Behind the scenes at Pokémon EUIC, one of Pokémon’s biggest events ever

“Look at this. I love this.” Chris Brown, The Pokémon Company’s director of global esports, has a wide smile as he walks across London’s Excel Center. Above us is an enormous inflatable Pikachu, a float that wouldn’t look out of place in a street parade. Around us, thousands of fans, competitors, and parents soak in the PokéMania.

For the fourth year running, Pokémon has taken over London. The Excel Center, which hosted the Pokémon World Championships in 2022 and the Pokémon European International Championships in 2023, 2024, and 2025, is full to the brim with Pokémon fans. While many are flooding the concourse waiting for their money-can’t-buy slot at The Pokémon Center, for thousands of others, this is the culmination of a year’s worth of work.

The Pokémon European International Champions, or EUIC, one of the Pokémon’s biggest events, determines not only the best of the best competitive players, but also who will take the step towards ultimate Pokémon glory, the Pokémon World Championships, this year hailing from Anaheim California.

But EUIC isn’t simply about extremely hardcore competition or the constantly at-capacity Pokémon Center. It’s about the community. On Saturday, an unofficial fan meet-up became so popular that Excel’s security staff were forced to move it from the concourse inside the hall.

For the first time ever, the EUIC hosted four separate TCG artists, each of whom was signing posters of some of their most famous illustrations. The queue to even get a chance to meet these artists stretched across the hall, and back on itself, several times.

There was also a cosplay competition. Fans dressed as their favorite trainers, and Pokémon, posed on stage to warm applause and cheering. Finally, there was a small museum display featuring original Yuka Morii sculptures. This is a festival of Pokémon, or at least that’s certainly where it feels like the event was handled.

“One of the things that has happened as the tournament has grown is the number of people who are not necessarily competitive has grown,” explains Brown. “It’s friends of competitors, it’s brothers, sisters, moms, dads, that sort of thing. So suddenly it’s like ‘what do we provide for them?’

“Something we are looking to expand is the noncompetitive programming happening at the show. We have our four artists from Japan for the very first time. It’s the most we’ve ever done. We’ve never even had four artists at the World Championships.

“We’ve got our first cosplay showcase, we’ve got accessible family activities like the ring toss, the carnival games, the face painting, the board games. The brand is so rich that there’s so much we can do with it.”

There were not only casual games to play, but side events in which attendees could take part in, and win big prizes. For a price, players could play different TCG, VGC, and Pokémon Go formats, each of which awarded points to be exchanged at a prize wall.

“Our mission is to bring the world together through Pokémon, and increasing the event’s mission is to bring the world of Pokémon together,” said Brown.

While EUIC brought together the competitive players and hardcore fans, it’s what was happening in the hall next door that had fans in a fever for weeks, and saw London’s public transport system littered with people in bright yellow jumpers.

“There has been a big synergy with the pop-up Pokémon Center and EUIC,” Brown tells me. “For a long time, we wanted to do merchandise that was specific to events that are not just Worlds. The Pokémon Center online launching in the UK made it possible to do that here at EUIC.”

EUIC merch, including playmats, hats, bags, jumpers, TCG accessories, and more, were flying off the shelves all weekend. This time featuring Ogerpon, the most recently introduced Legendary Pokémon, and Psyduck, a fan-favorite, the event’s exclusive merch was largely gone by Saturday afternoon.

“Our mission is to bring the world together through Pokémon, and increasing the event’s mission is to bring the world of Pokémon together”

For non-players, The Pokémon Center is the main event. Reservations for the center sold out in a few hours, and due to technical issues with the reservation process, many who wanted to attend the store couldn’t.

Much of the excitement around the store was flamed by the Pokémon Trading Card Game’s latest release, Prismatic Evolutions. The set, which celebrates Eevee and its many evolutions, includes extremely rare cards that have been fetching thousands on the secondary market.

The Pokémon Company confirmed to VGC ahead of the event that the viral set wouldn’t be sold, but that didn’t stop the excitement and the speed at which items sold out.

“The challenge with the main event is that the passes have always sold out,” said Brown. “If you only heard about the pop-up shop and didn’t hear about the championships, you’re probably not that competitive, so we have PlayLabs, which is a perfect avenue to learn about the game.”

The PlayLabs, which sits between the entrance and the exit of the Pokémon Center, is a side event that allows new players, or veterans who never learned the correct rules, to get a crash course in the Pokémon Trading Card game. Just as the popularity of the cards themselves has skyrocketed, as has interest in the TCG.

One of the weekend’s winners, Pokémon TCG Junior’s Champion Oliver Cahill, only started playing the game in 2022 at his local card shop. This weekend, he was crowned winner and took a step closer to the World Championship.

The Pokémon TCG competitive scene is virtually as old as Pokémon itself, but it has always had a critical issue. It’s hard to watch. Not in a nail-biting tension, or brutal defeat way, but in the sense that it’s literally difficult to read the cards when they are being filmed.

In the pre-4K era, this was such a problem that commentators had to breathlessly explain each card as it was being played. This led to a competitive scene that wasn’t much of a spectator sport.

“For a long time we didn’t have a great way that you could even read the cards on broadcast. Every competitive TCG has this problem,” Brown laughs. “So we made a considerable investment into a new display technology that we released at the World Championships last year for broadcast.”

While less obtuse, the level of strategy involved in the Pokémon VGC means that this is also an issue facing the traditional video game competition.

“Game Freak is well aware of those challenges. When I first joined the company 12+ years ago, rental teams didn’t exist. There are rental codes where you can try out other teams. Each game is sort of a different challenge. How do you move people who are interested in being competitive to become competitive?”

You’d almost expect the various strands of the Pokémon multiverse to be split across several events, but for more than two decades now, The Pokémon Company has married its competitive scene into one big show.

“The area I personally look at the most is the fighting game community,” Brown told us. “They hold multi-game events, they’re open tournaments, and they try to bring everyone together. I think a lot of other groups have gone down pretty exclusive routes, where it’s more about just going to spectate professionals.

“Here, if you want to compete, you could play Tord Retklev round one. You could be matched against Wolfe Glick in round one. These are the best players in the world. If this is your first international championship, you might play them, and that’s special.”

Glick, a Pokémon veteran, former World Champion, and in recent years, extremely popular content creator, turns heads whenever he’s in the hall. The 29-year-old American is a master of Pokémon VGC. Known for his unique strategies, and decade-plus influence on the metagame, he’s the player that everyone wants to meet, but no one wants to match against.

However, this EUIC, he doesn’t enter the event as World Champ. That title belongs to Luca Ceribelli. The Italian VGC player has been appearing at events since 2021, and took home the World Championship last August in Hawaii. The competitive Pokémon scene, as volatile and changeable as it is, sees Luca eliminated before the last 16. Glick remains in contention.

Saturday sees the hall at its busiest. People are off work, virtually all the competitors are still in London, and fans from around the country and continent are looking to catch a glimpse of some of the weekend’s first consequential matchups.

From a spectator’s perspective, the event runs smoothly. Huge screens are hung and there are hundreds of chairs to spectate from. Excellent commentary teams mean that even if you’re not an expert in the game that you’re watching, the narratives, winners, and losers are all clear. The event is in its stride in its third London iteration. So does Pokémon see London as the natural home for the competitive scene in Europe?

“There are many factors, accessibility for flights, the venue, does it fit the schedule… obviously there are benefits to TPCi being here, but we’ve held this event in Germany, and as we look to future locations, it wouldn’t be a limiting factor that would keep us from going outside of here one day,” Brown told me.

As the weekend came to an end, there was a sad, ‘last day of school vibe’ to it all. The hall was thinning out as competitors and fans made their way to the airport. People were saying goodbye to friends they probably wouldn’t see in person until another Pokémon event just like this. Players who’d flown in from all corners of the globe for their shot at the World Championships dragged their trollies behind them, content to watch on as the heavy hitters picked up their Pikachu Trophies on Championship Sunday.

Sunday evening saw Wolfe Glick face off against the UK’s Dyl Yeomans in a tense final. Glick, the favorite, lost the first game to newcomer Dyl, but ultimately, the veteran hung on and reigned supreme as the European Champion for 2025. Dyl’s spirited performance ensured it was not the last we saw from the Brit.

“I’m just thinking about the scope. There were 1400 players who signed up for this tournament, who entered this tournament, the biggest official Pokémon tournament of all time,” Glick said on stage in front of hundreds of players and spectators following his victory.

Unlike other winners who’ve said a few quiet words of thanks and maybe shed a few tears, Wolfe holds court like a professional wrestler cutting a promo.

“1400 players trained their Pokémon, traveled to London, practiced with a friend, and worked on their team. 1400 people showed up to this tournament hoping and dreaming of winning the entire thing… But it wasn’t enough!” The crowd erupts. They know they are watching the star of the Pokémon competitive scene.

Pokémon EUIC 2025 came to an end with Wolfey, arguably the best to ever do it, standing on top. Next up, it’s the North American regionals in New Orleans before a trip to the West Coast for the Pokémon World Championships in Anaheim, California, to crown the very best like no one ever was.