14 teams. Two groups. Everyone plays until the season ends.

01 — DECIDED

What's locked in

Every operational detail is locked in — no guesswork, nothing left to announce later. Here's the full picture.

• Minimum 56 teams to launch (70 is the target) — no season, no payment, until that's reached
• Matches are played on FACEIT
• Placement is skill-based, not random or first-come-first-served — purely data-driven, no pre-season qualifying or ranking matches
• 14 teams per division, split into two groups of 7 for the regular season
• Regular season is a 6-game round robin within your group, 2 matches a week
• Top 4 teams from each group — 8 total — advance to the Championship Playoffs, played as double-elimination
• The other 6 teams play in the Relegation Group — a single round robin, best-of-3, one match a week
• Promotion and relegation between divisions at the end of each season
• Everything operational — fixtures, scores, standings, rosters — runs through hub.kanaliiga.fi, not this site

02 — CHAMPIONSHIP & RELEGATION

Nobody's season ends after the group stage.

A 14-team division splits cleanly: the top 4 from each group fight for the division title, and the bottom 3 from each group fight to stay up. Both run in parallel, over the same weeks, so every paying team keeps playing meaningful matches all the way to the end of the season — not just the teams good enough to make a playoff bracket.

• Championship Playoffs — 8 teams, double-elimination. Losing once doesn't end your season; you need to lose twice. That matters for an amateur league where one off night shouldn't be the whole story.
• Relegation Group — 6 teams, single round robin, every match played best-of-3. Same weight as a playoff match, because staying in your division is exactly as meaningful as winning it.

Every team deserves meaningful matches, regardless of whether they're fighting for the title or fighting to stay up.

03 — SEASON CALENDAR

A season runs 9 weeks, 4 times a year.

3 weeks of group stage, then 6 weeks where the Championship Playoffs and Relegation Group run side by side (the Relegation Group wraps up a week early). At least 3 weeks off between seasons, with a longer break across June and July.

Season 5 picks the same rhythm back up in January 2028. See the Roadmap for how this connects to Season 1's launch.

04 — PLACEMENT

How teams are placed

Initial division placement is calculated using Kanaliiga's own rating system — refined over 18 seasons of actually running a competitive league, not a formula written for this launch. It draws on FACEIT data among other inputs, but the exact weighting isn't public: publishing it would just make it easier to game, and it's been tuned against real season outcomes rather than theory.

What we will commit to publishing is the philosophy, not the formula:

• Divisions are meant to be narrow enough that a mismatch is the exception, not the norm — the core lesson of seven years running Kanaliiga and watching where matches actually stopped being fun.
• Manual review exists to catch cases where the data doesn't reflect a team's actual strength (e.g. obvious smurf stacks).
• From Season 2 onward, a team's own league results start to carry real weight in placement — the more seasons played, the less placement depends on outside platforms like FACEIT alone.

05 — TRANSPARENCY

If placement isn't going to work, we'll tell you first.

Sometimes the honest answer is that a team is going to struggle no matter which division they land in. When that happens, we tell them before the season starts, not after weeks of one-sided losses.

"Based on our placement review, we believe this season will be significantly more difficult than intended for your team. We'd still love to have you participate, but we want to be transparent before the season begins. You may continue with your registration, or receive a full refund before the league starts."

This is something most leagues don't offer. It exists because we'd rather a team make an informed choice than get destroyed for a season and leave thinking the league itself was the problem.

06 — WHY NOT ESEA

Why not just copy ESEA's model?

ESEA's divisions (Open → Intermediate → Main → Advanced) are a proven structure, and Northbound borrows the core idea: tiered divisions with seasonal promotion and relegation. Where Northbound aims to differ is depth — narrower divisions than ESEA's broad tiers, keeping the skill spread within any single division smaller.