Only two of the eight League of Legends esports teams who traveled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to compete in the inaugural Esports World Cup remain standing.
Only two of the eight League of Legends esports teams who traveled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to compete in the inaugural Esports World Cup remain standing.
T1 and Top Esports will face off on Sunday, July 7 in a best-of-five series to decide who will be crowned the 2024 Esports World Cup presenting League of Legends winners.
T1 entered EWC as the 2nd seed from League of Legends Champions Korea, mirroring their qualification seeding for the 2024 Mid-Season Invitational. T1 began the tournament by exacting revenge on League of Legends Pro League 1st seed Bilibili Gaming. BLG eliminated T1 from MSI 2024 earlier this year, but at EWC 2024, it was the South Korean side who took the win in the rematch at EWC, 2-1.
T1’s next opponent was League Championship Series 1st seed Team Liquid. The North American squad were obvious underdogs against the defending world champions, but the series ended up coming down to the wire with T1 edging out a 2-1 victory.
Like T1, Top Esports represented their region at MSI 2024 as the 2nd seed from China’s LPL, and was seeded accordingly at the EWC. TES faced off against LCK 1st seed Gen.G, who boasted a series win streak that started back in February. As the LCK Spring champion and MSI champion, Gen.G came into the EWC as the clear favorite. However, they looked out of sorts against TES, who wasted no time punishing mistakes and took a decisive 2-0 upset.
Top Esports kept on cruising in their second match of EWC 2024. At MSI, TES had been eliminated in a clean sweep at the hands of League of Legends European Championship 1st seed G2 Esports at MSI. This time around, the Chinese side returned the favor and 2-0’d G2 in dominant fashion to qualify for the EWC finals.
After splitting the first two games of the semifinals series, TL looked poised to complete the upset against T1. Fortunately for T1, Mun "Oner" Hyeon-jun wasn’t going to let that happen.
Oner’s heist of Baron Nashor ended up being the killing blow for TL. Whatever control of Summoner’s Rift they previously possessed had quickly evaporated, and their nexus followed suit minutes later. T1 took the series 2-1 to advance to their first international final since their sweep of Weibo Gaming to win the 2023 World Championship.
Top Esports is a team known for high variance. TES can look like world beaters only to give onlookers pause in accepting their status as an elite LoL esports team at the very next moment. When things are going right for TES, jungler Gao "Tian" Tian-Liang often serves as the catalyst, and it will be up to Oner to come up clutch in big moments for T1 like his Baron steal against Team Liquid in the semifinals.
T1 and Top Esports are the last two League of Legends teams remaining in Riyadh, and their best-of-five series to decide the Esports World Cup presenting League of Legends winners begins on Sunday, July 7 at 19:00pm UTC +3.
9:00 PDT / 12:00 EDT / 18:00 CEST / 19:00 UTC+3
⚪️ Esportsworldcup.com/en/competition/games-and-tournaments/league-of-legends