‘Airport speed run’?: LoL esports fans debate expectations for Western squads at Worlds 2023

If anything’s consistent in this life, it’s death, taxes, and Western League of Legends teams falling short of expectations at the World Championship. This season, fans have set the bar low again, and in a thread posted to the official League subreddit, they debated just how far some of the game’s best Western squads will get at this year’s tournament. 

For what it’s worth, no one really has that much faith. 

But don’t hang your head too fast, Western teams. It’s not like you guys are particularly bad, it’s just that the Eastern teams that are headed to the tournament are incredible. 

“The West will probably be airport speed runs as usual,” one commenter on Reddit named Akamiso29 wrote. “I think their quality has gone up but holy crap the East is having some MONSTER teams right now.”

For the last few years (at least since 2020), Eastern teams have been back at the forefront of international League, dominating the game’s most prestigious tournaments in a way that hasn’t been seen since the mid-2010’s. It’s well-documented that a Western team has not won Worlds since 2011 (back when Eastern teams weren’t invited to the event), but in recent years, they’re not even getting close. 

At last year’s World Championship, seven of the eight teams who advanced to the tournament’s bracket stage were from either Korea or China. The only Western team to make an appearance in the quarterfinals were Rogue, who were swiftly sent home by way of a 3-0 sweep at the hands of JD Gaming. Furthermore, North American teams had an all-time-worst performance at last year’s Worlds, losing nine consecutive games to start the group stage en route to a 3-15 combined record between their representatives. 

This year, it’s entirely possible that the East pulls off a similar near-sweep, as the gap between the two halves of the world has only widened in recent years. At MSI earlier this season, six of the top eight teams hailed from the East, while the Grand Finals played host to the second consecutive intra-regional matchup at an international event. 

“One western team in knockout[s] will be a damn miracle,” another commenter by the name of Javiklegrand said. “However outside of G2 I don’t expect any Western team to take a game off [an] Asian team, the rest of EU is so bad and NA sucks too.”

Related: All teams qualified for 2023 LoL World Championship

Although that point of view might be more bleak than others, it’s demonstrative of the steep falloff that Western teams have had at international events over the last five seasons. In 2018, three of the four teams at the Worlds semifinals that season were from the West, while over the last two years, there’ve been zero Western semifinalists at Worlds. 

So far, eight teams have been confirmed for Worlds 2023, with all four Chinese representatives and all three North American teams locking in their spots. Korea and Europe are still in the midst of their domestic championships, but their reps should be expected to get confirmed within the coming weeks. 

North America and Europe will each have one opportunity to send an extra team to Worlds via a “grudge match” between the two regions’ fourth place teams; Golden Guardians have locked in their ticket to that event.  

And with how lopsided the record between the East and West has been in recent years, it’s entirely possible that that grudge match is the most electric series of the tournament for either region.