ESL brings back arena playoffs, online group stage for Pro League in 2026

ESL announced on March 7th some changes to ESL Pro League that will come into effect in 2026. Instead of playing both the group stage and the playoffs in a studio environment like in recent years, the group stage of EPL S23 will take place online on European servers, and the top-eight teams will then move to an arena.

This will add another layer of excitement to EPL playoffs in 2026 and help create interesting storylines as the teams will have to play the playoffs in front of fans. The locations haven't been announced yet, but they'll take place in Europe just like the online group stage.

ESL will also do a third-place decider match before the grand finals, just like PGL Cluj-Napoca 2025 did.

On top of these changes, the ESL Challenger League winners in five regions will get spots in the Stage 1 of EPL. Additionally, two teams will have the opportunity to qualify for EPL from grassroots Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) qualifiers in both North America and Europe.

So, this is how the EPL S23 Stage 1 team list will look like:

From there, the top eight teams of Stage 1 will move to Stage 2, where they'll join the top eight teams in the global Valve Ranking System (VRS) for another Swiss group. The invites for EPL S23 will be sent from the first available VRS publication of January 2026.

The $1 million prize pool for EPL S23 will be split as follows: