T1: The Complete History of The Greatest Dynasty in League of Legends
Photo Credit: T1 on Youtube
In November 2025, T1 lifted the Summoner's Cup for a sixth time.No other organization has won it more than twice. That distance is no longer a lead — it is a separate weight class, built over twelve years around a single mid laner who joined as a teenager and is still winning titles in his late twenties.
This is how a telecom company's gaming team became the benchmark for the entire sport.
Origins: a StarCraft team in disguise
The organization is older than the game that made it famous. In 2002, StarCraft legend Lim "BoxeR" Yo-hwan founded a team called Orion. SK Telecom — one of South Korea's largest mobile company — took it over in April 2004 and renamed it SK Telecom T1
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. For most of the next decade, the brand belonged to StarCraft, where BoxeR was already a national figure.
League of Legends arrived late. On December 13, 2012, SK Telecom bought the roster of Eat Sleep Game and fielded it as SK Telecom T1 S. Two months later, in February 2013, the organization built a second squad — SK Telecom T1 K. Korean rules at the time allowed sister teams, so the two SKT rosters competed in the same league. The S side's toplaner was Bok "Reapered" Han-gyu — among the most respected top laners of the early Korean scene, and today the head coach of Karmine Corp.
Photo Credit: OGN
Season 3: the debut that reset the bar
2013 produced the rookie who would anchor everything after it. Lee "Faker" Sang-hyeok joined SKT T1 K as a 16-year-old, alongside Impact, Bengi, Piglet and PoohManDu, under head coach kkOma. He forced his way into the best-mid-laner-in-the-world conversation within a single tournament, then carried the team through the domestic season and into the World Championship.
The 2013 final was a statement. SKT T1 K beat China's Royal Club 3-0 without dropping a game at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, taking the title in their first international appearance. Faker had a world championship before his 18th birthday, and the organization had its first.
2014 broke the rhythm. The K roster dominated the following winter and won the All-Star event in Paris, but its form fell away across the Spring and Summer splits, and both SKT teams missed Worlds entirely. Riot then changed the rulebook. From November 2014, organizations could field only one team per league, which forced SKT to dissolve the S and K split and merge into a single roster.
Photo Credit: Riot Games
The first dynasty: 2015 and 2016
2015 produced the strongest version of the team in its history. The merged roster — MaRin, Bengi, Faker, Bang and Wolf, with Easyhoon as the sixth man — opened with Faker and Easyhoon sharing the mid lane. The rotation cost them at the Mid-Season Invitational, where they finished second; the loss pushed Faker back into the full-time starting role. From there the team ran. SKT won both LCK splits, then claimed Worlds 2015 by beating fellow Koreans KOO Tigers 3-1. The lineup lost a single game across the entire tournament.
The 2016 title carried historical weight. SKT became the first organization to win back-to-back World Championships, and the third title in four years confirmed the model: a stable core around Faker, a coaching staff led by kkOma, and constant roster turnover at every other position.
Photo Credit: Riot Games
2017 extended the run domestically before ending it abroad. SKT won the LCK Spring split and MSI 2017, then lost the LCK Summer final to Longzhu Gaming. At Worlds, they reached the final again and lost to Samsung Galaxy 3-0. It was the last final of the dynasty's first chapter.
The lean years and the rebrand
2018 was the low point. The roster was rebuilt almost entirely, struggled domestically, and missed the World Championship for the first time since 2014 — knocked out by Gen.G in the LCK regional qualifier. The organization that had defined the sport spent a season watching it from outside.
The partnership behind that move — a joint venture between SK Telecom and Comcast Spectacor, named T1 Entertainment & Sports — launched in October 2019, with Joe Marsh installed as CEO. The League of Legends team kept the SKT name through the 2019 season and only began competing as T1 from December. At Worlds 2019, the team reached the semifinals and lost to G2 Esports 3-1.
The roster’s identity tightened around its franchise player. In February 2020, Faker signed a three-year extension with T1 and became a part-owner of T1 Entertainment & Sports — an extraordinary case of a player receiving an ownership stake in the very institution he had built his career inside. He had reportedly turned down larger offers from China and North America to stay, making his commitment to T1 not just competitive, but structural.
Results recovered slowly. A young core began to form — Oner, Gumayusi and Keria reached Worlds 2021 alongside Faker and top laner Canna — and the team made the semifinals before losing to DWG KIA 3-2.
Photo Credit: Riot Games
The pieces of the next dynasty were assembling, but the trophies had not come back yet.
2022: the final that hurt
2022 brought the roster that would carry T1 for the next three competitive years — Zeus, Oner, Faker, Gumayusi and Keria — ZOFGK. The five won the LCK Spring split, reached the MSI final and lost it, then made the Worlds final in their first full season together.
The 2022 final against DRX is remembered as one of the best ever played. T1 led the series and could not close it, losing 3-2 to a fourth-seeded DRX — the Cinderella story carried by veteran Kim "Deft" Hyuk-kyu, who claimed his first Worlds title after years of falling short. It was T1's second lost international final of the year. The young core had reached the summit and been turned back at the last step.
Photo Credit: Riot Games
The three-peat: 2023, 2024, 2025
2023 ended the international drought, and it was not a clean season. Faker missed several weeks with an arm injury — the team benched its star and risked its playoff spot to let him recover. He returned, and T1 worked through a brutal bracket, beating JD Gaming and Park "Ruler" Jae-hyuk's loaded roster in the semifinals. The final was a 3-0 sweep of Weibo Gaming at the Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul, in front of a home crowd. Faker took his fourth title, Zeus the Finals MVP. The same five who lost to DRX a year earlier had redeemed the loss on home soil.
2024 raised the ceiling and the stakes. T1 entered Worlds as the LCK's fourth seed and reached the final against China's Bilibili Gaming in London. BLG led the series 2-1 and sat one game from the title. T1 won the next two to take it 3-2. Faker collected his fifth championship and a second Finals MVP, and the match peaked at 6.9 million concurrent viewers outside China — a record for the sport. The win also made Zeus, Oner, Faker, Gumayusi and Keria the first roster to win back-to-back World Championships unchanged.
2025 turned dominance into a record that may stand for years. Doran replaced Zeus in the top lane, and T1 again qualified as a fourth seed before reaching the final in Chengdu against fellow LCK side KT Rolster. The opponent added a layer of history. KT and T1 are the two telecom-owned organizations behind the oldest rivalry in Korean League of Legends — the Telecom War — and KT had been the side to snap SKT's win streak in the 2016 LCK Summer semifinals. Nine years later, KT reached its first World Championship final and lost it to T1.
Photo Credit: Riot Games
The series followed the 2024 script almost exactly — T1 fell behind 1-2, then won two straight to take it 3-2. The result delivered a sixth World Championship and the first three-peat in the tournament's history. Gumayusi won Finals MVP, the first ADC to take the award since Ruler in 2017, and Doran earned his first international trophy.
Three consecutive titles had never been done before. By the end of 2025, T1 held six World Championships against a field where no rival had more than two.
The numbers explain the standing without embellishment. Six World Championships across twelve years. A core that won three straight after losing the 2022 final it should have closed. A player still ranked among the best in the world more than a decade after his first trophy. Domestically the record is just as lopsided — ten LCK titles, more than any other team in the league's history, alongside two Mid-Season Invitational crowns in 2016 and 2017. T1's record is not only the longest in League of Legends — it set the terms by which the sport now defines a dynasty.
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