Chinese League of Legends team OMG to host its own Youth Cup

In a great effort to promote young League of Legends talent in China, OMG is organizing its own Youth Cup. The first one, the 2014 OMG Summer Youth Cup, starts today.

A while back, OMG put out a recruitment notice on their Tencent Weibo. No, the team was not looking for more support players.

(See: Who is OMG’s Cloud? An interview with the team’s mysterious starting support)

Instead, these were more traditional positions and included roles for graphic design, video editing, and marketing. We didn’t know what to make of it as first, but now it makes sense: OMG is organizing its own tournaments and the first one, the 2014 OMG Summer Youth Cup, is already underway.

The OMG Youth Cup will place 16 teams into four different groups and have them face off in best-of-3 matches. All matches are played online (although we may possibly see an offline championship) and are overseen by OMG referees (a position they’re still hiring for, by the way).

Now this might be going a bit far for most professional teams, but OMG probably has some significant financial backing in China. After all, with recent international appearances in the Season 3 World Championship and All-Star 2014, OMG is one of the most popular Chinese team in the world, and what Chinese sponsor wouldn’t want a piece of that international pie?

There’s no mention of a prize, but OMG has a lot of players, so could this also be for the formation of a secondary team – OMG Academy, anyone?

Tournament rules translated below:

2014 Summer Team OMG Youth Cup Rules:

1) All matches are 5v5, draft mode.