Our prayers have been answered, as ESL is considering a return to LAN for ESL One Cologne in August. All depends on the amount of restrictions on travelling and the safety measures that will need to be taken, but the tournament organizer have said that if it's possible, they will be organizing the first LAN tournament since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The event would be held in a studio environment, which would mean no crowd. The invites will probably also look different - ESL want to prevent teams from forcibly having to skip the event because of travel restrictions or visa issues. The possibility also still exists that a LAN event will not be possible, in which case the event will be run online. We were trying to think of an "onliner" joke here, but everyone's an onliner these days.
We'd love to see ESL on the up again, as they took probably one of the hardest hits during the pandemic. They lost their crowd at Katowice, had to postpone the Rio Major - which could very well still be cancelled - had to completely turn around their plans for EPL S11 and had to postpone Cologne. Let's hope we see less ESL's and more ESW's in the future.
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