They work, study and play at night. Meet India’s League of Legends team for Asian Games 2026

It’s about 10 pm in Delhi, at the end of a long working weekday, when Mihir Ranjan sits down at his computer at home. Nothing particularly unusual about that. The IIM Ahmedabad graduate works at McKinsey & Company and spends much of his day in front of a screen, surrounded by the familiar rhythms of corporate life. There are meetings, presentations, spreadsheets, deadlines.

But now, late at night, the 25-year-old has got something else to look forward to.

“Now my second life begins,” he tells Sportstar.

He slips into something comfortable, closes the door to his room and keeps his phone on silent, so he won’t be disturbed. He puts on his headset and joins his teammates online on the League of Legends server. He’s not Mihir Ranjan anymore but ‘ Lotus’.

Joining in from Kochi is Akshaj ‘Kat Bot’ Shenoy, the team’s 24-year-old captain who is preparing for his MBA while helping run his father’s sanitaryware businesses. From Greater Noida, cloud engineering intern Aakash ‘ Infi’ Shandilya logs in. In Aligarh, Ahmed Shahid Israr, ‘ Nero’ to his teammates, is getting ready at the end of a day he’s spent studying to be a chemical engineer. Sanindhya ‘ Deadcorporal’ Malik will join from Mauritius, where he’s working to build the island’s telecommunications infrastructure. Rahul ‘ Bob’ Bisht, a product designer and entrepreneur from Bengaluru, is there as well.

Six men with entirely different lives, separated by thousands of kilometres and, in one case, an entire country, are about to become one team. But they aren’t just playing for fun. They are preparing for the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, where they will be representing India in League of Legends.

For most Indian athletes heading to the Asian Games, preparation for a major multi-sport event involves the familiar rituals of elite sport: camps, coaches, physiotherapists, strength and conditioning sessions, teammates living together, training facilities and months spent in one another’s company.

For India’s League of Legends team, preparation can look very different.

None of them makes their living from the game. Everyone is squeezing in practice time at night around their work and study commitments. Their training ground is not an academy or a national camp but the internet. Their meeting room is on Discord. They’ve never hung out together outside of competitions, where games are played over LAN (Local Area Network). The only time they’ll actually play together in person will be when they reach Nagoya in a few weeks’ time.

They do all of this while operating in an Indian esports ecosystem that is still tiny compared with those of the countries they are trying to compete against.

League of Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena, or MOBA. Five players work together to destroy the opposing team’s base, with each player taking on a different role. They have to make decisions individually and collectively, often in fractions of a second.

A player’s ability to control his champion — what players call “micro” — is only the foundation. The larger question is what five players do together: where they move, when they fight, which objectives they pursue and how they respond to the opposition.

“You can’t just play with the person if he’s just good. You have to have similar goals,” says Shenoy.

That distinction matters.

At the highest level, League is as much about how five people function together as how well any one of them can play. And building that understanding has been particularly difficult for India’s players because they have never had the infrastructure that exists in the game’s strongest countries.

Yet the team exists because one of its players decided that India’s best individuals should stop playing separately.

Akshaj had watched good Indian players become scattered across different teams, often playing alongside friends rather than the strongest players available. If the pool of elite players in India was small, his thinking went, why not put as many of them as possible on one team?

So in 2022 he started reaching out.

There was no national scouting programme identifying the players. No academy had developed them. No centralised system had brought them together.

They found one another online.

The team that eventually emerged became one of the strongest in the Indian League of Legends scene. And when League of Legends was introduced as a medal sport at the Asian Games, the same group would go on to qualify for the Games and compete in Hangzhou, where they eventually finished fifth.

Akshaj knows all too well just how different his team is.

“At the last Asian Games in Hangzhou, we were at the Games village food court when one of the Indian track and field athletes came up to us and said, ‘You guys are from the esports team, right?’” Akshaj recalls.

“I was like, ‘How did you guess?’ And he told me it was because we were the only team that came in different shapes and sizes. That was pretty funny, but it was also very accurate.”

The players don’t look, live or train like what most people imagine an athlete should.

But the Games have given them something the domestic ecosystem could not: a reason to see themselves as athletes representing their country. Games that had been played in bedrooms, offices and university rooms suddenly had a national-team consequence.

For some, it also provided the first real evidence to their families that this was more than a hobby.

Digital warriors: (L-R) Sanindhya Malik, Aakash Shandilya and Akshaj Shenoy in action at the 2023 Hangzhou Asian Games seeding event. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

Mihir’s parents, for example, had long struggled to understand exactly how serious his gaming was. That changed in a particularly strange way when officials from the National Anti-Doping Agency turned up at their house before the 2023 Asian Games. “I had been informed that I would probably be tested at some point, but still it was startling when officials arrived at my home in Delhi and told me I had to pee in a cup while they watched,” he recalls.

But what was initially a bit startling turned into a flex.

“My parents were at home when all this happened. Until that point, they were always having this bit of disbelief over how real my gaming was. I think they thought I was making some of it up and I’m not really going to the Asian Games,” he recalls.

The dope test changed that. His parents began questioning the official about where he was from and whether he was from the government. “For them, it was probably a weird matter of pride. The fact that I was drug tested actually gave some legitimacy to the whole thing,” he recalls.

There is a certain irony in the story of India’s League team. The players are legitimate enough to be subjected to the same anti-doping protocols as other athletes at a major multi-sport event. But they aren’t yet playing in an ecosystem capable of making all of them full-time professionals.

The team’s choice of practice time, late into the night, makes complete sense when you realise that’s the only time they all have to spare.

Mihir has made a deliberate choice not to become a full-time League player. It is not because he lacks the mentality of a professional athlete. Quite the opposite.

“I do consider myself a professional sports person, from a mentality perspective,” he says.

He has been playing the game for 13 years. He still loves it. He’s even convinced his girlfriend to play. And when he faces a better team, the competitive instinct kicks in. “I have a drive and a passion in me that I want to get as good as these guys, and I want to beat them someday,” he says.

But passion and economics are different things.

For Mihir, becoming a full-time League player in India did not make financial sense. The Indian ecosystem was not developed enough to support the sort of professional life he wanted.

“If I were to do this full time, how much can I really not even like, how much money can I make? I don’t think anyone does sports for money; you do it for the love of the game,” he says. “At that point, it was just becoming a bit apparent to me that I will not be able to sustain the kind of lifestyle I want. In this game at least.”

That decision reflects the reality of the Indian game.

They have players good enough to represent their country at the Asian Games, but they do not yet have an ecosystem capable of making all of them full-time professional athletes.

So they work and study. And then they play. Then they get back to working.

Rahul Bisht’s life is another example.

A BITS Pilani computer science graduate, Rahul is the oldest member of the squad at 29. He has spent eight to 10 years as a product designer and says he has worked with multiple companies. One of his projects was the initial design of the Paytm card machine in 2017 and 2018.

“I think that’s probably something that’s had much more of an impact than anything else I’ve done,” he says.

He has since moved on to other things and is now running his own technology startup. He has also tried his hand at other businesses, including a conventional haircutting salon, which he eventually sold.

Gaming, though, has been the one constant in his life. But even so, he has to prioritise.

“There’s no other time in which to practise other than late at night. That’s when we are all free. We’ll practise together until about 12 am. After that I’ll play a few personal games. Then I’ll work for the next few hours. I probably sleep for about four or five hours a night,” he says.

Sanindhya’s situation takes that contradiction to an almost comic extreme.

He works for Telecommunications Consultants India Ltd. (TCIL), a Government of India company. He is currently based in Mauritius, working on telecommunications infrastructure. He gets up around 7 a.m., goes to work and returns home before logging into League with his teammates.

His day job is maintaining telecommunications infrastructure in another country. His second job, effectively, is using that infrastructure to prepare for the Asian Games in Japan.

But sometimes even that connection fails.

Late last year, a submarine fibre optic cable serving Mauritius was damaged, leaving the internet operational but too slow for Sanindhya to play properly. For about a month, he couldn’t practise at the level he needed.

“All that is frustrating. And when I have my regular job to do, it gets really tiring to play after that. But when you have a goal, when you have passion, it doesn’t matter. You just do it. I don’t get tired when I log in and practise with my team. The tiredness just goes away,” he says.

Ahmed has had his own problems, though not quite on that scale. He admits he’s lost games for his team a couple of times after losing the Wi-Fi signal in Aligarh.

But for Ahmed Shahid Israr, the youngest member of the team, the problem has sometimes been explaining to people that there is even a sport to prepare for.

When he applied to his university for a no-objection certificate because he would miss classes for the Asian Games, he had to explain what esports was, what game he played and why it qualified as a sporting event.

“They wanted to know if I even counted as an athlete, and I had to tell them yes, I do count as an athlete. It’s a medal event,” he says.

Things are starting to change, even if the pace is incremental.

Mihir noticed it at the last Asian Games itself. The other athletes they met did not necessarily know that esports was an event, but they were curious.

“A lot of athletes were a lot more open-minded than I expected,” he says. He thinks it’s because the Games coincided with the boom in mobile games such as PUBG.

“When you play something like that, you kind of realise, like, okay, there is even within something traditionally called a video game, there are levels,” he says.

“And the moment you establish that, you can have respect for anyone who has that level of skill or mastery or proficiency in anything.”

But both Ahmed and Mihir know these questions would have been easier to answer had India possessed the kind of League ecosystem that exists elsewhere.

It doesn’t.

Officially launched in 2009, League of Legends has a huge global player base, with an estimated 8 million players competing simultaneously at its peak. India provides only a fraction of that. Akshaj estimates that the official Indian League community has around 4,000 to 5,000 members, with perhaps 1,000 active players. “We have probably one thousandth or one ten thousandth of the player base that South Korea has,” he says.

And there is a more immediate disadvantage.

India does not have a dedicated League of Legends server.

The players therefore use the Singapore server. At home, they experience relatively high latency of about 80-90 milliseconds, the time their inputs take to travel to the server and back. In the strongest League ecosystems, players can operate at dramatically lower latency.

At the Asian Games, where the game is played on a local server, the delay can fall to almost zero.

For a player who has spent years compensating for the delay, that creates a peculiar problem: the conditions suddenly become better, but the player isn’t necessarily immediately better in them.

“Playing at high ping is like playing with a weighted vest. The player becomes accustomed to the extra resistance, unconsciously compensating for the delay. At a tournament, the vest comes off, and suddenly everything is faster,” Mihir says.

That is one reason why the team’s preparation for Nagoya is so complicated. They are trying to train themselves to compete at a level they cannot fully reproduce at home.

But the server is only part of the problem.

The very depth of the competition in India is different.

Every League player can reach the highest rank on his own server, but those rankings do not necessarily mean the same thing across regions.

“A player who is Challenger (mathematically limited to the top 200 players or about 0.01 per cent of the players of any given server) on the Singapore server may actually be in Diamond (top 1-2 per cent) on the Korean server. The competition there is much deeper,” says Mihir.

India’s players can therefore dominate the ecosystem available to them without necessarily being tested against the best players in the world.

Hangzhou, where the team eventually finished fifth, provided the most painful demonstration of what that means.

India came through the group stage but ran into Vietnam in the quarterfinals.

The two matches lasted less than 20 minutes each. Games between equally matched opponents usually last between 30 and 35 minutes.

“Vietnam destroyed us,” Mihir admits.

It was not simply that Vietnam had better players. The Indian players realised they were operating in a fundamentally different system.

The Vietnamese team had players who had been playing professionally for years. They were salaried. They had competed at the World Championship. Their matches and careers were documented and easily available to study.

Although India now has an official team, with the players competing under the banner of S8UL, an esports and content creation platform in India, there’s still very much a gap between them and the top teams in the world.

Against Vietnam, the Indians discovered that some of the things they believed were possible limits of the game were not limits at all. Players could make mechanical plays that they simply had not encountered often enough in domestic competition to expect.

“They were doing things that we didn’t know were possible,” says Mihir.

The result forced them to rethink what “good” meant.

They had known they were strong.

They discovered they had not been strong enough.

Ahead of the 2026 Games, the team has done what it can to close that gap. Two players, Ahmed and Rahul, were brought in earlier this year to strengthen the outfit. They have set up scrims with top teams from South and West Asia. They don’t just play. They analyse results and plays, much in the way other sports teams might conduct post-match video analysis.

There is a lot of work that happens before they even enter a game.

And then, after all the analysis, they still have to play.

The players also reject the idea that because the sport is played sitting down, the body does not matter.

Aakash’s physique wouldn’t look out of place in a weightlifting squad. He’s a regular at the gym. Akshaj goes to the gym and sometimes plays badminton. Other members of the team make an effort to walk, exercise or simply get away from their desks between sessions.

The reason is partly performance and partly survival.

“They spend hours sitting. Their backs hurt. Their wrists take punishment. Their concentration has to remain high for extended periods,” says Aakash.

“The more physically fit we are, the better we play. It is about being able to sit down at a computer for hours and still have a functioning body and a sharp mind at the end of it.”

As much as they try, the players know there is a limit to how much they can improve under their current circumstances.

Some of it, like the lack of a country server, is out of their hands.

There is also the question of whether they could become a better team if they lived and trained together, as the very best teams do.

Probably.

But for now, even that is unrealistic.

“If we sit together and train for six months without doing anything else, we probably would be better, but right now even if you put us in the same city it wouldn’t work out,” says Sanindhya. “We all have our own lives to live, and we would probably still be playing out of our homes.”

Despite the challenges, there are moments when everything comes together.

To qualify for the Asian Games this time, India had to come from behind against Jordan. They were thousands of gold behind and down on objectives, with their qualification hopes at stake.

They recovered and won.

“That was a really hype moment,” says Aakash.

It is that sort of comeback that has kept the team going through the less glamorous parts of the job, the late-night practice sessions, the day jobs, the university commitments and the hours spent playing on a server outside the country.

There is also the simple pleasure of being around the people whose careers they once followed from a distance.

In Hangzhou, Aakash met Neeraj Chopra as well as other athletes from the Indian contingent. But he was far more excited when he met Lee Sang-hyeok, better known as Faker, the legendary Korean League player he had grown up watching online.

“He was always the guy I grew up watching on streams or in World Championships. It’s like if you got to meet Sachin [Tendulkar] or [Lionel] Messi,” Aakash says.

A dream come true: India’s esports contingent with Korean League of Legends star Faker at the Hangzhou Asian Games. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

For a League of Legends player, Faker occupies a place in the sporting imagination that is difficult to explain to someone who has never played the game.

For Aakash, meeting him was one of the highlights of the Games.

But perhaps most special of all is simply getting the chance to represent the country.

Folded away in Mihir’s cupboard is a reminder of what all those late nights are for. It’s a couple of blue T-shirts with India written on them, his kit from Hangzhou.

“It’s basically passion that’s driving all of us. It’s not like we make a living out of this. I’m not someone who likes to show off my accomplishments. I don’t go and tell people about the fact that I’ve played for India at the Asian Games.

“But I don’t think there’s anything as special as getting the opportunity to wear the India jersey. I gave one set to my grandparents, and it was one of the most sentimental moments of my life.

“It didn’t matter what kind of sportsperson I was. It was the India jersey. And when you wear it, everything we do seems to be worth it,” he says.

Published on Sep 15, 2026

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