Esports World Cup 2026 Relocates From Riyadh to Paris
Iranian drone strikes on Riyadh forced the biggest esports event of the year out of Saudi Arabia for the first time — and the Élysée got the win.
The Élysée confirmed on May 20 that the 2026 Esports World Cup will run July 6 through August 23 at Paris La Défense Arena instead of Riyadh, after repeated Iranian drone strikes on Riyadh and King Khalid International Airport made the original venue untenable. It's the first EWC held outside Saudi Arabia, and the prize pool is unchanged at a record $75M across 21 disciplines and over 2,000 players. The Saudi-funded event being announced from the French presidential palace is the kind of soft-power swap that doesn't happen unless someone in Paris worked the phones hard — the same wave of strikes also cancelled the Jeddah F1 Grand Prix in April, and France clearly saw a free win sitting on the table. For organisers this is an enormous logistics scramble: venue contracts, broadcast deals, team housing, visas, sponsor activations, all re-pinned to Paris with six weeks of runway. The bigger story for the scene is that the EWC's funding model — Saudi PIF money, Saudi venue, Saudi political positioning — just got partly decoupled from Saudi geography, and that changes the politics of accepting EWC slots for the teams and players who'd been pressed about it for two years.