LEC withdraws new age limit of 18 years

Apparently, Riot Games accidentally posted an old article announcing that the minimum age for players in the League of Legends EMEA Championship will be increased to 18. Now the game publisher is rowing back and confirming that the lower age limit is still 17 years. 

Riot Games originally announced in a blog post that the minimum age would be raised in order to open up new sponsorship opportunities for teams. In the scene, the offspring and young players have always been an important topic; after all, the biggest star players do emerge from young stars. 

While the age limit remains unchanged for now, a question arises: Is Riot Games considering setting the entry age to 18?

The problem with the minors

When young gamers start traveling around the world, appearing in videos, and attending late-night events, there are always a few hurdles and they usually need parental approval for everything. Furthermore, when it comes to drugs, gambling, nudity, and violence; youth should be protected, which was the whole point of Riot’s supposed rule change.

The change of age limit would give teams new opportunities to secure various sponsorship deals that they would not have with 17-year-old players. In theory, alcohol and gambling sponsorships would have been fine too, although some alcohol sponsorships are already allowed anyway. In the LCS, for example, there are contracts with Bud Light, but according to the LEC rules, the teams were not allowed to work with such companies or display their logos on their jerseys.

How far can you go?

It is clear that esports teams and organizations need financial partners. It’s a common practice to sign sponsorship deals and sometimes also produce advertisements for partners. So far so good, that’s not the problem. 

Still, the organizers know they shouldn’t make deals with just anyone if they don’t want to tarnish their reputation. It may not be the best idea to enter into contracts with gambling operators, alcohol and cigarette manufacturers, or controversial companies such as Nestlé or Shell. 

We also remember the FTX crisis which was the reason that their partner TSM had taped over the FTX logo on all jerseys. In November last year, the cryptocurrency exchange had to file for bankruptcy, even though it had just signed an extremely expensive name deal ($210 million) with TSM .

Luckily, Riot Games rescinded the minimum age change because do we really want to see the logos of questionable companies on young players’ jerseys? After all, esports has a young target group that is even easier to influence and manipulate. Hopefully, we won’t find any Philip Morris or Jack Daniel’s logos on the jerseys of our favorite teams for the foreseeable future!

Header: LEC