Team Vitality Sets Up a Third Meeting With LOUD in Champions 2026's Final

Team Vitality beat 100 Thieves 3-1 in the lower bracket final of Valorant Champions 2026 on October 17, booking the French roster's spot in Sunday's grand final against LOUD at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai. It will be the third time the two sides have met at the same event, after LOUD eliminated Vitality from the upper bracket just two days earlier.

From the tournament's official bracket and match results.

How the bracket got here

Champions 2026 opened with a group stage running from September 24 to October 4, splitting 16 teams drawn from the EMEA, Pacific, China and Americas regional leagues into four groups of four, playing best-of-three matches. The top two finishers in each group advanced to an October 7 double-elimination playoff bracket, where a single loss sends a team to the lower bracket rather than out of the tournament outright, and a second loss eliminates it.

Vitality and LOUD were drawn into the same four-team group in September, alongside Global Esports and EDward Gaming, which is why Sunday's meeting will be the third time the two sides have played each other at this one event rather than the first.

Vitality's road to Shanghai ran through a rockier EMEA season than 100 Thieves had in the Americas. The French team lost its opening playoff match of EMEA Stage 2 to the second-tier Enterprise Esports, then was eliminated from the main bracket entirely by another second-tier side, Fire Flux Esports, in August. With no regional trophy to show for the stage, Vitality's place in the Champions field instead came down to its accumulated Championship Points from across the season, which were high enough to carry it through once the qualification picture settled.

The long way back for Vitality

Vitality reached the upper bracket final by beating G2 Esports 2-0 in the October 10 semifinal, winning Abyss 13-11 and Split 13-4. On the same day, LOUD beat NRG 2-1 in the other semifinal to set up the all-important upper bracket final between Vitality and LOUD, with a direct spot in Sunday's grand final waiting for the winner.

That final, played on October 16, went Vitality's way on the opening map, Lotus, 13-8, but LOUD recovered to win Ascent 13-5 and Summit 13-11, taking the series 2-1 and the first of the two grand final spots.

With the loss, Vitality dropped into the lower bracket final, its last chance to reach Sunday's title match, against whichever team emerged from the 100 Thieves-G2 Esports lower bracket semifinal.

LOUD now carries that upper bracket win into Sunday's final as the only team left in the bracket without a loss since the playoffs began. The Brazilian organization is already a Valorant world champion once over, having beaten OpTic Gaming to win the first Champions event back in 2022, and a win over Vitality would give it a second international title four years on.

A long-awaited return to the stage

100 Thieves arrived in Shanghai on the back of its best Americas season in years. After a fifth-place finish at the region's Kickoff event and a fourth-place finish at Stage One, the roster won the Esports World Cup in Paris, then returned home with barely half a day off before beating LOUD 3-2 in the Americas Stage 2 grand final in São Paulo, its first regional title in more than two years and the result that sent it to Shanghai as the Americas' first seed.

Rookie in-game leader Jordan "vora" Pulwer, who joined 100 Thieves from the second-tier scene in 2025 alongside former teammate Timothee "timotino" Lavigne Dupont, had promised fans a return to the event the organization had been shut out of for close to four years. "I'm going to bring us to Champs, I promise," he said after the Paris win. The run that followed carried the team from the lower bracket's early rounds all the way to the October 16 rematch with G2 Esports and, ultimately, Saturday's lower bracket final against Vitality.

100 Thieves' run through the lower bracket

100 Thieves took a longer road than Vitality to reach that point. The American roster first had to survive the lower bracket's early rounds, beating Nongshim RedForce 2-1 on October 9 and the reigning 2025 champions, NRG, 2-0 on October 11, eliminating NRG from the tournament entirely. NRG's exit marked the bracket's biggest upset: the defending champions had been knocked into the lower bracket by LOUD on October 10, then lost outright to 100 Thieves the very next day, a tournament-ending defeat for the team that had won the title twelve months earlier.

Elsewhere in the lower bracket's early rounds, T1 beat Paper Rex 2-1 on October 9 to survive its own first elimination match and eliminate Paper Rex in the process. T1's own run ended two days later, on October 11, when it lost 1-2 to G2 Esports, who had themselves been dropped into the lower bracket by Vitality's October 10 win. With T1's exit, the entire Pacific region's representation in the tournament — Paper Rex, Nongshim RedForce and T1 — was eliminated by October 11.

Its next test was a rematch with G2 Esports, which had beaten 100 Thieves 2-0 in the upper bracket quarterfinal back on October 8 before being knocked down to the lower bracket itself by Vitality. The second meeting, on October 16, went 100 Thieves' way 2-1: G2 won the opening map, Lotus, 13-11, but 100 Thieves answered by taking Ascent 13-10 and Summit 13-7 to close out the series and end G2's run.

Individual players stood out across that run. 100 Thieves' Erick "Cryocells" Bach posted a series-high 1.23 rating against G2, finishing the deciding map with a 13-kill, 4-death scoreline, while teammate Sean "bang" Bezerra led the first half of that same map before 100 Thieves pulled away. On the losing side, G2's Jacob "valyn" Batio got a four-kill round that briefly halted 100 Thieves' momentum in a thrifty Summit win for the Americans, though it wasn't enough to extend the series. Asked about the margin afterward, Batio said the match had been close and came down to a handful of rounds breaking the other way.

The decider

The October 17 lower bracket final against Vitality proved to be a step too far for 100 Thieves. Vitality dropped the opening map, Split, before winning three in a row — Summit 13-10, Lotus, and Ascent 13-9 — to close out the series 3-1 and claim the tournament's final grand-final berth.

That result sets up a third meeting between Vitality and LOUD inside the same event: the two sides first played in the group stage, where Vitality held the advantage after both had won their opening matches, before LOUD reversed that result in the October 16 upper bracket final. The grand final will settle the rubber match between them, with the full $1 million winner's share and the Champions 2026 title on the line.

For Vitality, Sunday's match is a chance to finish what a shaky regional stage didn't promise: a team that lost its own EMEA playoff bracket outright in August has instead gone further at the sport's biggest event than any of the EMEA sides that beat it there. For LOUD, it's a chance to add a second world title to the one it won in 2022, four years and several roster changes removed from that run, against the one team in the bracket that has already beaten it once at this event.

What's next

The Valorant Champions 2026 grand final between Team Vitality and LOUD is scheduled for Sunday, October 18, at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, closing out a playoff stage that began on October 7. LOUD enters as the only team yet to be eliminated from the bracket, while Vitality will be playing its third match of the tournament against the same opponent, looking to settle the score after the October 16 loss.

Saturday's result also locks in the rest of the event's $2.25 million prize pool. 100 Thieves takes third place and $250,000 for its run, one spot and $120,000 ahead of G2 Esports, which finishes fourth with $130,000. NRG and T1 tied for fifth-sixth place at $85,000 each, with Paper Rex and Nongshim RedForce taking $50,000 apiece for seventh-eighth. Whichever of Vitality or LOUD wins on Sunday takes home $1,000,000 and the Champions 2026 title; the runner-up collects $400,000.

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