League of Legends and menstrual-cycle research opens a player welfare conversation

Esports News UK, Senior Editor

Last Updated: 14/04/2026

League of Legends coach Tony Chau has reignited an ugly and familiar debate after posting data from 147 ranked games to claim tracking his duo partner yuulu’s menstrual cycle could improve win rate. According to reporting from Esports Insider, Chau said yuulu’s win rate dropped from 57.5% outside menstruation to 52% during it, framing the whole thing as optimisation rather than intrusion.

The numbers are one part of the story. The more important point is that esports keeps stumbling into conversations about women’s bodies through the lens of competitive limitation, and that has direct consequences for player welfare, trust and who feels welcome in the scene.

What the research involves

On paper, Chau’s post looks like a tiny performance-science experiment: a sample of solo queue games, a tracked variable, and an attempted link between physiology and results. In practice, it is a flimsy dataset wrapped around a highly personal subject, and yuulu reportedly said she only later discovered Chau had been keeping a CRM tracking her cycle for months.

That sits awkwardly beside the kind of welfare research esports actually needs. Broader work on player health has focused on stress, burnout, sleep, physical strain and support systems, with a 2021 review of esports athletes and players highlighting recurring issues including eye fatigue, musculoskeletal pain and schedule pressure, while a TechRxiv study on League of Legends match stress responses found measurable physiological differences between winners and losers.

That does not mean hormonal health should be off limits as a subject. It means it needs consent, context and actual scientific rigour, especially in a scene that still lacks enough female-focused research.

Why this is a recurring broader concern

The reason this landed so badly is that League of Legends esports has heard versions of this before. In September 2025, FlyQuest top laner Bwipo was suspended after claiming on stream that menstruation made women unable to compete at a high level, a flashpoint that made already difficult conversations around women’s participation in esports even worse.

It is the same pattern seen in other inclusion stories across the scene: performance gets discussed as if women are a problem to be explained rather than players to be supported. That is also why this story connects naturally with wider concerns around discrimination in EMEA League of Legends esports and the broader fight for sustainable pathways highlighted in women’s pro Valorant development.

Even when framed as a joke, that rhetoric gives cover to people who want to turn biology into a barrier. Once that door opens, welfare language gets repurposed into exclusionary language very quickly.

What the esports scene has and has not done about this

Esports has become better at talking about burnout, practice load and mental health, but it is still much worse at handling gender-specific welfare issues with maturity. There are more conversations now about diversity, opportunity and structural support, as seen in recent discussions around diversity and opportunity in esports, yet the scene still too often relies on public hot takes instead of informed, player-led policy.

That is the real opening here. If organisations want to treat player welfare as part of performance, then the next step is not amateur body-tracking posted for engagement; it is proper support systems, privacy standards and evidence-led research that players can actually trust.

For now, the immediate consequence is another uncomfortable spotlight on how women’s participation in esports gets discussed. The next question is whether the scene can finally separate genuine welfare science from the same old stereotypes dressed up as competitive insight.

Esports News UK, Senior Editor

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