ESL Impact announces 2025 schedule; $350,000 in Club Incentives

Today ESL have announced the schedule for the ESL Impact League in 2025 while also introducing a number of changes and improvements to the women's CS2 circuit. Off the bat, the most important announcement for NA fans is that the ESL Impact League Season 7 Finals are set to take place at DreamHack Dallas, seeing the first LAN event of the Impact calendar return to Dallas for the fourth year in a row.

Additionally, ESL have changed the LAN slot distribution in order to adhere to Valve's new rules, with NA set to have two spots in the Season 7 and Season 8 Finals. This is a marked improvement over the system employed for Season 5 and 6, which saw North America and South only have one permanent spot in the Finals while a third spot rotated between the two regions.

Another novel change by ESL is the introduction of a "Seasonal Club Incentive" program for the ESL Impact League. This new program by ESL is set to disperse $350,000 to esports organizations to reward investment in the ESL Impact scene. The first part of the program will see organizations fight for $100,000 via "Club Ranking System" while an additional $250,000 will be given to organizations producing long-form and short-form content to promote their ESL Impact teams.

This massive incentives program by ESL was likely created with the aim of driving further investment by organizations in the women's scene while also stemming, and hopefully reverse, the recent trend of organizations exiting the scene due to financial viability concerns. Most notably, TSM, Spirit, Astralis, and ENCE all exited the Impact scene within the last 30 days, likely setting off alarm bells for many key stakeholders.

Moving into the more granular details, ESL Impact League Season 7 will be the final season to use the old invite system seen in previous seasons, while Season 8 will handle all invites through the Valve Ranking System (VRS), aligning the league with Valve's requirements in 2025.

Key dates for the league in 2025 are as follows:

ESL Impact League Season 7:

• Open Qualifiers: January 31st - February 6th

• Online League: February 26th - April 13th

• LAN Finals: May 23rd - May 25th

ESL Impact League Season 8:

• Open Qualifiers: August 15th - 24th

• Online League: September 10th - October 26th

• LAN Finals: November 28th - 30th

ESL's full blog post about next year's circuit may be found here.