LFL Loses Two Teams in Three Days as Its 2027 Organizer Remains Unnamed

Team Vitality has pulled its academy team out of the Ligue Française de League of Legends (LFL), the second French organization in three days to step back from the league for the same reason: nobody has said who will run it in 2027.

Vitality announced in a video posted to X on Oct. 9 that it is pausing its LFL activities and closing Vitality.Bee, which has competed in the LFL since the league launched in 2019. In the video, which is in French, Vitality CEO Fabien “Neo” Devide said the first factor was uncertainty over the league itself. “Today, Webedia’s withdrawal means we don’t know who will take over,” he said. (Quotes from the video are TEA’s translation.)

Devide said the ERL system was also in flux and needed “a little more time to arrive at an ecosystem that, in our eyes, will be satisfactory and will allow us to reinvest in it.” He was explicit that money played a part. “We need to make trade-offs today, and the trade-off is that we want to keep investing in the LEC, where we have a more established roadmap,” he said. He presented the move as a pause rather than an exit: “It’s not goodbye, it’s more of a see you soon.”

Two days earlier, on Oct. 7, Ici Japon Corp Esport announced that it will cease operations at the end of 2026. Sheep Esports reported that the club, which reached the LFL in 2025, said the decision was partly driven by the fact that the league’s future “has become uncertain.” Joblife ended its League of Legends division in September . According to Sheep Esports, half of the teams that competed in the 2026 LFL Summer Split are now confirmed not to return in 2027, and only five of the 10 LEC organizations still field a team in the regional leagues.

The departures trace back to the operator.

Sheep Esports reported on Aug. 19 , citing sources, that Webedia will no longer organize the LFL starting in 2027, ending an involvement that began with the league’s creation. The news first aired on the French show On Refait Le Nash. According to The Esports Radar, Webedia co-managed the league with Riot Games France, overseeing commercial partnerships, day-to-day administration and broadcast production. Sheep Esports reported that the LFL did not hold a single in-person event in 2026, the first year without one since the pandemic year of 2020.

The exit continues a broader retreat. Webedia ran the EMEA Masters, Europe’s top second-tier League of Legends competition, in 2024 and 2025, but no longer did so in 2026. Bertrand Amar, who led Webedia’s esports operations, left the company in December 2025. In a March interview with Sheep Esports , Amar said that Webedia “decided to reduce its esports scope to focus on French competitions that were already well-established commercially and less risky.” Five months later, the LFL was reported to be leaving that portfolio too.

The company most often named as a successor says it had not planned to take the league on. Amar co-founded New Esports Org. (NEO) with Matthieu Dallon, creator of the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC), and NEO has taken over the EMEA Masters and the League of Legends Game Changers women’s circuit from Webedia. Sheep Esports called NEO a logical candidate for the LFL, noting that Amar played a key role in creating the league. In August, NEO told The Esports Radar : “We are in talks with Riot and key stakeholders in France to find a new sustainable model, but nothing is decided yet, knowing that we didn’t plan to invest in LFL but rather in EMEA Masters and Game Changers LoL.” No operator has been announced since.

The cost pressure on academy teams was visible before Webedia’s exit. In 2025, Vitality and Team BDS agreed to merge their LFL academies so that one team could draw on both organizations’ resources. Sheep Esports reported in November 2025 that Riot blocked the merger on competitive integrity grounds after Webedia and Riot’s local team had initially approved it. Riot declined to comment to Sheep Esports at the time. By then, Gentle Mates, GameWard and IziDream had already announced they were leaving the game.

France is not the only regional league to lose its operator this year.

As previously reported by The Esports Advocate, the organizers of the Northern League of Legends Championship said in March that they were no longer in a position to operate the league, and Riot later set up an interim structure with GameWaves running it. Spain’s league was taken over this year by LastLap, a group selected by the league’s organizations, according to Sheep Esports, and Insider Gaming reported that Germany’s Prime League has a new operator in Berlin-based onethreefive gaming GmbH.

Riot has also closed the route that let regional teams reach the top flight. LEC Versus, the 2026 format that put regional teams Los Ratones and Karmine Corp Blue on the LEC stage, will not return. LEC Commissioner Artem Bykov said in a Sept. 19 interview with Sheep Esports that “we are not bringing LEC Versus back,” adding: “We are sticking to the classic LEC format, with 10 LEC teams playing.” Sheep Esports reported that Riot is waiting for its current three-year licensing cycle with the 13 regional league organizers to end after 2027 before potentially making changes to the system.

Vitality’s own business is not shrinking. The Esports Radar reported that the organization’s overall business has continued to expand, and Vitality has kept signing partners, including BYD France as its official vehicle supplier , as previously reported by The Esports Advocate. That makes the LFL pause what Devide described, a trade-off inside one budget, rather than a sign of wider retrenchment, which is the less comfortable reading for the league.

Still unknown are who will operate the LFL in 2027, in what format and with how many teams, whether Riot will fund the league directly during the transition, what an LFL team now costs to run, and whether Webedia’s exit was its own decision or a non-renewal. TEA could not find a public statement from Webedia or Riot confirming the change of operator.

The immediate question is whether a replacement operator is named before French organizations finish their 2027 budgets. The larger one is whether Riot is prepared to let its European second tier shrink until the licensing cycle ends, or will step in to hold the development pathway together before then.