The Esports Foundation (EF, former Esports World Cup Foundation) has officially confirmed that Paris Expo Porte de Versailles will serve as the host venue for the Esports World Cup (EWC) 2026. The exhibition and conference complex will accommodate the entirety of the multi-game tournament’s competition arenas, broadcast operations, and fan festival experiences from 6 July through 23 August 2026.
Organisers also revealed that admission tickets across all 25 participating gaming competitions will go on sale on Friday, 29 May.
According to the EF, selecting Paris Expo Porte de Versailles provides the event with immediate operational infrastructure and an established competitive gaming heritage. The complex is structurally divided across eight dedicated pavilions, two auditoriums, and 32 integrated meeting rooms, providing the necessary infrastructure to scale up multiple simultaneous tournament broadcasts, team warm-up zones, and partner activations under a single centralised location.
The venue has served as the permanent home of Paris Games Week since 2010, hosted the Teamfight Tactics (TFT) Open in 2025, and operated as the largest active complex during the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The layout will be configured to support more than 2,000 professional players representing 200 elite clubs across 100 countries as they compete for a aggregate prize pool of over $75 million.
The ticketing rollout on 29 May will feature a tiered access structure, including a limited allocation of Early Bird passes. The purchasing options are divided into three primary categories:
- Regular Tournament Pass: Grants entry to every single competition day for a single selected game title—spanning both the group stages and the championship weekend—with standard Silver-tier seating included.
- Premium Tournament Pass: Provides fast-track entry lines to all matches of a specific game tournament, a Gold-tier seating allocation, and a limited-edition merchandise bag containing a collector coin, tote bag, and event T-shirt.
- Daily Regular Tournament Pass: Offers single-day entry to one specific game bracket, with custom seating choices available for select headline stages.
The spectator areas for the high-demand final stadium days—specifically covering the championship matches for VALORANT, League of Legends, Rocket League, and Counter-Strike 2—will be structurally divided into distinct Gold, Silver, and Bronze seating tiers to manage crowd density.
The venue allocation resolves the logistical questions triggered by the Esports Foundation’s decision to entirely relocate the 2026 tournament cycle out of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, due to mounting Middle Eastern airspace disruptions and regional security anxieties.
For more insight into the operational shift behind the event, readers can explore our recent interview with Esports Foundation CEO Ralf Reichert. In the discussion, Reichert explains that the explicit political backing of the French authorities, including President Emmanuel Macron, was capital to selecting Paris. See the full article in this link.
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