Global Esports were down 0-2 against Nongshim RedForce in the VCT Pacific Stage 2 Grand Final and looked finished. Then they won three straight maps for a reverse sweep, took the region’s top seed, and sent Nongshim to Champions anyway as runner-up. That result, from the first week of September, closed the last open bracket of the 2026 season.
All 16 teams heading to Shanghai are now set. Four regions, four slots each, and for the first time since the tournament’s 2021 debut, Fnatic isn’t one of them. VALORANT Champions 2026 runs September 24 through October 18 at Jing’an Sports Center and the Mercedes-Benz Arena, and it’s also the last Champions under the current franchise structure before VCT shifts to an open format in 2027.
Who Qualified for Valorant Champions Shanghai 2026
- China locked its delegation first. TYLOO took the top seed after beating JD Gaming 3-1 in the Stage 2 grand final, with IGL Pong “SiuFatBB” Ka Hei running a mid-season turnaround that carried the team through the lower bracket. JD Gaming took the runner-up spot for their first Champions appearance. EDward Gaming, the 2024 world champions, got in on Championship Points with 20, and XLG Esports claimed the region’s fourth slot on 18 points, their second straight Champions berth.
- Pacific ended with Global Esports first and Nongshim RedForce second after that reverse sweep. Paper Rex actually locked their spot months earlier, before Stage 2 even started, on the strength of runner-up finishes at Masters Santiago and Masters London plus a Stage 1 title, putting them at 25 Championship Points and making them the first team globally to qualify for Shanghai. T1 rounded out the region on points as well.
- EMEA’s story is the region that’s been won and lost, if you keep score by Fnatic. Karmine Corp fought through the bracket with a 2-0 win over already-qualified FUT Esports before taking the Stage 2 title outright, claiming the top seed with Team Liquid as runner-up. FUT still made it through points, and Team Vitality fielding former Fnatic stars Nikita “Derke” Sirmitev and Timofey “Chronicle” Khromov took the fourth spot after BBL Esports were eliminated. Fnatic themselves never recovered a Championship Points cushion big enough to survive a rough Stage 2, and that’s the whole story of why they’re sitting this one out.
- Americas closed last, with 100 Thieves beating LOUD in the Stage 2 grand final to reclaim a Champions spot the organization hasn’t held since 2022, before the league went franchised. LOUD took runner-up after grinding through the lower bracket, including a win over NRG. NRG, the reigning 2025 world champions, still made it in on points, and G2 Esports took the final Americas slot on 21 points as well, tied with NRG.
NRG walk in as defending champions after beating Fnatic 3-2 in the 2025 final in Paris, and this time they didn’t even need to win their own region to get back: Championship Points did the job instead, the same path that got Paper Rex and XLG Esports into the field.
For players following the latest gaming news, Liquipedia’s Valorant hub keeps the bracket history and Championship Points math updated in real time, which is the fastest way to see exactly how close some of these fourth-seed races actually were.
Which teams missed Champions despite winning a trophy this year
Sixteen names on a bracket graphic don’t say much on their own. What stands out is who isn’t there, and the strangest absence belongs to Leviatán. The Argentine roster won Masters London in June, beating Paper Rex 3-2 behind MVP Bruno “Neon” Rodriguez, and every Masters winner since the format launched in 2021 had gone on to play Champions that same season but Leviatán won’t. They lost 0-2 to 100 Thieves in the Stage 2 upper bracket on August 28, then lost 1-2 to G2 Esports in the lower bracket two days later, and that ended their season. Two bad playoff losses erased a Masters title’s worth of points, and Championship Points don’t care how a team won its trophies, only when.
Fnatic’s absence tells a similar story with less shock value attached, since it built up over months instead of one bad week. Fnatic reached every Champions since the tournament began in 2021, made the 2025 final against NRG, and lost 3-2 in a game that’s still one of the better grand finals the game has produced. Missing this year isn’t a fluke result in one series. It’s a full season of Championship Points that never built up, which meant a single bad Stage 2 run had nowhere to hide.
Paper Rex qualified without playing a single Stage 2 map, on the strength of results from months earlier. Points accumulation now decides half the field before the regional finals even start, and Leviatán just found out the hard way what happens when a team treats Stage 2 as an afterthought instead.
Watching the Global Esports-Nongshim decide back, the reverse sweep didn’t hinge on one server-breaking play. It came down to Nongshim’s economy management falling apart in back-to-back pistol rounds once the series flipped to must-win maps, the kind of detail that never shows up in a highlight reel but decides best-of-fives anyway.
None of this changes what happens next: sixteen teams, four groups, one trophy, and a $2,250,000 prize pool with $1 million going to the winner. Champions Shanghai opens VCT’s final run under the current format before everything resets in 2027.
