ESL announces IEM Chengdu 2025 invite list...and there are zero NA teams in it

ESL announced all 16 teams invited to IEM Chengdu 2025 this Tuesday, August 26th, and unfortunately for North American fans, they'll have no NA teams to cheer for during the event.

Even with GamerLegion and Aurora declining invitations, none of the NA teams had enough Valve Regional Standings (VRS) points to secure an invite to the $300,000 Chinese tournament that will run from November 3rd to 9th.

The Americas had two slots just like Europe and Asia. However, FURIA and paiN are currently the highest-ranked teams of our region, because they have had better results in the past months, most notably at the BLAST.tv Austin Major.

NA's top teams, Liquid and Passion UA, are too far behind in the global VRS, so the invites that belonged to Aurora and GamerLegion were handed off to HEROIC and Virtus.pro.

The team list for IEM Chengdu is a good indicator of how much NA's performance has dipped since around the Austin Major. The Chinese event could be the first big LAN in the second half of 2025 to not feature any NA team.

All that is left for NA fans is to cheer for G2's Guatemalan star Mario "malbsMd" Samayoa during IEM Chengdu. Other than him, there's also Lynn Vision's Su "C4LLM3SU3" Qihao, who used to play in NA.