Team Falcons leaves Dota 2 a year after winning The International

Team Falcons, the organization whose roster won The International in 2025, has left Dota 2. The Saudi club announced its exit on September 6, 2026, with a farewell video on X, and followed it with a written statement on the same platform, Dot Esports reported that day. The video retraced a run of nearly three years. "It's been an incredible ride," the farewell post read.

The statement that came after it puts the decision down to planning, not results. Team Falcons said it had completed a strategic review of its roadmap across games for 2026 and beyond, and that its global focus is moving toward competitive scenes offering what it called greater strategic alignment and long-term operational sustainability. The same text gives Dota 2 a legendary place in competitive gaming.

The departure comes sixteen days after the team was eliminated from The International 2026 in Shanghai, where it arrived as defending champion and finished seventh to eighth. Dot Esports has reported three other organizations leaving the game since April.

What the statement says

Two messages make up the announcement, and they do different jobs. The first is a goodbye addressed to fans, a video looking back on the team's time in the game. The second is corporate: it describes an organization that looks at all of its teams together and decides where to put its effort.

The reasoning, as relayed by Dot Esports, whose headline says the club cites long-term sustainability, has three parts. Team Falcons carried out a review of what it calls its multi-title roadmap, meaning the list of games in which it fields teams. It concluded that its attention should shift to other ecosystems, the word the industry uses for a game's whole competitive and commercial circuit. And it framed the choice as one of strategy and of operations that can be sustained over time.

The statement names no figure: no budget, no revenue, no cost. It does not say which games gain from the review. And it does not criticize Dota 2 or its publisher, Valve.

The roster that carried the name

The team was formed in November 2023 and kept the same lineup through The International 2026: skiter, Malr1ne, ATF, Cr1t- and Sneyking, coached by Aui_2000. Dot Esports calls it the longest-running five-man roster in the scene.

The outlet's count of the record under the Falcons name reads as follows: 799 games played, a win rate of 65.4 per cent, and 11 trophies in what it calls the post-DPC era. Seven of those 11 were tier-one titles, the label given to tournaments that gather the best teams in the world.

The largest came in Hamburg. At The International 2025, the 14th edition of the world championship, Team Falcons beat Xtreme Gaming 3-2 in the grand final, a best-of-five series won by the first team to take three games. The winner of The International receives the Aegis of Champions, the trophy of the world championship.

The group was already breaking up before the organization spoke. Aui_2000 announced his departure from professional Dota shortly after The International 2026, Dot Esports reports. Sneyking thanked the club on X for the opportunity it had given him. No player's next team had been announced when the exit was made public.

A title defense that ended in two days

The International 2026 was played at the Oriental Sports Center in Shanghai with 16 teams. Team Falcons was one of seven invited directly, according to Dot Esports's record of the event; the other nine came through regional qualifiers. The number of invitations has moved from year to year: The International 2024 had six and the 2025 edition eight, the same outlet noted in February.

The group stage, from August 13 to 16, used a Swiss system, in which teams with similar records face each other round after round. Every series was a best-of-three. Team Falcons beat LGD Gaming 2-1, lost 1-2 to TEAM VISION and to Iron Wing, then beat GamerLegion and BoomBoys by the same 2-1 score. Three wins and two defeats left it outside the top three, who went straight to the main event, and in the elimination round reserved for the teams placed fourth to 13th. It won that match 2-0 against Vici Gaming on August 16, one of five teams to come through a round that sent five others home.

The main event was a double-elimination bracket, where a team is out after its second lost series. Team Falcons lost both in two days: 1-2 to Nigma Galaxy in the first round of the upper bracket on August 20, and 1-2 to Team Liquid in the lower bracket on August 21.

The numbers show how thin the margin was. Seven of the team's eight series in Shanghai went to a deciding third game. It won four series and lost four, with 12 games won and 11 lost. Team Spirit took the title on August 23 by beating TEAM VISION 3-2, becoming the first organization to win a third Aegis.

Seventh to eighth place was worth US$133,790, or 4 per cent of a pool of more than US$3.3 million, against US$1,416,786 and 42.5 per cent for the champion. The team that shared that placing with Falcons has its own history this year: Iron Wing is the name under which the 1win team, which took over the Tundra Esports roster, appeared in Shanghai.

Three other exits since April

Team Falcons joins a list that has grown every few weeks since the spring. Each case was reported by Dot Esports from the organization's own statement.

The four differ in size and in what they left behind. paiN Gaming, from Brazil, closed a division it had reopened on February 2. HEROIC released a South America-based roster that had placed in the top six of The International 2025, and its chief gaming officer said on X that Dota was a hard game to make money from. Tundra Esports stepped away with a roster whose recent victories included ESL One Birmingham, and the whole group moved to 1win.

What sets Team Falcons apart is rank. It is the only one of the four to leave as the previous year's world champion, and the only one that entered The International 2026 with a title to defend.

A fifth name belongs near the list without being on it. Virtus.pro parted ways with its whole Dota 2 roster after The International 2026, Dot Esports reported on August 24, following a season in which the team failed to qualify for the event for the third year running. The Russian club said in the same statement that it remains committed to Dota 2 and is working toward returning with a team able to compete at the highest level. That is a roster change. Team Falcons has announced the opposite: the organization itself is going.

A club built across many games

The word multi-title in the statement describes how Team Falcons operates. It is not a Dota 2 organization that also plays other games.

The clearest measure is the Esports World Cup's Club Championship, a ranking that adds up a club's results across every game of the event. Team Falcons won it in 2025 with 4,900 points and a prize of US$7 million, Sheep Esports reported on August 22, 2025, after entering 21 of the 25 games on the program. It had also won the 2024 edition. In 2025 its only outright tournament victory came in Overwatch 2, and Dota 2 supplied one of its two second places, the other being chess. The rules reward exactly that spread: points are cumulative across all games, and a club needs top-eight finishes in at least two tournaments to be ranked.

The club is also one of the 40 organizations of the Esports Foundation's 2026 Club Partner Program, a US$20 million scheme whose members were published on March 31. The foundation's release states that membership does not guarantee qualification for the Esports World Cup.

Seen from that angle, a single game is one line in a larger plan, and the statement treats it that way. The review it describes covers the whole roadmap for 2026 and beyond, and Dota 2 is the title that came out of it.

What the exit leaves behind

For Dota 2, the practical effect is that five players come onto the market, and that one of the seven teams invited directly to the last world championship no longer exists in that form.

The players are free to continue. Dot Esports reports that Aui_2000 has already said he is stepping away from professional Dota. For the five players, the public record on September 6 held thanks and farewells, and no signing.

For Team Falcons, the record in the game closes on the figures Dot Esports published with the announcement: 799 games, 11 trophies, one Aegis of Champions, and a last series lost 1-2 in Shanghai.

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