The League of Legends esports off-season is in full swing, and we’re moving from roster reports to official team announcements.
Two teams in the Northern League Championship (NLC), the European Regional League for the UK, Ireland and Nordics, revealed their official player rosters this evening: Dusty and NYYRIKKI. And X7 followed suit.
Icelandic organisation Dusty have put together an impressive roster, retaining the services of Swedish mid-laner Backlund and bringing three experienced players back to the UK/Nordics scene: British top-laner Kerberos, Lithuanian jungler Lyncas and Danish ADC DenVoksne. They’ve also signed French support player Stend, who was most recently with Spanish side Giants.
Icelandic general manager Bonni and Slovenian head coach Zen remain.
Zen told Esports News UK: “I’m confident that the roster Dusty built will bring some spice to the NLC. While we don’t have much experience playing with each other yet, since its an almost entirely new roster, I already have a feeling that we’ll be the ones bringing new picks and strategies to the NLC, that will make for some really fun games to watch.”
DenVoksne – who helped Tricked Esport become the first non-academy team to win the NLC last year after a dramatic reverse sweep versus Fnatic Rising – also gave some fighting words to reigning NLC champions X7.
Elsewhere, Finnish org NYYRIKKI announced their NLC Summer 2022 roster.
They’ve retained the services of Finnish ADC Azitor, Turkish support player Abagnale and French mid-laner Eyhro, while also bringing Danish jungler Flipper back and signing Norweigan top-laner Banderas to the team.
The team is completed by Italian head coach Sotze and Finnish coach/sub Pihla.
Dusty finished fourth in the NLC Spring 2022 Season (and third in the playoffs), while NYYRIKKI were eighth – both will be looking to move up the table come Summer.
In other roster news in the NLC, Isle of Man organisation X7 Esports are set to announce new signings Chasy, MC and Attila (see what coaches and casters think of the newcomers in our article in this link). Update: They announced the roster here:
And Norweigan org Bifrost are set to sign Russian League of Legends veteran jungler Diamondprox. Both of these reports originally came from LEC Wooloo for Upcomer.
Update: UK esports organisation MNM have announced their NLC Summer 2022 roster, featuring UK players Sof an Chemera, who previously said he’d like to be known as the best player from Scotland, and more.
Excel have also announced their JD XL roster:
There have been other reports – but no official announcement from the teams yet – including Riddle’s Summer 2022 NLC roster by Megalodontus for Blix.
Kaya has put together more roster NLC team roster rumours in this spreadsheet. We’ll be back with more official announcements soon.
Update: The full list of rosters can be found on the Liquipedia NLC Summer 2022 page:
The NLC Summer 2022 Season gets underway on May 30th and the playoffs are set to begin on August 1st.
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.
