish regional league would be overseen by LastLap and Cabal Esports.

That announcement also loosened the common rulebook. Until then, every team in a regional league had to field at least two locally trained representatives, known as LTRs, under a rule shared by all leagues. For 2026, Riot wrote, the leagues are no longer required to apply such a limit and are free to set their own guidelines. The same text spoke of giving operators more flexibility to adapt to regional needs. The division of the NLC into two tracks is a step in the same direction, applied to geography.

An eight-team Spring Split from May 25

The first competition of the new arrangement is short. The NLC 2026 Spring Split starts on Monday, May 25, at 19:00 Central European Summer Time, on the league's Twitch channel. Riot calls its format shortened and interim, chosen to catch up with the schedule of the other regional leagues.

Eight teams take part: Arctic Pandas, DMG Esports, Verdant, Bulldog Esports, LEO, Deer Gaming, Lundqvist Lightside and Ruddy Corporation.

A best-of-one is a match decided by a single game. With eight teams meeting once each, every team plays seven games and the stage holds 28 in all. Three of the eight do not reach the playoffs. In a double-elimination bracket, a team is out only after losing two series, and seeding means the teams that finished higher in the first stage start from a better position. Riot's post does not give the length of the playoff series.

One team comes out of it with something concrete: according to the post, the champion secures a slot at the EMEA Masters Spring event, where it represents Northern Europe.

Catching up with the regional calendar

The word "shortened" is easier to read against the calendar Riot published for all regional leagues last November. Those dates were given as preliminary, with a note that they could vary from one league to the next.

On that calendar, the spring season of a regional league began on March 23. The NLC's begins on May 25, nine weeks later, and the EMEA Masters Spring event it qualifies for was planned to open on June 8, two weeks after the first match.

The Winter event had already pushed the season back slightly. In its primer for EMEA Masters Winter, published on February 26, Riot said the event was longer than before and that the regional Spring Splits would start three days later as a result.

What the league feeds: EMEA Masters and the LEC

EMEA Masters is where the thirteen regional leagues meet. Riot's format explainer for the 2025 season places it in the region's Tier 2 ecosystem, and lists the leagues with their territories: France, Turkey, the German-speaking countries, Spain, Poland and the Baltics, Italy, the Middle East and North Africa, Greece and Cyprus, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the Balkans, the Benelux, and the NLC for the UK and the Nordics.

The number of places a league receives has depended on its results. In 2025, according to that explainer, six leagues received three slots in the Spring event and the others two, the six being chosen on performance over the previous two seasons; in Summer, each region had three slots and the five best-performing leagues a fourth. For this spring, the NLC post confirms one slot, the champion's, and says nothing about others.

The stakes at that level rose this year. The Winter edition of EMEA Masters gathered 36 teams from the regional leagues, and Riot's primer gave its top two a place in the new Esports World Cup Qualifier, alongside ten LEC teams. The primer added a rule for academy teams, the development rosters of LEC organizations that play in the regional leagues: they may compete at EMEA Masters, but a qualifier place they win passes to the next non-academy team.

Northern Europe has housed such a team before. Sheep Esports, reporting on March 6 on a question-and-answer session held by Fnatic, recalled that the club had fielded an academy roster, Fnatic Rising, in the NLC, and reported that Fnatic's management was exploring a new academy team. Whether a league for the UK and Ireland alone becomes a home for a project of that kind is not addressed in Riot's post.

What is still to be announced

Riot has dated the next step. More information on the Summer Split is promised toward the end of June, which on the preliminary calendar is also when the regional summer season begins.

The larger questions belong to 2027. The post does not say what the two competitions will be called, how many teams each will field, how the eight current teams will be distributed between them, or how many EMEA Masters places each will carry. It does not say whether GameWaves remains the operator after the transition year.

The NLC name is kept for 2026. The single league it stood for is not planned to outlast it.

For the teams, the immediate calendar is simpler: seven games each from May 25, a bracket for five of them, and one place in Europe.

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