The Pokemon World Championships are supposed to represent the entire world, so it only makes sense that the event itself would move around every once in a while. Pokemon has done exactly that before, taking Worlds to places like Canada, London, and Yokohama, but the event has remained in the United States for the last few years, including two consecutive stops in California. According to The Pokemon Company’s Director of Global Esports and Events Chris Brown, though, that isn’t something Pokemon wants to become the norm.
Speaking with GameRant during a group Q&A at the 2026 Pokemon World Championships, Brown made it clear that Pokemon intends to look outside the United States again as it plans future editions of Worlds. The problem is that the event has gotten so big that there are only so many places capable of hosting it anymore, and keeping the World Championships moving around could eventually mean Pokemon has to make some compromises regarding just how large each individual event can be.
The Pokemon World Championships Have Become Enormous
Pokemon had a reason for keeping Worlds in California for two years in a row. Brown actually explained that doing so was an intentional decision designed to simplify some of the operational challenges involved with an event that has continued to grow considerably over time. “We have been in the US for a couple of years now, and some of that was to help make sure that this event would be successful because it simplified our operations a little bit,” Brown stated. “So we’re in California two years in a row. That was intentional to help maximize our success this year.”
It becomes pretty easy to understand why once you start looking at what Pokemon actually needs to put Worlds together now. Brown said the 2026 event has more than one million square feet of convention space in addition to Chase Center, where 15,000 fans are expected for Championship Sunday. That is a massive amount of space to find in one city before even getting into all the logistical headaches that come with actually using it.
PokemonXP complicates that picture even further this year, although Brown stopped short of saying XP will necessarily happen alongside Worlds every year from this point forward. Pokemon plans to take what it learns from this year’s inaugural event and determine how often XP should happen, whether it should always be coupled with Worlds, and how much of what Pokemon is doing this year should be carried forward. What Brown did make clear, however, is that the fan experience surrounding Worlds itself isn’t suddenly going away:
I think, you know, the World Championships is always going to have that extra fan layer of experience attached to it. That can’t go away just because of how big it is now.
Even without the full PokemonXP experience, Brown doesn’t expect Worlds to suddenly become a small event again. “The show is not getting smaller in general, even if we don’t sort of have that XP experience,” he said. “We’re still likely talking, you know, 30,000 attendees, 40,000 attendees, maybe Anaheim, for example, levels.”
That size is where the problem starts, though. Pokemon doesn’t simply need a large convention center in whatever city it chooses for Worlds. Brown said the company could be looking for something in the neighborhood of 800,000 square feet of convention space along with a basketball arena, and then somehow needs the availability of both venues to perfectly line up. The arena requires around a week for installation and setup, while the convention center needs almost two weeks.
Finding all of that in the same place at the same time would already be challenging enough without Pokemon also trying to move Worlds around the globe. “There’s only so many, you know, not just cities that have that infrastructure, but the dates aligning between these two things,” Brown said. “And so there will be years that may not be as large as others because on a long-term lens, the World Championships, you know, our intent is to move it around.”
Pokemon Doesn’t Want Worlds to Stay in the US Forever
Pokemon has built Worlds into such a massive event that its own success is now making it harder to do something that seems pretty fundamental to the idea of a World Championship in the first place. There may only be so many cities capable of handling Worlds at its current size, but Pokemon doesn’t want that to mean settling into the same handful of locations forever.
Brown specifically pointed back to previous Worlds events in Yokohama, London, and Canada while discussing the company’s long-term plans before making it clear that Pokemon will be looking beyond the United States again. “We are going to look, you know, outside the US, obviously,” Brown said. “We have to because the World Championships is meant to serve the world.”
I think that’s the right way to look at it. Moving Worlds around isn’t only about giving the event a different backdrop every year. For a lot of Pokemon fans, attending something like this might only ever become realistic when Worlds finally lands somewhere relatively close to them, and Brown seems well aware of that:
For it to do that most effectively, it needs to move around between markets so that fans anywhere know and players anywhere know that there’s a chance, you know, Worlds could be getting close to them at some point.
The difficulty is that Pokemon can’t make a suitable basketball arena the deciding factor every time it chooses a location. If it did, that would immediately eliminate a lot of potential markets, which is why the company is already thinking about other ways to preserve the atmosphere of Championship Sunday without requiring exactly the same setup it has in San Francisco this year.
Some Future Pokemon Worlds Events May Need to Be Smaller
Brown said Pokemon is already looking three, four, and even five years into the future, and one possibility being considered is skipping the separate arena entirely in certain locations. Instead, Pokemon could find an especially large convention hall and build something resembling an arena inside it with temporary bleacher seating. As Brown stated:
We might need to be in a very large convention hall and bring in bleacher seating to create that arena feel, and maybe we do 8 or 10,000 fans instead of 15,000, you know, on that closing day.
Of course, reducing the number of available seats creates another problem when Worlds is already attracting tens of thousands of people. Brown acknowledged that not everyone who wants to attend Championship Sunday would necessarily be able to get in under a setup like that, but there may simply be no way around making those kinds of compromises if Pokemon wants Worlds to continue traveling.
Personally, I would much rather see that happen than watch the Pokemon World Championships become restricted to the handful of cities capable of hosting the biggest possible version of the event. If one year has 8,000 people watching Championship Sunday instead of 15,000 because Worlds finally gets to visit another part of the world, I don’t think that makes the event any less special.
If anything, it might make it more special for the Pokemon fans who finally get to experience it themselves. Worlds has grown to the point where finding somewhere to put it has become a legitimate problem, which says plenty about how big the event has become. Pokemon just has to make sure that growth doesn’t eventually stop the World Championships from actually seeing the world.
