Riot Games Brasil unveiled a logo for the upcoming Brazilian League of Legends Championship on Tuesday and revealed that the league was transitioning to a franchise system.
This would be the 5th region to become franchised after EU/NA/Turkey/Russia. While it has been quite successful for the major regions, there were no significant differences for the minor regions.
The CBLoL will be the latest League of Legends league to move to a franchise model.https://t.co/rviriFlXeq
— ESPN Esports (@ESPN_Esports) January 21, 2020
The Campeonato Brasileiro de League of Legends (CBLoL) is the top level of professional League of Legends competition in Brazil. There are eight teams in the league. Each annual season of play is divided into two splits, spring, and summer, both consisting of ten rounds of round-robin tournament play, which then concludes with play-off tournaments between the top three teams. The winners of each split qualify for the Mid-Season Invitational and World Championship.
The matches have been held since 2015 at Riot studios in São Paulo and broadcast via Livestream, without an audience, except for the grand final, held in arenas like Allianz Parque, and are attended by narrators, commentators, analysts and presenters. In addition to full broadcasting on official YouTube channels, Twitch, and since 2017 CBLoL has also been playing live games on SporTV, with the same coverage as Riot.
“When we talk about the franchise model, we say that there will be no further relegation; that was a very strong request from the teams. To bring about this stability, halt the relegation and maintain the structure in the league, we need to change a lot in franchise development,” said esports director Carlos “Caco” Antunes. “We need to think about the league’s competitiveness.”
At the press conference in Sao Paulo, Antunes said he would reveal details about the franchise system in the coming months, adding that the new structure would allow the league to grow, create sponsorships and bring in more revenue. In addition, it would align CBLoL with other global tournaments that function with the franchise system, such as LEC and LCS.
Brazil is one of the minor regions, which always keeps impressing at International Events. While the franchising system has not been proven to bring a lot of change to minor regions based on the experience from Russia, and Turkey, the additional sponsors it will bring might help the League a bit.
Within a franchised League, sponsors are more happy to invest as the risk to lose the investment is less if the team cannot drop out. There have been rumors that the Korean LCK will move to a franchised League as well in the near future.
