ESL announces 2025 Dota 2 events calendar

ESL One Birmingham
Image credit: Adam Lakomy, ESL

Esports tournament organiser ESL, part of the ESL FACEIT Group, has announced the 2025 Dota 2 competitive calendar under its ESL Pro Tour brand.

The calendar includes a total of five events, with three seasons of the DreamLeague and two editions of ESL One taking place throughout the year.

The Dota 2 events will continue being a part of the ESL Pro Tour brand, ESL’s own Dota 2 tournament circuit with open competitions and large-scale LAN events that feature prize pools up to $1m (~£793,000). For 2025, the company has announced five events, which means that no further events were added to the Pro Tour.

For example, the 2024 calendar year also features three DreamLeague seasons and two ESL One events, in the UK and a yet-unannounced location in Asia. The Riyadh Masters in Dota 2 will also take place this year and will include the best-placed ESL Pro Tour teams.

The 2025 events will start with DreamLeague Season 25 between February and March, with ESL One Europe in April. DreamLeague will then take the stage for two consecutive seasons in May and November and the year will be closed with ESL One Asia in December.

Locations and further details were not shared by ESL.

The ESL Pro Tour was revamped in early 2023, and marked the return of the DreamLeague as one of its main LAN events throughout the season. Since its revamp, the Pro Tour has held six major events to date, including four seasons of the DreamLeague and two ESL One events, in Kuala Lumpur and Birmingham.

The Pro Tour news comes shortly after ESL’s competitor BLAST announced that it will enter Dota with BLAST Slam events in 2024 and 2025. In March, PGL announced plans to host at least eight large Dota 2 events between 2024 and 2026. As a result, competition in the Dota 2 landscape has increased dramatically in just a couple of months this year.

Ivan Šimić
Ivan comes from Croatia, loves weird simulator games, and is terrible at playing anything else. Spent 5 years writing about tech and esports in Croatia, and is now doing it here.