LPL Teams Went 0-for-3 on Day One of League of Legends Worlds — and One Team's Coach Never Left China

Friday was a bad day to hold LPL fandom. At the League of Legends World Championship — "S16," the sixteenth edition of the game's world title, this year hosted in the United States — China's flagship league, the LPL, went 0-for-3 on day one of the Swiss stage. iG lost to Korea's GEN after leading early. TES was routed 7-24 in kills by Korea's HLE. And BLG, the domestic runner-up, fell to Europe's MKOI, the third seed from the European league, in the result fans treated as the night's humiliation.

The GEN–iG match was the most painful kind of loss: a win given away. iG opened well, opened an early gold lead, and then handed the game back — a bounty falling to GEN's veteran mid-laner Rookie around the ten-minute mark turned the game, GEN's jungler took over dragon control, and a late five-for-zero team fight pushed GEN across the finish line. The club's own recap post read like a slow bleed, each timestamp recording another objective conceded, until at 25:57 GEN "pushed through mid and ended the match."

TES's defeat was not close enough to argue about. The broadcast scoreboard shows TES down 7-24 in kills at under 24 minutes; HLE's marksman and jungler ran the map while TES's star marksman JackeyLove — the most decorated active Chinese player of his generation — was repeatedly dove under his own tower. "Top, mid and jungle all went silent," one match thread put it. "JackeyLove is heart-tired." The team's own Weibo recap ended at 23:50 with TES team-wiped and the game swept away.

But the subplot that caught China's attention was off the stage. TES's head coach ZUIAN has spent the run-up fighting the same US visa problem that kept a staff member home from Worlds two years running — he failed two interviews, the team turned to veteran coach 369, and ZUIAN watched Friday's match from the team base in China on a video call with two other stranded coaches. A team-adjacent caster, Wang Duoduo, is in the same bind: his visa has sat unanswered for a month, and he says he will likely miss the tournament entirely, commentating from home. "I can completely understand," he told viewers, "but this month of waiting has worn me down to nothing."

The Swiss-stage scoreboard screenshot making the rounds on Weibo — a fan-made graphic watermarked by the account that posted it — shows the day's full toll: four matchups, three LPL losses by the small hours of Saturday morning, and fans joking grimly about the "0-1 pool getting crowded." For a league that has won the world title more recently than any other, that is not just a bad day; it is a data point in the argument, running since LCK teams overtook the LPL, about whether China's model of star-studded, spending-heavy rosters still beats Korea's development machine. Day one says no. The Swiss stage says there is still time to answer back.