Every region around the world has a clear path for teams to go pro, usually through Premier, open qualifiers, or regional qualifiers.
For North Africa, since we don’t have local servers, our path has always been one thing: Playground, our regional qualifier.

But for 2026, something unexpected happened.
Tournament Organizers decided to skip Playground entirely and instead run a relegation between:

The bottom 2 teams from last split

2 teams chosen from the last Playground, which happened all the way back in April, for Split 2 of last season.

This creates a massive problem.
The April Playground is extremely outdated. Teams changed rosters, orgs invested, some rosters don’t even exist anymore.
Using a 7-month-old tournament to decide who plays the upcoming season makes zero sense.

And here’s where it gets worse: the picks weren’t even based on current performance.
They skipped the top 3 and took the 4th place team instead.
Why? No explanation.
Why rely on an old tournament when you could hold an open qualifier, giving every team a fair chance?

There’s another detail most people don’t know:
This year, VCL can directly qualify a team to Champions.
Meaning circuit points are more important than ever.

If a team doesn’t get to play Split 1, they lose an entire stage’s worth of circuit points, which could be the difference between:

Qualifying to Challengers EMEA 3
→ Leading to VCT EMEA Stage 2
→ And ultimately Champions.

Teams have invested money, time, players, coaching staff, and months of preparation, all to wake up to a system that feels unfair, outdated, and disconnected from the region’s actual competitive state.

North African teams deserve a transparent, modern, and competitive path to pro, not random selections and outdated brackets deciding their entire season