After the champions leave: how Lycée International de Londres Winston Churchill is rebuilding for Malta

The team that won the Rocket League title at the inaugural School Esports World Championships is gone. Every single player has graduated. The jerseys they wore under the stage lights at PlayCon in October 2025 are souvenirs now.

Arthur Bourillon, PE teacher and esports coach at Lycée International de Londres Winston Churchill, knows this better than anyone. He inherited those players when his colleague Cédric Durantin, who built and trained the squad for two years, returned to France. Arthur was there for the win. He watched the students lift the trophy. And then, one by one, they left.

In September 2026 he started again from scratch: a new team, and a place at the world championships waiting in Malta in November. “I’m really happy to come back,” he says, “and see all the teams step up their games.”

At a glance

• Reigning Rocket League world champions — winners at SEWC 2025 in Malta.
• From 3 computers to an esports room with 10 — built up over a few years.
• European champions in 2024 — the result that convinced the school this was “something big”.
• An all-new team for 2026 — now in French and English, with a first Minecraft squad too.

How it began

The programme did not start with a grand strategy. It started with a conversation between Cédric Durantin, then a maths teacher, and the head teacher, who had heard what esports was doing in schools across England and decided to find out.

At first the school had three or four computers for esports, not nearly enough for Rocket League, which needs fast, reliable hardware. Over time it built a dedicated room with ten machines. In 2024 the team won the European Esports Tournament, and that changed everything.

“The European tournament and the qualification for Malta was the true moment that we decided, okay, it’s something big. So we will keep being involved in that for the next years.”

— Arthur Bourillon, PE teacher and esports coach

What Rocket League actually is

Arthur’s world is the sports pitch: movement, pressure, split-second decisions, team chemistry. In Rocket League he sees the same things. The game is football with rocket-powered cars: three a side, cars that fly, a ball that moves faster than you can fully anticipate.

“Playing Rocket League is like being on the basketball court. You have the same mental skills to develop. But you have more time pressure: the cars drive really fast, so you don’t have more than one second to make a decision.”

Quick thinking, communication under pressure, and roles where someone makes the call and the others trust it. For a PE teacher, familiar territory. It just happens on a screen.

The day of the final

Arthur will tell you he was more stressed than his students. They wore jerseys, sat at a proper stage at PlayCon, and played on a live stream while the coaches watched from behind. “It was stressful because I wanted my students to perform. But once we started the games, it was really amazing.” His students, he admits, handled it better: “They were more confident than me. More happy than stressed, honestly.”

The celebration waited a week, because of exams. Then the school gathered to mark it. And at the end of the year, as the Malta players prepared to leave for good, something happened Arthur had not expected.

“When they graduated, all the students who were in the team in Malta came to me and said: thank you really for Malta. It was really the best moment of the year. We will remember that for all our life.”

“An extraordinary journey, full of emotion and intensity. A memory that my team and I will never forget, because we are world champions!”

— A Lycée player, SEWC 2025

The student who found his place

Not everyone who comes to esports at the Lycée is already busy across the school. One member of the championship squad was not a sports student or a music student. He was looking for where he belonged.

“It was a way for him to affirm his personality,” Arthur says. “He felt he was good at something, and he could show others that he was good at something.” It is why one word keeps coming back when Arthur describes what esports does for a school: inclusive.

Building again

The 2025 squad trained together for two to three years and all came from the school’s French track, so everything ran in one language. The new group mixes English-track and French-track students, and the Lycée is building its first Minecraft team as well. “It will change the way I do the sessions,” Arthur says. “Now I will have to do it in English and in French and make sure we can communicate well.”

For this first edition of the new team, the target is not a result. “We are here to enjoy the experience, to learn, to build skills, to see how the other teams compete so that we can adapt.” He knows the level will be higher than in 2025, and he welcomes it. “When the level increases, that is when you can improve the most. I am happy and worried at the same time.”

What changed for the parents

Before Malta, parents worried about screen time and wondered what esports was for. After Malta, that changed. “For them, it was just playing video games. But after Malta they said, okay, it is maybe screen time, but they can travel, see other students, have tournaments, and it develops more skills than we thought.”

What Arthur wants you to know

Asked what he wants readers to remember, Arthur apologised for speaking in his third language. The apology was unnecessary.

“Esports is not just video game playing. It is something that everyone can be involved in. There is no differentiation by sex, by age group. It is really inclusive. Esports can carry a new way to learn in school: a way to learn skills, a way to learn values, a way to develop a mindset.”

Back to Malta

The Lycée returns to SEWC 2026 without its champions. It brings something harder to measure: a programme that proved it could win at the highest level, a coach who was on the bench when it happened, and a new generation carrying a title they did not earn themselves. A weight and a gift at once.

The school that started with three computers and a maths teacher who believed in an idea now has a world title, a room built for the game, and a coach who knows what the stage feels like. In November, the new team finds out what it is made of.

Lycée International de Londres Winston Churchill competes in Rocket League at the School Esports World Championships 2026, Malta, 18–23 November. It qualified through the ECIS x DAIGON Esports Competition.