Dexerto’s Richard Lewis recently came out with an article claiming that TSM may potentially sell their franchised spot in the LCS.

Latest for Dexerto: Sources say TSM recently considered selling their LCS slot among plans to streamline their esports division.https://t.co/KfH24Hh6MA

— Richard Lewis (@RLewisReports) July 28, 2022

It is believed that a number of reasons factor into this decision such as to help TSM with reducing costs in esports as a whole, the level of competition in the North American region and the decline in popularity of North American League of Legends as a whole.

As confirmed by another one of Dexerto’s sources, this wasn’t to say that TSM was planning on leaving League of Legends as a whole. In fact, they intended to sell off their LCS spot and were interested in the now-sold Misfits Gaming franchise slot in Riot’s European LEC league. I say “now-sold” as that slot was purchased by the Spain-based organisation, Team Heretics for a reported US$45-50 million.

Statistically, according to Esports Charts, the LCS viewership has seen a drop in comparison to its European counterpart, the LEC. In April, the LCS’ Spring Split saw a peak of 387,000 viewers while the LEC almost doubled that with 723,000. On average, the LCS achieved only 123,411 viewers compared to the LEC’s 270,749.

According to one of Dexerto’s sources, “TSM are currently cutting budgets everywhere in esports,” the source said. “They will likely sell other parts of their esports division in the near future.”

A third source anonymously said that there’s no guarantee that TSM will actually be dropping any of their lineups, but were just “ideas” that the North American organisation were exploring.

This is still a developing story, so this piece will be updated if anything new comes to light.