Karmine Corp win the Rocket League Paris Major on home soil

Karmine Corp are the champions of the Rocket League Paris Major. The French team beat Twisted Minds 4-1 in the grand final on Sunday, May 24, 2026, at La Défense Arena, according to the account published the same day by Psyonix, the studio that makes Rocket League and runs its official circuit, the Rocket League Championship Series, known as the RLCS. Axel "Vatira" Touret was named the tournament's most valuable player, the award usually shortened to MVP.

Rocket League is played three against three, with cars in place of soccer players, and a Major is one of the two large international tournaments of its season. Paris was the second and last of 2026. Sixteen teams came for a prize pool of US$354,000, and the winners left with the RLCS trophy in front of their own supporters.

Psyonix, result published on May 24, 2026, and Paris Major primer of May 14, 2026.

A final settled in five games

The last day of a Major is played in best-of-seven series: the first team to win four games takes the match. A 4-1 score therefore means the final lasted five games, four for Karmine Corp and one for Twisted Minds, with two games left unplayed.

Psyonix gives no game-by-game account of the final, but it describes the week around it in one line: Karmine Corp led in every series they played. Vatira said much the same after the trophy was lifted, telling the publisher that the team had managed to win every match, that its preparation had been good and that it had found its flow during the tournament.

The match he singled out was not the final. Karmine Corp met Team Vitality, the other French heavyweight of the game, in the semi-finals, and knocked them out. Vatira called that series the toughest of the event, and said it had gone the way his team wanted.

His first reaction was shorter. "It feels amazing, we have been waiting for the Paris Major for a long time," he said, in the words printed by Psyonix. He also had a word for the Blue Wall, the name Karmine Corp's supporters go by.

Five days at La Défense Arena

The Major ran from Wednesday, May 20 to Sunday, May 24. The primer Psyonix published on May 14 set out the week in two parts: two days of group play with no spectators in the building, then three days of playoffs in front of a live audience. The result article speaks of thousands of fans across those three days, without giving an attendance figure.

The group stage split the 16 teams into four groups of four, and every match there was a best-of-five, won by the first team to three games. Twelve teams went through to the playoffs and four went home after two days. On those two days, two matches were played at the same time and shown on separate channels.

The playoffs used what the primer calls a hybrid elimination format, with an upper bracket and a lower bracket. From that point on the series are longer: best-of-seven instead of best-of-five.

Each day's first match started at 14:00 Central European Summer Time, and on the three public days the doors opened at 12:30. Alongside the English broadcast, the primer listed official streams in French, Spanish for Latin America and for Spain, Portuguese and German.

One more detail of the week concerned money that sits outside the prize pool. Psyonix sold a limited-time Paris Major bundle of in-game items and said all net sales from it would go directly to the players and teams competing at the Major.

The three players who won it

Psyonix prints the winning roster in full: Tristan "Atow." Soyez, Axel "Vatira" Touret and Charles "juicy" Sabiani. They are coached by Alexandre "Extra" Paoli, and the team also lists a performance coach, Jordi "Jordi" Nouvellet.

The line-up is recent. In a feature on the team published on May 20, the opening day of the Major, Psyonix recalled that Sami "dralii" Hajji left Karmine Corp for Team Falcons in September 2025, and that juicy joined about a month later. The result article adds that Paris was only the second Major these three have played together.

The same feature gave the measure of the two players who stayed. Atow came to Paris with 13 RLCS event wins. Vatira was ahead of every European player this season with 143 goals, a figure counted before the Major began. Their coach did not hide what he thought of the group. "They are probably the best players in the world," Extra told Psyonix.

As an organization, Karmine Corp arrived with two RLCS Major titles, an Esports World Cup title and 12 regional titles, by the publisher's count. Paris makes it three Majors.

A semi-final between two French clubs

The semi-final against Team Vitality carried a story of its own, and Psyonix had told Vitality's side of it three days before the final. In a piece dated May 21, it called Vitality France's most decorated organization and recalled its world title in the 2022-23 RLCS season.

Vitality's roster had changed too. Gaspar "stizzy" Rosalen joined Brice "ExoTiiK" Bigeard and Alexis "zen" Bernier, and Psyonix noted that he is the team's first starter who is not a French speaker since 2020. ExoTiiK holds the longest active run of consecutive RLCS qualifications, 13 events. The team trains at the Stade de France, about 20 minutes from La Défense Arena.

That trio had the better of Karmine Corp earlier in the year. At the Boston Major, the first Major of 2026, Vitality finished first in Group C, ahead of Karmine Corp, and went on to the grand final. In Paris the order was reversed, on the stage both teams had been pointing to for months. Before the event, ExoTiiK had said that playing in front of the team's fans would be exceptional, and Vatira had spoken of what it would mean to represent his country at home.

How the season led to Paris

The 2026 RLCS season has two Majors, Boston and Paris, and a World Championship at the end. Teams earn RLCS points along the way, and the Paris primer states that those points help them qualify for the World Championship.

Karmine Corp set the tone early. According to the May 20 feature, the team opened its season at the Kick-Off Weekend with a 4-1 win over Spacestation Gaming and a 4-0 sweep of Shopify Rebellion in the grand final. That result, Psyonix wrote, earned Europe an extra slot at both Majors and at the World Championship.

Boston then went to another team from a French organization. Gentle Mates, with Oskar "Oski" Gozdowski, Nassim "nass" Bali and Archie "archie" Pickthall, won the Boston Major by beating Team Vitality 4-2 in the grand final, after 4-3 wins over NRG, the reigning world champions, and Team Falcons. Psyonix's account of that event, published on March 4, credits nass with a record 12 goals in a grand final played on LAN, meaning with the teams in the same venue instead of online. The previous record was nine.

So the two Majors of 2026 were both won by teams from French organizations, and Team Vitality reached the last four or better in each. Karmine Corp, Vitality and Gentle Mates were all in the Paris field, and Psyonix had presented the two rivals as obstacles on Karmine Corp's road before a ball was kicked.

Fort Worth and the title still missing

Karmine Corp's season does not end in Paris, and the result article says where it leads. The Rocket League World Championship will be played in Fort Worth, Texas, in September 2026, over six days, for a prize pool of US$1,200,000. Karmine Corp have already qualified.

That is the trophy the club does not own. Psyonix describes the team as one of the top challengers and the world title as the one line missing from its record. Atow, in the feature published before the Major, allowed that the team would have bad moments and said he was confident it could recover from them, at a Major or at the World Championship.

Before Texas, there is a title to defend. The Esports World Cup Foundation announced in February, as reported by Esports Insider on February 18, that the Rocket League tournament of the 2026 Esports World Cup would gather 16 teams from August 12 to 16 for US$1 million, and that Karmine Corp were invited directly as defending champions. The other European places go by RLCS ranking. The foundation has since confirmed, on May 20, that the whole Esports World Cup is moving from Riyadh to Paris, and a spokesperson quoted by HLTV said a slight shift in the schedule was possible.

If the August dates hold, Karmine Corp will play for a second trophy in the French capital in the space of three months. The World Championship follows in September, with the season's largest prize pool, more than three times the US$354,000 of the Paris Major.

The .esports registry publishes Esports Observer, so the whole scene can read its news for free.