LOUD beat Team Vitality 3-1 in the grand final of VALORANT Champions 2026 on October 18, taking a second world championship and becoming the first organization to win the title twice. Across the tournament’s six editions, five organizations have lifted the trophy, and LOUD is the only one to hold it more than once.
The two sides met three times across the tournament. Vitality took the group-stage meeting 2-0 on September 30. LOUD answered in the upper-bracket final on October 16, winning 2-1 to reach the decider without dropping to the lower bracket. Vitality fought back through the losers’ side, beating 100 Thieves 3-1 to earn a rematch. LOUD closed that rematch out 3-1 at the Mercedes-Benz Arena.
The road to the final
LOUD reached the grand final through the upper bracket. They beat NRG 2-1 in the semifinals on October 10, then took down Vitality 2-1 in the upper-bracket final six days later. Vitality’s own run went through G2 Esports, whom they beat 2-0 in the other semifinal, before a 3-1 lower-bracket-final win over 100 Thieves, who had eliminated G2 2-1 the day before.
An MVP and a repeat
Riot named LOUD’s captain Roberto “erde” Lobos the tournament MVP and announced the award on stage after the final. The Chilean in-game leader ran the team’s mid-round calling through the playoff bracket.
The first title came four years earlier, at Champions 2022 in Istanbul, where LOUD beat OpTic Gaming 3-1. Both of LOUD’s championships ended with a 3-1 grand-final win. In between, the trophy changed hands four times: Acend won in 2021, Evil Geniuses in 2023, EDward Gaming in 2024, and NRG in 2025. None of them repeated, so LOUD’s Shanghai title stands as the league’s first repeat championship.
How the tournament was built
Champions 2026 brought 16 teams to Shanghai from September 24 through October 18. The field split into four groups, with the top two from each advancing to an eight-team, double-elimination playoff. The grand final was played as a best-of-five, and the $2.25 million prize pool paid $1 million to the winners, $400,000 to Vitality as runner-up, and $250,000 to 100 Thieves for third. That pool is more than double the $1 million total offered when LOUD won their first title in 2022.
The decider capped a weekend that also included a showmatch and an opening ceremony, and it revealed Hush, VALORANT’s next duelist, on the broadcast before the final began.
