The second season of Nanyang Championships lost three of their directly invited teams as the defending Champions, Team Secret decided to pull out from the tournament after Fnatic and Evil Geniuses had to pass due to visa issues.
Three days before the tournament is set to kick off, three out of the four directly invited teams have announced their withdrawal. Fnatic were the first to announce the impossibility of their participation in China due to the passport complications of Djardel 'DJ' Mampusti. The Filipino player is left with only one blank page in his passport and the Chinese visa requires two. Despite great efforts to get him a new one even with the express option, they couldn’t make it in time. However, Fnatic will be able to attend The Summit 5 and TI6 without problems as DJ has a ten year USA visa in the current passport.
After Fnatic’s absence was resolved by bringing LGD Gaming to the event, yesterday Evil Geniuses were the second team to cite visa issues for the Pakistani player Syed Sumail 'SumaiL' Hassan. According to the Nanyang organizers, they’ve been trying to help EG to secure the visa but the team manager posted a tweet yesterday saying “we were never provided a government approved invitation from Nanyang” .
SumaiL’s visa application was rejected three times in a row which means that the runners up from the Chinese qualifiers (which are still undergoing) will replace the NA team.
After all these, Team Secret announced last night that they will also drop from the tournament, this time around visas not being the problem. They simply decided to focus on the TI6 practice and not to travel to China. Their replacement is yet to be announced.
Nanyang Season 2 is set to kick off Wednesday, June 6th in Shanghai, China and for now will feature at least four Chinese teams, one European, one from SEA, one fromr NA and one more to be announced.
Nanyang #2 participating teams:
NewBee (direct invite)
LGD Gaming (direct invite- Fnatic’s replacement)
Digital Chaos (US qualifiers)
Team Empire (EU qualifiers)
WarriorsGaming.Unity (SEA qualifiers)
TBD 1 - Chinese qualifiers winners
TBD 2 - Chinese qualifiers runners up (EG’s replacement)
TBA - Secret’s replacement
