Saudi Arabia’s content mill is back this year with a new nations-themed tournament, taking place across different games throughout November this year. We’ve started to see the national teams’ coaching squads for different games, and now it’s time for the players.
But for League of Legends, it seems there’s not that much interest from the pros.
Slovenian players reportedly not interested in the Esports Nations Cup
Based on some Reddit posts this morning, it appears that some Slovenian players are not very interested in attending the Esports Nation Cup. The news comes from clips now deleted from Juš “Crownshot” Marušič‘s Twitch feed, which indicate that he, Tim “Nemesis” Lipovšek, and Mihael “MikyX” Mehle are not that interested in coming to the show. The post has now been removed from the subreddit by moderators, too.
Allegedly, the clips detail that there simply isn’t enough player interest for various reasons, with skill issues across player roles, and that it’s eating into the content streams at that time of year.
In addition, the tournament is tiered, with rosters needing to be locked in by April 26th. From there, qualifiers take place throughout the year, with some of the qualification points for qualifying taking place through to June 14th. According to Liquipedia, the teams earn points via the following methods:
- National Teams will be awarded points based on placements at official Riot Games competitions
- Points are equally shared across all participating players on a roster
- Total points across the submitted roster determine the national ranking
- Top 16 countries with the most points by June 14th, 2026 are invited
- The Top 8 are directly seeded into the Group Stage
We also briefly touched upon how this was likely to work when it was first announced back in January.
Spanish players also reportedly uninterested
In addition, there are rumors that the Spanish team, which already has quite a few players in the LEC, is not interested. The evidence comes from a stream roughly a week or so ago, where Spanish content creators were talking about how some of the KOI roster could make or break the Spanish project, depending on their interest.
We also had a report from Sheep Esports stating that Marc “Caedrel” Lamont, arguably the biggest content creator who you would want involved in some way with the ENC, also declined to play as Team GB’s mid laner. So, it seems like some of esports biggest names are not that interested in covering the tournament.
In other news, some teams are very interested, with the likes of Sergen “Broken Blade” Çelik reportedly playing for the Turkish team, and we’ve seen coaches like Dylan Falco and Mac represent Canada and Great Britain, respectively.
So the ENC is off to a bit of a strange start at the moment.
Perhaps it is down to the prize pool, perhaps it is down to a meme format getting in the way of important game time. Maybe now that players are no longer forced to attend a Saudi event, they are choosing based on ethics. Maybe it’s in November, and that’s the peak of roster lock-in and contract expirations, so there’s frankly more things to concentrate on if you’re a star of League of Legends.
There are many reasons this tournament simply won’t interest some of the game’s biggest stars.