Students from the University of Southampton hosted nine universities from across the South of the UK for the SouthLANder esports event.
The competition concluded with finals held at the University of Southampton and was run and managed by students at the university, with a total prize pool of £600.
The event was sponsored by Amazon University Esports, NUEL, GGTech, NSE, Monster and Intel.
Edward ‘Hanno’ Joyce, a General Manager of SouthLANder and SVGE Treasurer, commented: “SouthLANder was for almost all of the crew their first time developing a LAN and tournament experience, and was a huge opportunity for students to learn about league operations, broadcast production, player management and content creation.
“We’ll be returning next year with SouthLANder 2024 which will be bigger and better than ever before.”
Amazon also has the separate Amazon University Esports circuit, which has a presence in 16 countries, and aims to provide students with community opportunities as well as professional experiences and educational workshops.
It comes as top UK and Ireland student teams prepare to gather at Confetti X for the Amazon University Esports Spring Finals.
SouthLANder participants and winners
The competition involved student teams from Southampton, Winchester, Portsmouth, Chichester, Sussex, Bristol, Bath, Bournemouth and Reading universities.
In League of Legends, the University of Portsmouth team beat the University of Southampton team in the offline final. In CSGO the champions were from the University of Southampton, beating the University of Bath team in the final.
All attendees of the live event also had the opportunity to play games such as CSGO, Valorant, League of Legends, Rocket League and more.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He has almost two decades of experience in journalism, and left Esports News UK in June 2025.
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 also previously worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation.
