One of the longest standing rosters in professional League of Legends, the Evil Geniuses, has effectively been disbanded in Europe, with three of its old members set to now compete under the EG brand in the North American circuit, while too remain in the EU and are now operating under the EG subsidiary brand, Alliance.
In the US scene, the relatively poorly performing Velocity eSports, will now become Evil Genius, but will retain its independence, whilst in the EU, Alliance will fill the slot in the general roster vacated by the departing EG team, though it sounds like it's had a shake up in management.
Well they got that new site up pretty quickly huh?
While there was some concern at sites like PCGamesN about two teams being operated and owned by the same organisation – something that is against the World Championship rules, for obvious reasons – Riot esports manager Chris Hopper has assured everyone that despite the association between the two teams, that they are ultimately completely distinct, with “separate owners, general managers and players.”
While the shuttering of the EU branch of EG is an end of an era to some extent, it seems like something that needed to happen. The team did relatively well this year, but if you compare its performance to the individual star power of some of the players, it didn't correlate. Perhaps now the players that were being held back will be able to stretch their legs a little more.
KitGuru Says: This is quite interesting as it shows the power of branding in the League of Legends pro scene. Velocity is still running the show in the US, but it now has a license to use the EG name. It will be interesting to see how that affects its performance in the upcoming season 4.