Team Spirit Have Won The International Three Times and Two of Their Players Have Never Lost One
Spirit beat TEAM VISION 3-2 in Shanghai on 23 August for a third Aegis of Champions. Yatoro and Collapse became the first three-time winners in the event's history.
The International 2026 finished on 23 August at the Oriental Sports Center in Shanghai with Team Spirit beating TEAM VISION 3-2 in the grand final. It was the organisation's third Aegis of Champions, and it made two of its players the first people to win Dota 2's world championship three times.
Illya "Yatoro" Mulyarchuk and Magomed "Collapse" Khalilov have now been on every one of Spirit's winning rosters. Yaroslav "Miposhka" Naidenov also has three, two of them as a player and this one from the coach's chair. Denis "Larl" Sigitov became the thirteenth player in the history of the event to win it twice. Alexey "not me" Kosmynin won on debut. Aleksandr "rue" Filin completed the roster.
TEAM VISION, coached by Clement "Puppey" Ivanov — himself a winner of the first International in 2011 — took the series to a fifth game and lost it.
The money is the part of the story that has quietly changed. Spirit's share was 1.4 million US dollars out of a total pool of 3.33 million. That is a fraction of the sums The International handed out at its crowdfunded peak, when a single tournament cleared 40 million dollars. Valve's decision to unwind the Battle Pass funding model has permanently reset the scale of the event, and the 2026 edition is what the post-Battle-Pass International looks like: a smaller purse, a full arena, and a competitive field that has not thinned in the slightest.
Shanghai's hosting matters too. The Oriental Sports Center put the tournament back in the region that supplies the largest share of Dota 2's player base, after years in which the event rotated through Europe and North America. Chinese state broadcaster CGTN covered the closing weekend as a cultural event rather than a niche one.
Three Aegises for one organisation is now the record, and Spirit hold it outright. The next question for the rest of the field is whether anyone dismantles that roster before it plays for a fourth.