Can MSI performance predict Worlds success?

Every year, the Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) gives us what should be our first proper answer to one of League of Legends’ biggest questions: who is actually the best team in the world?

The strongest teams from across the world meet, and eventually the best of them are thrown into best-of-five series against each other. By the end of it, we have an international champion.

Even though Worlds arrives just a couple of months later, things often look completely different. No matter how dominant they are, the MSI champion usually does not end up lifting the Summoner’s Cup.

Hanwha Life Esports is the latest team to test that theory. HLE beat Bilibili Gaming 3–2 to win MSI 2026, with LYON surprisingly finishing third and G2 Esports taking fourth. HLE has already secured its place at Worlds 2026, but can they bring home League’s most prestigious trophy? History says yes and no.

While winning MSI is a surprisingly poor predictor of who eventually lifts the Summoner’s Cup, performing well at MSI is still a strong indicator that a team could make a deep Worlds run. That has become even more apparent under MSI’s expanded format.

MSI has been played every year since 2015, with the obvious exception of 2020, when the tournament was canceled due to the global pandemic. That gives us ten completed MSI-to-Worlds seasons before 2026.

Across those ten tournaments, only one MSI champion has gone on to win Worlds in the same year. SK Telecom T1 did it in 2016. That is it.

EDward Gaming won MSI in 2015 before losing in the Worlds quarterfinals. SKT won MSI again in 2017 but lost the Worlds final to Samsung Galaxy. RNG won MSI in 2018, 2021, and 2022, but never made it beyond the quarterfinals in any of those three Worlds runs.

G2 Esports came close in 2019, reaching the Worlds final after their famous MSI victory, while JD Gaming and Gen.G have both followed MSI titles with Worlds semifinal exits in recent years.

Even Gen.G’s dominant 2025 season ended the same way. They beat T1 in the MSI final but eventually fell to KT Rolster in the Worlds semifinals, while T1 went on to win Worlds instead.

Overall, the record for MSI champions looks like this:

A 60% semifinal rate is obviously still very good. But if we are trying to use MSI to predict the eventual World champion, a 10% success rate is not particularly convincing.

Across the same ten seasons, there have been 40 top-four finishes at MSI, and 19 of those teams went on to reach the Worlds semifinals.

MSI finalists do even better. Of the 20 teams that reached an MSI final between 2015 and 2025, 12 later made it to the Worlds semifinals that same year.

There is some obvious selection bias here. Teams finishing in the top four at MSI are already among the world’s strongest and generally come from its strongest regions, meaning MSI performance cannot be treated as the sole reason they subsequently succeed at Worlds.

What the numbers can tell us, however, is how frequently the teams that perform best at MSI remain among the international elite months later.

In every single season since MSI was introduced, at least one team that finished in the top four has gone on to reach the Worlds final.

There is also a pretty clear difference between the old MSI format and the tournament we have today.

Before 2023, MSI generally featured one representative from each region. That created an obvious problem if we wanted to use the tournament as a Worlds preview.

Some of the best teams in the world simply did not attend the tournament.

Samsung Galaxy did not qualify for MSI before winning Worlds in 2017. Invictus Gaming was not there in 2018. FunPlus Phoenix missed MSI 2019, EDward Gaming missed MSI 2021, and DRX obviously was nowhere near MSI before completing its miracle Worlds run in 2022.

MSI could hardly predict that those teams would win Worlds when they had never competed in the tournament in the first place. Riot changed that significantly in 2023.

The results since then are pretty hard to ignore.

In 2023, MSI’s top four comprised JD Gaming, Bilibili Gaming, T1, and Gen.G. Three of them reached the Worlds semifinals.

In 2024, the top four included Gen.G, Bilibili Gaming, T1, and G2. Again, three reached the Worlds semifinals.

In 2025, Gen.G, T1, Anyone’s Legend, and Bilibili Gaming made up the top four. Gen.G reached another Worlds semifinal, T1 won the entire tournament, and Anyone’s Legend made the quarterfinals.

Put it together, and the difference is striking.

From 2015 to 2022, 11 of 28 MSI top-four teams reached the Worlds semifinals, or 39.3%.

From 2023 to 2025, that rises to eight of 12, or 66.7%.

Even more impressively, every MSI finalist from those three years reached at least the semifinals at Worlds:

That is six out of six. It is still a tiny sample size, and three years of results are nowhere near enough to call it a rule. But so far, at least, the expanded MSI has lined up much more closely with what eventually happens at Worlds than the old tournament did.

There is also a slightly ridiculous T1 statistic hidden in all of this. The last three League of Legends Worlds winners all finished near the top of MSI earlier in the year.

They just did not win it.

T1 finished third at MSI 2023 before beating Weibo Gaming in the Worlds final. They finished third again at MSI 2024 before going on to win Worlds against BLG. Then in 2025, T1 finished second to Gen.G at MSI before clinching a third consecutive World Championship.

Obviously, that does not mean losing MSI somehow “improves” your chances of winning Worlds. Most of this is simply T1 being T1.

HLE won MSI 2026, but historically, that does not automatically make HLE the Worlds favorite. Nine of the previous ten MSI winners failed to complete the double.

But MSI has been much better at identifying Worlds contenders, especially if we look at teams that reached the semifinals. For 2026, that group is HLE, BLG, LYON, and G2.

There is no guarantee the streak will continue, but more than a decade of results suggests at least one of them could be around very late in Worlds.

So, can MSI performance predict Worlds success? To an extent. Winning MSI has rarely translated into Worlds victory, but finishing near the top has consistently identified teams capable of making deep runs.

Almost half of all MSI top-four finishes since 2015 have subsequently been followed by a Worlds semifinal appearance. Under the expanded MSI format since 2023, that figure has risen to 66.7%.

MSI may not tell us exactly who will lift the Summoner’s Cup. But it does a pretty good job of telling us who belongs on the shortlist.