Clearlove Joins Weibo Gaming as Head Coach Ahead of LPL Split 3

The Weight of What You Already Won

There is a kind of return that doesn’t look like coming back.

It looks like a new contract, a different jersey, a press release with the right verbs. It looks like something forward-facing.

Ming “Clearlove” Kai has joined Weibo Gaming as head coach. He left EDward Gaming — his home for most of his playing life, the organization that carried him to the first Mid-Season Invitational in 2015, eleven years ago. He leaves a team that just earned promotion. He arrives at one that just got relegated.

There’s a particular weight that accumulates for players who were exceptional at exactly the right moment. Clearlove was extraordinary in 2015. At a time when the world was still deciding whether China could belong at the top of this game, he sat down and won. He beat SK Telecom T1 in the semifinal, when losing to SKT was basically the expected outcome. He carried a team through it.

That was eleven years ago. Long enough for the game to have reorganized around other names.

Newer fans recognize “Clearlove” the way you half-recognize a word from a language you studied briefly. Something is there. The specifics have gone soft.

What does it feel like to go looking for your own relevance inside someone else’s team? I don’t think it’s desperation. It feels more like the specific discomfort of someone who was genuinely great, who knows the feeling of winning clearly, and who cannot quite locate that feeling anymore in the coaching work he has done since.

Weibo Gaming is a strange destination for that. They started as Suning, acquired a World Finals run in 2023 that surprised nearly everyone, then this split dropped into Group Nirvana after a five-game series against LGD. They’re a team that knows how to spike dramatically and flatten without warning. There’s something in that shape that rhymes with where Clearlove finds himself.

Group Nirvana: four teams, two spots. Invictus Gaming are in there too, another name that used to carry a different kind of meaning.

Maybe this is what it comes down to. Not a rebuild. Not a comeback narrative. Just two things that used to mean more than they currently do, reaching for whatever made them real.

The split starts July 22nd. Clearlove’s first match is July 25th, against Invictus.

No room for mistakes. That’s what they’re saying. As if there ever was.