League of Legends has its share of superstar aces—the Fakers and Bjergsens that grace the weekly streams with explosive plays and mechanical miracles. But while they tend to hog the spotlight, the nature of the game is such that they rarely win it alone—or are even the primary reasons for why the win occurs.
There's a stark difference between a lean mean tournament-winning machine and a floundering gang of solo-queue warriors, and leadership has historically been the biggest difference. The term "team captain" isn't necessarily applicable to every organization—depending on the roster, shotcalling can be split based on phases, roles, or various other means of decision-making. But eight names in particular stand out anyway for the undoubted influence they've had on their teams.
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To start off, there might not actually be a team in LoL's history whose fortunes are quite as dependent on a single man as Cloud 9. Their successes and failures have all coincided with Hai Du Lam's own ups and downs—the team took a noticeable performance hit between Spring and Summer 2014, when he was hospitalized with a collapsed lung. When wrist problems meant he couldn't keep up with the mechanical demands of mid lane, America's #1 Team spiraled into a months-long funk.
When he announced his un-retirement, replacing Meteos in the jungle last season, Cloud 9 went from a sob story to the greatest underdog team in North America, repeating back-to-back reverse-sweeps in the LCS playoffs to qualify for Worlds—where they secured an undefeated 3-0 in Day One.
Sure, they couldn't make it farther than that, losing a crucial tiebreaker match against Taiwan's ahq e-Sports Club. But with Hai now moved to the mechanically undemanding support position, where his in-game leadership capabilities are allowed to shine to their utmost, the team is once again flying high through North America's standings.
Chen "MiSTakE" Hui Chung
Former Teams: Taipei Assassins, Taipei Snipers Country: Taiwan
Photo credit: Garena.
Sometimes, a team captain's influence extends far outside his own team. The 2012 Taipei Assassins disappointed the entire island with the roster's slow post-Worlds dissolution, but it might have been for the best—team captain Mistake's founding of sister team Taipei Snipers helped spearhead the creation of the LoL Nova League, the domestic predecessor to the LMS and the incubation farm for the current generation of Taiwanese players' best and brightest.
It also helped that the Snipers were on an upward path under his guidance, dominating the Nova League while the remaining TPA roster increasingly floundered internationally and in the Southeast Asia's Garena Premier League. Though the Snipers were never able to claim the championship, falling short by a single game in a best of 5 set, Mistake's guidance and leadership across two top teams set the standard for the entirety of the Taiwanese scene: their consistent dominance eventually earning their independence from the rest of Southeast Asia and the establishment of the Worlds-seeded LoL Master Series in 2015.
For three years, there were only two consistent facts in the EU LCS: one, everybody would take games off of everybody else, regardless if they were last place or circuit leaders. Two, when the dust had finally settled, Fnatic would be at or near the top of the heap.
It's hard to tell where the credit goes for the team's first two years of dominance—but there's no question that support captain Yellowstar was at least the architect, if not the executor. He was the only one remaining of the 2014 squad when xPeke and pretty much everybody else left for newly formed Origen. Yet Yellowstar's handpicked replacements went on to Fnatic's single most dominant season in its entire history—culminating with an undefeated summer split and Worlds semifinals placement. Time will tell if he can replicate that success with North America's TSM.
Reginald's got his haters, but you only get them when you've made a big enough impact—and the owner-founder of TSM has most definitely made an impact. Newcomers to League of Legends esports might not know that he was also captain and mid laner throughout most of the organization's history, prior to acquiring Bjergsen from Europe's Copenhagen Wolves.
He wasn't the most mechanically adept mid laner in North America, even for the time, but his demanding leadership and no-excuses treatment of roster issues formulated TSM's tradition of domestic success. He was The Boss, both in and out of the game—and across the developing culture of North American LoL esports.
Lee "PoohManDu" Jeong-hyeon
Team: SKT T1 Country: South Korea
Photo credit: LoLesports.
When PoohManDu initially stepped down from SKT T1 K, before the 2014 summer split, the organization was expected to still keep kicking out wins. After all, with Impact, Faker and Piglet, the mechanical core was thought to be unbeatable—they'd just won Worlds the previous year, and secured an unprecedented perfect season that spring.
As it actually turned out, even Faker was going to look terrible without the in-game leadership offered by ManDu. Health problems still afflicted him when SKT desperately called him back onto the roster, after losing to Samsung Ozone in the quarterfinals, but his return did herald a perfect tournament run at that year's All-Star. Though they failed to run it back through the Korean league that year, ManDu played a vital role in keeping SKT T1 from being one-hit wonders.
Gao "WeiXiao" Xuecheng
Team: Team WE Country: China
Photo credit: LoLesports.
It's rare for the AD carry to be team captain—the mechanically intensive role doesn't leave a lot of time left for shotcalling or strategic guidance. But Team WE, formerly World Elite, was never as strong as when WeiXiao was making the shots, both figurative and literal. Their 2012-2013 period was the single most dominant in Chinese League of Legends history, qualifying for the 2012 World Championship months before anybody else by the simple virtue of winning so many points-awarding tournaments that nobody else could catch up.
Their Worlds run was tragic, as the match against CLG.EU was marred heavily by hours-long technical errors (and starting the reprehensible trend of cheering for ward kills), but WeiXiao got his chance to prove the merits of his team, and of his own reputation as the world's best AD carry, in the legendary IPL 5 tournament just months later. For one glorious moment, China was top of the world, and WeiXiao its king.
The problem with playing against Fnatic circa 2013-2014 is, even if you managed to beat their macro strategy, you were nervously glancing at your minimap all the time. At any moment, that telltale Teleport warning was going to show up and make a close or even winning game into a sudden turnaround loss—all because of xPeke.
If Yellowstar was the architect of Fnatic's strategic body, xPeke was the heart and soul of it. And he carried it over to Origen, including that signature backdoor play. Though current mid laner PowerofEvil had also made a name for himself on the original Unicorns of Love roster, the team has been comparatively listless without xPeke's swagger.
Jang "Woong" Gun-woong
Team: CJ Entus Frost Country: South Korea
Photo credit: Gosugamers.
Jang "Woon" Gun-woong's inclusion might be the most controversial thing about this list—the man was caught screen-glimpsing back in Worlds 2012, his AD play was so bad that he was eventually forced to adapt by buying Warmog's Armor just to survive in fights, and he had a reputation for solo queue rage. By most standards, he would've gone down in history as just another has-been.
Yet CJ Entus Frost, formerly of Azubu, was never so good and never as confident as when he was still leading the team. Legendary support player Madlife might have long established a reputation for being the shining star of an otherwise lackluster bot lane, but before Faker, before KaKAO, and long before Samsung had two of the world's strongest teams, it was Woong's Frost that set the standard for Korea's international excellence in League of Legends. That banner yet waves.
