How to read Riot's Global Contract Database (League of Legends)

Where pro player contracts are published, how to read them, and what the sheet cannot tell you.

Looking for VALORANT? VCT contracts live on a separate sheet with a different format: expiry is a year, not a date. Read the VALORANT contract database (VCT GCD) guide instead.

What the GCD is

The Global Contract Database (GCD) is Riot's public register of who is signed to which League of Legends team and until when. When the community quotes a date like "contract expires 2026-11-16", it almost always comes from here. It is a Google spreadsheet split into regional tabs. Both sheets are linked from Data & Method.

Reading it

• End Date: when the contract runs out. After that date the player may negotiate elsewhere.
• Resident Status: residency in that league. Non-Resident means the player counts as an import and is subject to roster limits; Native Resident means home-grown status.
• Role: position. The Korean (LCK) tab has no role column at all, so the sheet alone cannot tell you what position an LCK player plays.
• The timestamp in the first row: updated per tab. One region may be current while another has not moved in two months.

What the sheet cannot do

• No history. It always shows the present state only. When a team edits a value, the previous one simply disappears, and there is no record of what changed yesterday.
• It lags. Weeks can pass between an announced transfer and the sheet catching up. Occasionally it moves first and reveals a transfer before the announcement.
• It does not sort or search in practice. Regional tabs make cross-league questions ("everyone expiring in November") hard, and it is painful to read on a phone.

What this site adds on top

• Every free agent in one table, sorted by rating (VALORANT here).
• A dated log of contract changes (RSS).
• Rating leaderboards with contract status on the same row.
• Player and team pages with expiry dates and recent match records.

Transfers the sheet has not caught up with are reflected only when a club has announced them publicly, with the source link listed in Data & Method. Rumours are not added.

FAQ

Why do so many contracts end on November 16? League rules align contract end dates to that date, so several hundred players hit free agency at once every mid-November. See the offseason calendar for the full timeline.

What about players who are not in the sheet? Players who are not registered with the league (some trainees and academy players) may not appear at all.

A name disappeared from the sheet. Did they retire? Not necessarily. A club may simply have cleaned up its registrations, so a disappearance alone does not prove retirement or a transfer.