Restrictions on Rosters and Work Hours to Prevent Brute Forcing

What if the working hours and roster sizes of professional teams were restricted, just like their players’ salaries, to prevent the brute forcing of wins by hiring a large roster and pushing its hours to their players’ psychological limits?

This practice is especially prevalent in Korea, where a large regional talent pool enables teams to hire many excellent players, squeeze in every possible hour of practice, substitute them both between matches and splits. It robs the players of their personal lives and creates the perception that teams from that region are just not comparable to ones from elsewhere.

Beyond being unfair to the players’ reasonable expectation of activities off the Rift and their opponents’ hopes of a level playing field, it should also unsettle us viewers. What price are we paying for our entertainment when 18 or 19 year old boys are, as former Korean players put it, ‘grinding their souls’ just to substitute for teams that will never even see international competition?

Personally, I never knew or thought about it until seeing Faker cry after losing the final game of last year’s World Championship. It shook me. He’s worth millions, the undisputed greatest of all time, and couldn’t even hold himself together long enough to walk offstage after taking the Grand Final to a 5 game series. Short of actually taking home the trophy, that’s as far as anyone could go. He’s not a tilter: SKT and the LCK did that to him.

So, I think it’s time we did something about it, and limiting practice hours and roster sizes seems like a good start. I can’t claim to know the exact numbers, but if my suggestions are wrong, then please suggest better ones. 10 hours a day seems like a reasonable starting point for the working hour limit, since players work seven days a week for months on end. A 5 starter, 1 sub roster, locked over each split, would prevent actions like SKT’s full-team mid-split bench, or in fair criticism of other regions, C9’s triple Academy swap.

Other sports had similar abuses before the advent of players’ unions. It took decades of suffering and strikes to win the protections that make them humane today. League can benefit from their experience and instate them today.