Previously announced as a LAN to take place in Anaheim, California within the United States at the Dreamhack Anaheim Festival, ESL Challenger Anaheim has now been moved online. Since the festival is being cancelled because of COVID concerns, the event will now take place online in Europe. Because of the cancellation of the Dreamhack Anaheim Festival, ESL Challenger 48 is now being recognized as an online event by the ESL Event Circuit. For those teams unable to personally boot camp for the event, ESL have announced that they will provide full accommodation to teams in Europe to travel to ESL sanctioned boot camps. All of the regional qualifiers for the event have already taken place.

Four invited teams have yet to be announced for the event. Three of four qualified teams hail from different continents than North America, where the event was supposed to take place. Because of this, these teams will have to travel into Europe instead of originally travelling into the United States. The rest of the event will remain the same, including the $100,000 prize pool, format, and amount of Pro Tour points of which the event will award the teams that take part. As of now, the only team that will have to travel to Europe is ORDER, who come from Australia.

Four more teams remain to be invited to the event, which is supposed to take place in February. This is not the only event to take place within America, with IEM Dallas supposed to take place on May 31st through June 5th. Unfortunately, if this trend continues, then IEM Dallas will most likely be cancelled and moved online as well. This series of events comes at a bad time, as we are just now getting back-in-person events. The current team list for ESL Challenger 48 looks like: DBL Poney – France, 9z – South America, ORDER – Australia, and the rest of the four slots remain to be announced as they contain invited teams to the event.