The past two years, especially, have been incredibly turbulent—sometimes in bad ways, but overall in very good ways. From facilitating the Benelux community with a tournament circuit boasting a total prize pool of more than €18,000, to broadcasting the RLCS 22-23 World Championship live from the DSB Bank Dome in Düsseldorf in August 2023... let’s just say we peaked in 2023.

However, after 2023 ended, we were met with some bad news. One of our most important partners at the time, Unlocked, decided to discontinue their funding for everything Rocket League-related, including the Elite Series, effective immediately. Needless to say, we were incredibly upset. What do you do when you suddenly lose close to €35,000 of upcoming investments for 2024? How do you ensure we can run competitions? How do we pay our staff? How do we keep prize pools large enough to remain attractive? All these questions needed answers if we wanted to continue doing what we do best: organizing Rocket League tournaments.

It was a hard decision. Not everyone agreed with stepping down, decreasing the overall budget for prize pools, staff, and more. But we had no choice if we wanted to continue in 2024.

As you all know, we revived a good old format: The Showdowns. We partnered with Erazer and GameWaves for the majority of the year to ensure we could still do everything that was financially possible.

Now, we owe each of you an explanation and need to share our plan for the future. As you might have noticed by the time you’re reading this, we strive to be as transparent as possible. We believe it’s important to lay our cards on the table and let you know what we’ve been up to. It has been well over a month since you last heard from us, following the conclusion of the Winter Showdown. We’re sorry to have kept you waiting this long. But we’d be lying if we said the past few months have been easy. Countless conversations, calls, and late-night discussions have culminated in the conclusions written in this statement. 

To be completely honest and straightforward, right now we lack the resources to fulfill the vision we have for Rocket Benelux. The two main bottlenecks are money and time. With everything that happened — or didn’t happen — in 2023-24, we simply don’t have the financial resources to give the community what we want: high-quality tournaments. Beyond the financial aspect, we all notice that our lives are evolving. Juicy is a full-time data engineer, Pollie is a freelance developer, Paul works on RLCS for BLAST, and Pieter is a project manager at GameWaves. Still, we want to spend every free second we have on Rocket Benelux, but we find it extremely hard without that light at the end of the tunnel. We can’t bring back an Elite Series-like tournament, a tournament circuit, or even a Showdown like we did in 2024 without external — mainly financial — help. We have noticed several community members asking for more tournaments, even if that means less prize pool. Back to the old days, they say. 

As the board of Rocket Benelux, we are extremely passionate about Rocket League esports. Rocket Benelux was founded out of passion, and that same passion drives our determination not to scale down further. After dedicating thousands of hours and euros to this project, we were forced to make significant cuts in 2024. However, continuing on this downward trajectory is not an option, as it’s clear that our current approach is unsustainable. For this reason, we are shifting our strategy for the foreseeable future.

Instead of creating tournaments independently and then seeking sponsors to fit into our system, we will now collaborate directly with sponsors and partners to design tournaments tailored to their needs. As a result, we won’t have a consistent schedule initially, as events will be planned in coordination with our partners. This is why we have not announced any events yet and do not have a timeline for 2025 at this time. We are actively engaging in discussions with several sponsors and partners and will share details about upcoming events as soon as they are finalized. Our primary goal remains to ensure that everyone participating or watching has a fantastic experience—a commitment we will always uphold.

Rocket Benelux will continue to exist, along with trusted tournament formats like the Showdowns and Master Series, as well as the casters and teams you know and love. However, we cannot yet say when these familiar names will return to your screens. Just know we are working tirelessly behind the scenes. All we ask from you is your patience and support.

We want to thank everyone who was involved with Rocket Benelux in any shape or form for the past 5 years:
The viewers
The players
The staff
The organisations
The partners
and The community.

Thank you, we will be back.

- Paul
- Pieter
- Pollie
- Rocket Benelux