I was thinking a ton about NA franchising today and I had a few thoughts I wanted to share. To preface, I've seen a lot of whispers and a couple pro opinions that have led me down this path.
The NA 8
I'm calling it that because I've heard that the America's division will have 8 NA teams then the rest is LATAM and Brazil. At this point, we as fans have very little news on teams that are favorable in Riot's eyes, but I've got a few personal Ideas based on who Riot rejected already. First off, I'm surprised by Shopify Rebellion's early out since they had big into the gamechangers aspect. It was crazy how effort in Gamechangers was not even a real factor, simply based on how early of an exit they had. Secondly, it's basically a given that any tier 2 level squad was not given serious thought, like Akrew, NYFU, and Complexity.
At this point I'd like to (possibly) jinx some teams by listing them as 'locks' for franchising. They are :
Sentinels (110%)
OpTic (99%)
100 Thieves (95%)
Cloud 9 (93%)
I'm going to stick to these 4 for a few reasons. C9 and OpTic are more so historical teams that have a legacy before Valorant on their side. They also hold huge legacy's inside of Valorant, one as NA's last hope and the other as NA's current hope. 100T have shown an unapparelled commitment to Valorant, has represented the region globally, and is currently one of (if not) the largest growing gaming organization. Then Sentinels bring in more views than any other team. They won the first international lan. They have the largest game wide meme associated with them. They have the thicccccest trio of players in Rawkass, Shroud, and Zellsis. THEY HAVE FUCKING SHROUD. I know he's leaving afterwards, but it still stands. To be honest, idk who the other 8 will be. But I want to move on to another thing with NA franchising that I realized more after a Yay clip.
"The Largest region into 8 teams"
NA is the largest region in terms of commitment to building talent, and now all those teams and players with so much talent are fighting for 40 player slots. This occurred to me today when thinking of Gen.G. They haven't gotten out of Val yet, but they are letting their roster go. the first thought is "of course, they're going out of Val now" but my second thought was this : What if they are preparing to build a brand new roster out of those let-go talents? Then Yay also kinda talked about this with how all those talents were being pushed into these tiny amount of real slots. Like, top tier rosters like Guard or Ghost may not make the cut. That's a working team that you can grab and go with.
Franchising Itself
Of course, not all teams will make it, and the large NA tier 2 scene will die with it. So, next is two ideas from myself to keep the NA scene alive. This mostly comes out of problems I don't want in the future for Valorant in NA. First is a real Academy league. Not International, but just a region wide academy league to run alongside the real league. with there being (I believe) 15 slots for all of NA, Brazil, and LATAM, that might create a problem with scrimming. Adding an extra 15 teams to the pool will allow much more scrim opportunities. Just as a base, not all teams have the same scrim hours so that alone closes off some available scrims. Adding an extra 15 teams gives more flexibility of hours and more availability during buy hours. then with the academy teams as well, that's an extra 75 slots to play with as an up-and-coming talent. The reason I'd like this to be a riot funded league is to both incentivize proper funding and development of these Academy teams, along with the monetary aspect of making a team able to afford having another team. This academy level would be different and allow 14 and up rather than the 16 and up in other Riot tournaments, simply due to being more focused on a largespread encouragement of talent rather than being the best team in the world.
Second is a more basic one of more third-party tournaments - which I think Riot has already committed to? Things like the Knights or Nerd Street tournaments. But, what I would like those franchised teams to themselves hold tournaments. Even if it's like a combo tournament held by 2 franchised teams, I feel like this is an easy and good way to continue to encourage a healthy tier 2 scene. Like, that'd be at least an extra 6-12 tournaments for teams to play in.
That's really it. I don't have really much to add, I just wanted to put out some thoughts on how franchising would be in my mind and how Riot can keep a healthy NA scene. I'm much MUCH more concerned about keeping APAC healthy. Like, DRX and PRX cant even play together. That region is so much more spread than the rest. Anyways, have a great rest of your day if you read this far.
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