Ubisoft has today announced that the UK Ireland Nationals (UKIN) and Nordic Championship esports leagues will combine to create the Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege Northern Premier League.
This new revamped league will gather the best players and teams from both UKIN and Nordic local scenes to compete in a new competition with a €25,000 prize pool.
The Northern Premier League will have 10 teams compete across nine weeks from April 19th to end of August 2022. Each week there will be two days of broadcast: Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
“This new tier will help further develop both local scenes from grassroots through to the Northern Premier League and ultimately to the European Challenger League, giving our players and teams more opportunities to participate and to win.”
Mark Slaughter, Ubisoft
At the end of the Northern Premier League season, the top two teams will qualify for the European Challenger League, where teams from across Europe compete to be promoted to the European League, the highest level of competitive Rainbow Six Siege in the region.
The middle four teams will retain their place in the Northern Premier League, while the seventh and eight positions enter relegation playoffs and the bottom two will be automatically relegated to their respective local league.
At a grassroots level the existing UKIN 2nd Division will rebrand as UKIN and, along with the Nordic Championship, will act as feeder leagues to the Northern Premier League. Ubisoft said more details will be shared about these leagues soon.
Siege has had some solid UK talent emerge over the years. MNM Gaming is one notable organisation that has seen success in Siege.
Over the past few months, MNM qualified for the Rainbow Six Siege European League, before MNM reached the Six Invitational, and Tenstar recently won the Rainbow Six Siege UKIN Rainbow Rumble.
“We’re excited to bring this new Rainbow Six Siege esports competition for our UK, Ireland and Nordic players” said Mark Slaughter, UK marketing director at Ubisoft.
“This new tier will help further develop both local scenes from grassroots through to the Northern Premier League and ultimately to the European Challenger League, giving our players and teams more opportunities to participate and to win.”
“Rainbow Six Siege has steadily become one of the most popular esports games in the world and the new Northern Premier League will expose this wonderful title to even more people,” added Peter Weile, Nordic MD at Ubisoft. “The future is extremely exciting for Rainbow Six Siege.”
The Northern Premier League has taken a similar approach to Riot Games, which has its own Northern European regional leagues in both League of Legends (NLC) and Valorant (Polaris).
There’s more info on the new Northern Premier League at https://r6npl.gg/about
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
