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Team Spirit beat Yangon Galacticos 4-3 in the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang Mid-Season Cup 2026 grand final on August 1 in Paris, coming back from a 3-1 deficit to win its fifth straight MLBB Mid-Season Cup title. The Russian CIS organization became the first team from outside Southeast Asia to win one of the game's two biggest annual international championships, taking roughly $1 million of the event's $3.025 million prize pool, with Yangon Galacticos earning $500,000 as runner-up.
The grand final, part of the Esports World Cup 2026 at the Lenovo Legion Gauntlet arena, swung back and forth across all seven games before Spirit closed it out by winning the final three in a row.
Results reported by GosuGamers, Paris, August 1, 2026.
A final decided by a three-game comeback
Yangon Galacticos opened the best-of-seven with wins in Game 2, then took a 3-1 lead by winning Games 5 and 6, each by lopsided kill counts of 17-2 and 17-1 that put the Myanmar organization within one game of the title. Team Spirit answered by winning Games 3, 4 and 7, the last of them closing out the series, turning what had briefly looked like a comfortable path to a first Mid-Season Cup for Yangon Galacticos into Spirit's fifth consecutive title instead.
| Game | Winner | Map |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Team Spirit | Expanding Rivers |
| 2 | Yangon Galacticos | Expanding Rivers |
| 3 | Team Spirit | Expanding Rivers |
| 4 | Team Spirit | Flying Cloud |
| 5 | Yangon Galacticos | Broken Walls |
| 6 | Yangon Galacticos | Flying Cloud |
| 7 | Team Spirit | Broken Walls |
Game results reported by GosuGamers, August 1, 2026.
Spirit's road through the lower bracket
Team Spirit's path to the final was never straightforward: after beating IGNITE Gaming 2-0 in the Group Stage's upper bracket, the team lost 0-2 to Team Vamos and dropped to the lower bracket, needing a 2-1 win over Guangzhou Gaming just to reach the Knockout Stage. From there, Spirit beat Team Vamos 3-0 in a quarterfinal rematch and swept ONIC 3-0 in the semifinal, meaning the eventual champion had already needed one comeback, out of the lower bracket, before engineering the bigger one in the final itself.
Related readThe International 2026: Shanghai venue, dates and format are setThe Mid-Season Cup uses a rotating map format
Every game at this year's event used the tournament's "Annual Map Change" feature, drawing from four randomly rotated map variants rather than a single fixed map. The grand final alone used three different variants across its seven games.
Yangon Galacticos' historic run to the final
Yangon Galacticos went 4-0 through the Group Stage, sweeping both Geekay Esports and PRO Esports without dropping a game, before beating PRO Esports 3-0 again in the Knockout Stage quarterfinal. The Myanmar organization's semifinal was tighter: Yangon Galacticos fell behind Team Falcons PH 2-2 before winning the final game to reach the final 3-2. The run made Yangon Galacticos only the second Myanmar team to reach an international MLBB grand final, after Burmese Ghouls' runner-up finish at the M2 World Championship in 2021.
The players who decided the final
Zaur "zaur egoist" Magomadov and Kemiran "Sunset Lover" Kochkarov were central to Team Spirit's comeback, with Anton "HIKO" Pak playing a major role in the decisive closing games. For Yangon Galacticos, Hann and Oo "Ying" Hein Htet led the comebacks that put the team 3-1 up, performances that nearly delivered the Myanmar organization's first major international title before Spirit's own response in the final three games.
From a Dota 2 powerhouse to an MLBB roster
Team Spirit built its name in Dota 2, winning The International in both 2021 and 2023 before adding the inaugural Esports World Cup Dota 2 title in 2025, and the organization only entered Mobile Legends in 2024 by acquiring the roster of Deus Vult, an established team from the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region. That roster, built around Stanislav "SAWO" Reshniak as captain alongside Mathaios "Kid Bomba" Chatzilakos, Sunset Lover and HIKO, had made its own Mobile Legends world championship debut at the 2019 M1 World Championship under the Deus Vult name, with its best prior result a fourth-place finish at M5 in the Philippines after a semifinal loss to ONIC Indonesia and a lower-bracket final defeat to Blacklist International. Zaur egoist's arrival in the jungle role, replacing Sergei "Marl" Finashev, rounded out the lineup that went on to the Mid-Season Cup title in Paris.
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Before this year's event, the Mid-Season Cup and the M-Series World Championship, Mobile Legends' two biggest annual international titles, had been won exclusively by teams from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia since each tournament's inception, making Southeast Asia's hold on both close to total. Team Spirit's run to the Mid-Season Cup title ended that streak outright, with the organization's own run of seven consecutive Mobile Legends Continental Championship titles, the EECA region's top annual event, already establishing Spirit as that region's dominant force before Paris gave it a result that carried internationally. That the breakthrough came from an organization already established across other esports titles, rather than a roster built from scratch inside Mobile Legends, added weight to a result that a long-dominant Southeast Asian scene had treated as close to unbreakable. Spirit also had to adjust to a significant competitive patch shortly before the tournament, a change that reshuffled the game's meta and left several of the pre-tournament favorites still adapting by the time the Knockout Stage began.
Yangon Galacticos' long road back to the top
Yangon Galacticos' Mobile Legends program dates back to 2017 under the name Resolution, rebranding to its current name in 2019 after winning MPL Myanmar Season 2 and following that with a fourth-place finish in Season 3 and third-place finishes in Seasons 4 and 5. The program was suspended between 2021 and 2025 amid the COVID-19 pandemic and Myanmar's 2021 coup, before re-forming with a new roster in March 2025 and finishing second in that year's Mobile Legends Super League Myanmar Season 1. The organization's November 2025 win at MSL Myanmar Season 2 qualified it for the MLBB M7 World Championship, and a follow-up MSL Myanmar Season 3 title in May 2026 earned Yangon Galacticos its spot at the Mid-Season Cup in Paris, where the team's grand-final run built on nearly a decade of history for a program that had spent several of the intervening years on hiatus altogether.
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Last year's Mid-Season Cup finalists, Team Liquid PH and Selangor Red Giants, were both eliminated in this year's Group Stage, a sign of how much the competitive landscape had shifted entering Paris even before Spirit's result rewrote the event's regional history. Team Falcons PH's near-upset of Yangon Galacticos in the semifinal, falling just short after leading 2-2, kept the Philippines-based organization in the conversation at the top of the sport despite missing out on the final itself.
A roster built around one key swap
Team Spirit's starting five for the Mid-Season Cup paired four holdovers from the Deus Vult days, SAWO, Kid Bomba, Sunset Lover and HIKO, with Zaur egoist in the jungle role after the team moved on from Sergei "Marl" Finashev. That single change meant the bulk of the roster's chemistry, built over seven straight Continental Championship titles in the EECA region, carried directly into the Mid-Season Cup grand final, with the new jungler's own contributions in the deciding games standing out specifically because the rest of the lineup's cohesion was already well established heading into Paris.
A $3 million stage inside a bigger event
The Mid-Season Cup's place inside the Esports World Cup gave this year's edition a far larger stage than the tournament's standalone prior editions, held at the Lenovo Legion Gauntlet arena alongside dozens of other titles competing for a share of the overall event's prize fund. The $3.025 million pool on offer for Mobile Legends alone, with roughly $1 million going to Team Spirit as champion, made this year's Mid-Season Cup among the richest events in the game's history regardless of which region ultimately won it, adding financial weight to a result that already carried historical significance for ending Southeast Asia's run atop the tournament.
What comes next
The Mid-Season Cup sits roughly midway through the Mobile Legends competitive calendar, with regional leagues in the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar and beyond continuing through the rest of 2026 before qualification tightens toward the M-Series World Championship later in the year, an event Team Spirit's current roster had already qualified for once before, through an earlier Continental Championship title, ahead of the stretch of the season that follows Paris. Team Spirit's result gives the organization a case to be taken seriously at that event too, now that its fifth straight Mid-Season Cup title has come with the added distinction of breaking Southeast Asia's hold on the tournament, while Yangon Galacticos carries a runner-up finish that still ranks among the best in Myanmar's competitive Mobile Legends history into the rest of the season.
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