Hello to all ESL One Birmingham Enjoyers!!
The playoffs are well underway and ESL One Birmingham 2026 is already shaping up to be a banger of an event. We hope you've explored all around and spent some time in DreamHack to see how the other gamers live. Our team has been working hard to improve things since the last event here in 2024 and we wanted to talk a little bit today about what how we got to that point.
ESL One Birmingham 2024 was a fantastic event, and going into this we already knew that the bar was set high — especially because most Dota fans only need some good dotes, some good vibes, and some (expensive) beer to be happy.
To make this event even bigger we knew we had to look outside of our comfort zone (Dota nerd stuff) and take a step back. That's when DreamHack appeared, with plans to bring the biggest gaming festival to the UK. It was a perfect fit.
One tunnel two events
We were always going to be at the BP Pulse Live arena, which did leave the open question of how we would create pathways for people. Of course, we can always make them go outside and back in, weathering the Birmingham storms (or the Birmingham light rain and wind) or we could explore a more creative solution: a hall/pathway that is normally reserved for logistics transportation, that we could repurpose into a tunnel to travel easily between the two events for all ticket holders.
To make the tunnel work we had to modify the stage; we had to turn the entire thing around by 90 degrees.
This presented its own problems as this arena was never designed with rotation in mind! We’re no strangers to these complications; esports has very strict requirements, and the stages we need are often not suited to the venues we host them in — but in this case more than most, we had to cover every angle.
We had so much horizontal space in the new stage setup, that we had to ditch the large screen we love (Dota always wants a large screen so that everyone can see everything!).
Our solution was to bring in two large side screens instead, which would help to ensure that everyone in the arena had a relatively straight viewing angle.
(Compare the fingers to the new setup!)
The fingers (where the heroes and players appear during the games!) also had to be moved inwards towards the middle to better utilise the deadspace that this created and ensure that the infield goers had an easy way of telling what’s going on, even if they were further away from the large side screens.
Finally, to guarantee that all viewing angles were good enough, we created renders of the stage from the POV of the worst possible seats. That way we could be sure that no one is destined for a terrible experience, while the average fan could have an incredible experience.
(Compare the fingers to the new setup!)
ESL One Birmingham 2026 is an event we're incredibly proud to have helped put together. It has all of the ingredients it needs to be the most fun Dota event of the year — the best teams in the world, a brand new patch, serious stakes on the line, and the best Dota fans in the entire world.
We hope that you enjoy the event as much as we enjoyed creating it.