IESF Declares Itself Debt-Free With No Championship on Its 2026 Calendar

What the report says

The International Esports Federation says it has settled all of its outstanding financial obligations and is debt-free, drawing a line under a dispute that began when member federations accused it of withholding prize money from its 2024 world championship to pay down earlier debts.“IESF is back, debt-free, focused and ready for the future. We faced our challenges directly, took responsibility and honored every obligation,” IESF President Vlad Marinescu said in the announcement Wednesday. “That work was not always easy, but it was necessary, and today IESF stands on solid ground.”The announcement does not state how much was owed, to whom, over what period, or where the money to settle it came from.

It does not identify the creditors as prize winners, staff, vendors or host cities, and it is not accompanied by a financial statement.The claim lands against an unusually empty competition calendar.IESF’s own events database lists no IESF-organized competition anywhere in 2026. The federation has two entries on this year’s calendar and both are conferences: the World Esports Summit 2025, held in Busan on Feb. 10-11, and the World Esports Summit 2026, scheduled for the same city in October. The remaining 2026 entries belong to member national federations in Portugal, Morocco and Malaysia. The summit series is running a year behind its own name, with the 2025 and 2026 editions falling eight months apart inside the same calendar year.There is no World Esports Championship on the calendar, no continental championship and no regional qualifier series.

IESF staged a world championship and a regional qualifier series in each of the four preceding years.The gap is not the result of an announced pause. When IESF confirmed in October 2025 that its 2025 championship would run as a Mobile Legends: Bang Bang-only event in Kuala Lumpur, it said in the same release that “all other official WEC titles will follow in the first half of 2026, with host city and dates to be announced soon.” Counter-Strike, Dota 2, PUBG Mobile and eFootball are still carried with no date and no host on Liquipedia’s index of the series, and IESF has published nothing further about them.

Key details

The first half of 2026 ended nearly two months ago.Wednesday’s release describes something different. Marinescu’s statement cites “a growing international calendar,” and the release closes on “a growing calendar of international activities.”The championship IESF did stage was a fraction of its predecessor. The Kuala Lumpur event carried a $65,000 prize pool for the open division and $35,000 for the women’s division, according to Liquipedia’s tournament records — $100,000 across a single game title. A year earlier in Riyadh, IESF and the Saudi Esports Federation had secured a $1 million prize pool across four titles, which the federation said was the first time it had raised the pool “to this extent” and described as a tenfold increase over the 2021 edition.That Riyadh edition is where the debt problem became public.Portugal’s national federation told The Esports Advocate in 2025 that it had earned $70,000 at the 2024 championship and been paid $59,500.

IESF had told it that the Saudi Esports Federation applied a 15% government withholding tax and so remitted $850,000 of the $1 million prize pool, and that IESF had passed the same 15% deduction on to winners. The Portuguese source said IESF had separately received an organizing fee of the same size, leaving it with roughly $1.7 million, and had still cut the prize pools “allegedly to pay ‘previous debts,'” as previously reported by The Esports Advocate. The same source said three federations had been paid in full while the rest received 85%, called the handling “a clear case of incompetence, and discrimination of some Federations and Players over the others,” and said “the current board and secretariat should resign immediately.”IESF reversed the deduction in June 2025, attributing the shortfall to “differences in accounting systems, invoice timing, payments, and financial balancing” and saying its Audit, Risk, and Governance Committee would conduct a final review before affected nations received the remainder of their winnings.Boban Totovski, the general secretary named in that call for resignations, remains in the post.

He is listed as IESF general secretary in the federation’s published speaker materials for the World Esports Summit 2026.Marinescu is not new to the federation either. He served as IESF president from 2020 to 2023 and resigned that October, which opened the way for Saudi Esports Federation founder HRH Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud to take the presidency, and he was elected to the post again in December 2025.