India picked four Esports Nations Cup squads this summer, and the tournament has moved to November 2027

India had four squads picked, a national team partner in place and eleven weeks to go. On 18 August the Esports Foundation announced that the first Esports Nations Cup, due to run in Riyadh from 2 to 29 November this year, will now be held in November 2027 instead. Same city, same idea, twelve months later.

India had already done the work

NODWIN Gaming, India’s national team partner for the event, spent June and July assembling the contingent. The BGMI roster was announced in July with Nakul Sharma as in-game leader, alongside Yash Choudhary, Rudra Banswani, Ankit Shukla, Abhijot Singh and Raghuraj Singh, with Rahul Ayogi as coach. Nakul had just been named best IGL at BGIS 2026. India also received a special invitation to the BGMI event rather than having to qualify.

The chess pair was settled in June. Nihal Sarin came in through the Champions Chess Tour leaderboard, and Mitrabha Guha took the regional qualifier route, going unbeaten through the Swiss stage with six wins and three draws from nine rounds before beating Syria’s Malek Koniahli and Iran’s Artin Ashraf in the bracket. India also came through in VALORANT and Trackmania. The one that got away was Dota 2, where Pakistan took the last spot in the region.

All of that now sits on a shelf until late next year.

The reason, and the thing that happened in May

The Foundation’s stated reason is the “wider regional situation”, which is the same phrasing the organisation has used before. This is not the first Riyadh event it has moved. On 20 May the Esports World Cup was shifted to Paris after Iranian drone and missile strikes on the Saudi capital, and it ran there from 6 July to 23 August. The pattern was set months before this announcement landed.

Ralf Reichert, the Foundation’s chief executive, said the decision “was not taken lightly” and that the response from national team partners, publishers and players “has shown us how much potential this competition has”. The Foundation also confirmed that Development Fund commitments to national team partners stay in place, which matters more than it sounds: NODWIN and its equivalents in other countries have been spending against those commitments all year.

Fifteen months is a long time to hold a roster

The ENC was built at a scale that explains why the Foundation would rather wait than compromise. Sixteen titles, a 20 million dollar prize pool inside a 45 million dollar commitment, more than 100 countries and territories in qualifying, and payouts of 50,000 dollars per player for a winning side whether the title is a team game or a solo one. That is a lot of money to put behind a first edition that nobody is certain can be staged properly.

The cost lands on the players. Fifteen months is longer than plenty of esports contracts run. The six BGMI names picked in July were picked on July form and July rosters, and by November 2027 some are likely to be at different organisations, others may have dropped off the circuit entirely, and a player nowhere near the conversation today could have a real case for a place. NODWIN will almost certainly have to run the selection again, and the qualifying results India banked this summer are unlikely to mean much by then.

What softens it is that the ENC was never going to be India’s only national-flag event this year. The Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya run from 19 September to 4 October, and esports has 11 medal events there between 23 September and 2 October, up from seven at Hangzhou in 2023. Indian fans who wanted to watch players compete under a flag rather than an organisation still get that in four weeks. They just get it in Japan, in a different set of titles, and without the six-man BGMI squad NODWIN spent the summer putting together.

Keep up with the Indian esports scene