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No League of Legends team has ever won every trophy available to them in a single year. Bilibili Gaming were the latest to try, and the latest to fall short. Fifteen years of near-misses have produced a strange pattern — the step that breaks these teams is rarely the one anybody expects. Bilibili Gaming led Hanwha Life Esports 2-1 in the MSI 2026 Grand Final on 12 July. They had First Stand, LPL Split 1 and LPL Split 2 already banked. Two games later they were runners-up for the third time at the tournament, and the Golden Road was gone again.
That phrase belongs to Riot, who coined it for the feat other sports call a grand slam: one organisation winning every official Riot competition they are eligible for across a calendar year. Nobody has done it. The reason is partly that the target keeps growing. Until 2014 the checklist ran to a regional title and Worlds. MSI arrived in 2015 and made it four. First Stand joined in 2025 and made it five.
Ranking the near-misses depends on what counts as close. The Golden Road is a sequence, so the first reading is how far down the calendar a team travelled before the run died — everything won after that point completes nothing. The second reading counts games. This list follows the sequence, with the game count as the argument against it.
G2 Esports 2019: the last series of the year
G2 Esports remain the only team to have reached the final step with everything else already won. They took the LEC Spring title, beat Team Liquid at MSI 2019, and returned to win the LEC Summer title. Every trophy on the 2019 checklist was theirs except one.
FunPlus Phoenix beat them 3-0 in the Worlds final in Paris. The sweep matters as much as the result. G2 had spent the year winning close series against the best teams in the world, and lost the only one that would have completed the run without taking a game. No side has since matched their position — four steps down a four-step road, one series from the end.
SK Telecom T1 2015: beaten by a single game
SK Telecom T1 lost the Golden Road in May, and by the smallest possible margin.
They won the 2015 LCK Spring title and travelled to Tallahassee for the first MSI ever staged. EDward Gaming beat them 3-2 in the final. SKT then won the LCK Summer title and the World Championship, finishing the year with three of the four trophies and the most dominant Worlds run of the era.
One game at MSI separates the 2015 season from a completed Golden Road. The scheduling did not help. The LCK Spring final was played on 2 May and MSI opened on 7 May, leaving the Korean champions under a week to prepare for a tournament nobody had ever played before.
JD Gaming 2023: three down, stopped in the semis
JD Gaming arrived at Worlds 2023 with the LPL Spring title, the MSI trophy and the LPL Summer title. They were favourites in Seoul. The journalists, the analyst desks and most of the LPL agreed on it.
T1 beat them in the semi-final. Seo "Kanavi" Jin-hyeok, the jungler at the centre of that JDG side, would return to the same argument from the other direction three years later — he was on the Hanwha Life roster that ended Bilibili Gaming's attempt at MSI 2026.
SK Telecom T1 2016: the domestic step
SKT won the LCK Spring title in 2016, won MSI, and then finished third in the LCK Summer split. They went on to win Worlds for the third time.
The 2016 season is the clearest example of the pattern that runs through this whole list. SKT beat the world twice that year and lost at home. A Korean or Chinese team chasing the Golden Road has to get through three or four genuine title contenders in their own league, twice, on top of everything else — and the domestic bracket has ended more of these runs than Worlds has.
RNG 2018: the quarter-final
Royal Never Give Up won the LPL Spring title, MSI 2018 and the LPL Summer title. They went to Worlds as the strongest team on the planet by every available measure.
G2 Esports beat them 3-2 in the quarter-final. RNG took the first game and led the series before losing three of the next four. It remains the earliest exit of any team that reached Worlds with the Golden Road still live, and the result that made the phrase feel cursed rather than merely difficult.
Why nobody has done it
The checklist has grown from two trophies to five in eleven years, and each addition is another elimination series on another patch. That is the obvious explanation, and it is incomplete.
The record says the danger is domestic. SKT lost their 2016 run in the LCK Summer split. Gen.G went 17-1 through the 2024 LCK Summer regular season and lost the final 2-3 to Hanwha Life.
There is also a tournament that shapes these runs without counting towards them. The Esports World Cup is organised by the Esports World Cup Foundation and sanctioned by Riot rather than run by them, so no EWC trophy has ever appeared on a Golden Road checklist. It still costs a full preparation window in the middle of the season.
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