Eight invited organisations will start the European playoffs in the upper bracket, while every team that earns its place through the open qualifiers starts in the lower bracket.
Riot Games are taking another look at the format of the 2027 VCT EMEA Kickoff qualifiers after a day of criticism from coaches and players across the region. The anger is aimed at the European playoffs, where eight invited teams get a head start over the eight that come through the open qualifiers, as Sheep Esports first reported.
Tomek Borowka, VALORANT’s esports product manager for EMEA, answered on X on .
Riot have not said what, if anything, will change. Registration for the first European qualifier closes at tonight.
Two spots, two very different starting points
From 2027, the VCT is an open circuit. Each regional Kickoff has 12 teams: the eight partner teams are invited, and four places go to teams from the open qualifiers. In EMEA, two of those places belong to Europe, one to Türkiye and one to MENA, and any non-partner team that reaches Kickoff receives $100,000 from Riot.
The European road has three steps:
- Kickoff Qualifier 1 on 5 to 8 November and Kickoff Qualifier 2 on 12 to 15 November, both single-elimination brackets with Bo3 series. The top four teams from each go through.
- Kickoff Europe Qualifier Playoffs from 26 November to 5 December: 16 teams, the eight qualifiers plus eight non-partner teams invited on their 2026 results.
- The top two teams in the playoffs qualify for VCT EMEA Kickoff.
When Riot published the format on 15 October, it described the playoffs as a “modified double-elimination bracket” and said the invited teams would be named later. The seeding only became clear on Tuesday, when UCAM Esports announced their invite with a bracket graphic. It puts all eight invited teams in the upper bracket and all eight qualifiers in the lower bracket, where one defeat ends their run. The winner of the upper bracket takes the first Kickoff spot. A team from the open qualifiers can only reach Kickoff through the lower bracket final.
UCAM and Eintracht Frankfurt have confirmed their invites, Eintracht describing themselves on X as “one of 8 invited teams” (translated from German), and Sheep Esports name Joblife as another. Riot have not published the full list.
The rest of the requirements are the same across EMEA. Players must be at least 17 and have reached Ascendant 1, at least three of the five starters must live in the team’s home region, and a team must keep three of the five players who qualified to play in the playoffs. Beyond Kickoff, non-partner teams receive $100,000 for reaching a Cup, $200,000 for Masters and $400,000 for Champions.
Coaches and players speak out
The loudest objection is that Europe’s format is harsher than its neighbours’. In North America, qualifiers and invited teams, 16 in all, go into the same three-day Swiss stage before an eight-team double-elimination bracket, and the runner-up gets a second chance in an Americas Last Chance Qualifier. Türkiye’s playoffs start with GSL groups, and MENA rewards its best teams with higher seeding in the qualifiers rather than a bye.
Martin “Anderzz” Schelasin, a strategic coach who has worked with Fnatic, G2 Esports and Paper Rex, called the European setup unacceptable “from a competitive equity PoV” and said it “borders on a rug-pull”. In the same post, he described an organisation that signs contracts on the promise of an open ecosystem and then finds that its region has “a poignantly less equitable OQ format than the other regions”.
Team Liquid’s VCT coach Daniel “yaotziN” Roczniak questioned the invites themselves: “how is anyone even invited? and if so, why there is any sort of advantage?”
Gentle Mates player Yusuf Emre “Proxh” Tunc replied directly to Borowka.
but who even came up with the idea of automatically putting teams that qualify through the open qualifiers into the lower bracket, while invited teams get a free pass into the upper bracket? What’s even the point of open qualifiers if teams that actually earn their spot have to start at a disadvantage?
Patryk “starxo” Kopczyński, the Polish in-game leader who won the 2021 world title with Acend, went after the people behind the decision. “After 6 years, I’m still wondering if Riot Games has any former pro players working on the esports side, because I can’t imagine any former pro player being okay with these formats etc,” he wrote, before adding that Riot do “listen to feedback – SOMETIMES.” Ukrainian coach Ivan “Johnta” Shevtsov answered that he has the “same feeling each time” and called the cycle of formats, patch timings and scheduling “mentally exhausting”.
A narrower road for the teams without a seat
The format matters most to the organisations that missed out on partnership for 2027 and 2028. In EMEA, NAVI, GIANTX, Barça eSports, Eintracht Frankfurt and Movistar KOI were left out when Riot named its 32 partner teams for the new cycle.
Eintracht, who reached the playoffs of EMEA Stage 2 this year, are now on the comfortable side of the bracket. NAVI have moved their focus to NAVI Junior, the roster from their own academy, which will play the qualifiers for Kickoff. Unless it receives an invite, that team faces a single-elimination qualifier, then a lower bracket in which it has to win every series, and finally a lower bracket final for the only spot left. Every team from the open qualifiers, whether a NAVI project or five friends who signed up this week, is chasing that same one place.
The partnership cut has also put a large number of experienced players on the market for a region with only two open spots at Kickoff. The open format was meant to give them a road back. For now, the European version of it gives eight organisations a head start that the rest have to fight through, and Riot’s answer to that is still to come.
