MSI 2025 is underway in Vancouver, Canada, where League of Legends teams from around the world have converged to crown a mid-season champion. A total of 10 teams qualified for the action, making the tournament smaller than in recent years but comparable in size to pre-COVID MSI tournaments. The tournament format has also changed quite a bit, which seems like it happens every year, but nevertheless millions of people across the world are tuning in. This MSI 2025 Overview will cover all the teams that qualified, the new tournament format, and where you can catch all the action.

The Teams

As mentioned earlier, 10 teams qualified but unlike in years past where only one team from each region qualified, two teams from each region qualified. This is partially because some of the regions, namely the Asian Pacific and Americas, were combined for MSI qualifications. Therefore, two teams from Korea, China, EMEA (Europe), the Americas, and Asia-Pacific qualified. Some of them new and others familiar, here are the teams:

  • Gen.G – the number one seed from Korea
  • T1 – the number two seed from Korea
  • Movistar KOI – the number one seed from EMEA
  • G2 Esports – the number two seed from EMEA
  • CTBC Flying Oyster – the number one seed from Asia-Pacific
  • Gam Esports – the number two seed from Asia-Pacific
  • Anyone’s Legends – the number one seed from China
  • Bilibili Gaming – the number two seed from China
  • FlyQuest – the number one seed from the Americas (North)
  • FURIA – the number one seed from the Americas (South)

The Tournament Format

Moving onto the MSI tournament format, all matchups are best of fives, meaning for a team to advance, they must defeat their opponent in three out of five games. Upon losing, a team is sent to a lower bracket where they are match up against other teams that have also lost. In this lower bracket, losing means being eliminated from the tournament. This format resets once the tournament has progressed to its next stage.

Regarding stages, there are two stages, the Play-ins and the Bracket stage. In the Play-Ins, the four lowest seeded teams played (from all regions except Korea because Korea won Worlds 2024) and only two made it out to play in the Bracket Stage. Since this already happened, here are the results – Bilibili Gaming and G2 Esports made it to the Bracket stage, while Gam Esports and FURIA were eliminated.

Images of League of Legends Teams’ Icons that qualified for MSI 2025 from the League of Legends Official Wiki.

The Bracket Stage is currently underway. While the results are still not in, a similar trend is from all past MSI and Worlds League of Legends tournaments is coming to pass – the Korean and Chinese teams are dominating while the rest of the teams are struggling. Unlike the World Championship which takes over a month complete, MSI is done in a little over two weeks. This MSI will come to an end after the finals on Saturday July 12, 2025. Promptly after that, the teams will return to their regions to begin their summer region seasons to decide which teams will go to the 2025 World Championship.

How to Watch

Finally, watching MSI is free, super easy, and has many options. Historically, people could only watch the tournament on the Riot Games twitch channel or lolesports.com – the Western regions at least. Now, people can also watch live on YouTube and TikTok. However, the most popular way to watch worlds is through co-streamers. Co-streamers are former professional League of Legends players (generally) that watch and analyze the games in more unique ways. They are often more educational (in terms of learning the nuances of the game and specific roles) and often funnier as the co-streamers don’t have to speak professionally like the official broadcasters do. Most co-streamers stream on Twitch.tv. To find any of these of these streams of MSI, simply search #MSI2025 into your platform of choice.

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