The 2021 Overwatch League season was the fourth season of the Overwatch League (OWL), a professional esports league for the video game Overwatch. The regular season began on April 16, 2021, and concluded on August 21. The season featured four midseason tournaments throughout the regular season along with a new point system for season playoff seeding. Similar to the 2020 season, teams are split into two geographical regions. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most matches were played online, with the exception of several live events throughout the season. The season marks the second year of the Overwatch League's broadcast partnership with YouTube, their third with Sport1, and their first with Bilibili.
The postseason began on September 4 with two regional play-in tournaments acting as qualifiers for the season playoffs. The playoffs began on September 21 and culminated with the Grand Finals on September 25. The Shanghai Dragons won the Grand Finals over the Atlanta Reign to win their first OWL championship.
Format
Regions and live events
After all matches were rescheduled to be played strictly online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 season saw the OWL divide teams into two regions, North America and Asia, in an effort to reduce lag due to online play. For the 2021 season, the twenty teams were divided into two regions, the East and West. Eight teams from China and South Korea competed in the East Region, while twelve teams from North America and Europe competed in the West Division.
The majority of matches in the 2021 season were played online. Three live events were planned to be hosted by three teams in China: Hangzhou Spark in June, Shanghai Dragons in July, and Guangzhou Charge in August. All five China-based teams travelled to these events, while the three Korea-based teams played at the events remotely via the league's cloud server. The Charge's homestand in August was cancelled, however, due to COVID-19 concerns. Additionally, the Dallas Fuel hosted a homestand in July at Esports Stadium Arlington.
Midseason tournaments
The league expanded upon the tournament format that was introduced in the 2020 season. Four standalone tournaments, the May Melee, June Joust, Summer Showdown, and Countdown Cup, were spread throughout the regular season with teams from both regions competing against each other. Hero pools, a system in which some heroes are unplayable, were used in two of the four tournaments: the June Joust and Countdown Cup. For each tournament, teams played four weeks of regional qualifier matches. The top six teams from the West and the top four teams from the East advanced to regional knockout matches, and the top two teams from each region advanced from the knockouts to play in the interregional tournament. In an effort to minimize lag, the qualifying Western teams traveled to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa for each interregional tournament. The internet service provider at the University of Hawaii was directly connected to a cloud-based server in Tokyo, Japan via an underwater sea cable, while the qualifying Eastern teams did not travel anywhere and connected to the Tokyo server from Asia. With this setup, the league was able to equal latencies for all participating players with a "minimum-latency tool" developed by Activision.
Season playoffs
Contrasted to previous seasons, where playoff seeding was determined by teams' win–loss record throughout the regular season, the league implemented a point system, called League Points, to determine regular season standings. Every win in the regular season earned a team one point. A first-, second-, or third-place finish in each midseason tournament earned the placing team an additional three, two, or one point, respectively. A total of eight teams advanced to the season playoffs: the top three teams from the West and the top two teams from the East, based on League Points, advanced directly to the season playoffs. Seeds four through nine in the Western region and seeds three through five in the Eastern region in the advanced to their respective region's play-in tournament, with two teams from the West and one team from the East advancing to the season playoffs.
Regular season
The 2021 schedule was released on February 20, 2021, and the regular season began on April 16.
East region
West region
May Melee
The May Melee was the first of four midseason tournaments of the season. Qualifiers began on April 16 and concluded on May 1. The regional knockouts began on May 2, and the May Melee tournament between the top two teams from each region began on May 7.