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Venomcrest Serpents won the UKEL 4 Nations 2025 Winter Division 1 League of Legends grand final in Manchester today, and celebrated in style on a makeshift F1-style podium.
They defeated 200 Bandits at Pixel Bar in three straight games to win the grand final, the first official live UKEL 4 Nations final event.
This culminated an impressive Winter season for them, with zero games lost.
The Venomcrest Serpents are the academy side of Venomcrest, whose main team play in the NLC (the league which sits above the UK-focused UKEL and also includes teams from across the Nordics).
The Serpents’ roster consits of (top to support) Bust (Faroe Islands), Fraze (UK), Air (China), Rhythm (UK) and Seneca (Sweden), with head coach Haze (aka Hades). And 200 Bandits consist of Loopy (UK), Luncafoer (Netherlands), jb (Netherlands), Elendil (Poland) and Kenny (UK), plus coaches kiss me and Trolulu.
ADC Rhythm said after the win:
The broadcast talent and staff included host GreyHart, desk talent Jreal, Rob Loweth and Pietro Castellani, casters BlackBloxer, Trajan and Temporal, and production staff CasualCutie, Wettnoodles and WhattheBEEns.
Fellow UKEL esports organisation, Brod & Friends, also filmed a makeshift podium celebration outside the Pixel Bar venue in Manchester.
Chief Brod Officer Gov (aka The Governor) told Esports News UK he scoped this place out after arranging an event at the same venue last year for the UKEL Sunshine Showdown, which showed what UKEL events could be like and arguably paved the way for this season’s finals event.
After the match finished, he led the teams to the podium and grabbed some prosecco from the bar around the corner for the final touch:
UKEL founder and operations director, Synygy, said after the match that there will definitely be another LAN event for the next season, Spring 2025.
“It’s been amazing,” Synygy told host Greyhart. “The last two weeks has been stressful and chaotic, but it’s gone super well today, I’m so happy the community has come together.
“I’m so happy we could put on a LAN, especially so soon after the NLC finals [in Nottingham, won by Los Ratones].
“Now we’ve shown we can do this, yeah there’s been tech issues, but once we do something we try and grow. We will do this for sure, at the end of Spring, I’ll say that for certain now. I can’t wait, we’d love to go to bigger venues, one day we can look at Wembley, that’s the dream!”
There are more words from Synygy in this post-event tweet too.
The UKEL 4 Nations Division 2 grand final between Cymbal and Int Quick, the team featuring UK talent Whatley, Kerberos, Dragdar and more, will take place on Sunday March 23rd.
Update: Cymbal have won the Division 2 grand final!
You can watch the UKEL 4 Nations Div 1 Winter 2025 grand final VoD here, plus there’s more reaction and mini-interviews on the BrodnFriends X page here. You can also read more about the UKEL Winter 2025 season format, teams and other info here.
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.
