What are the Champions on VALORANT?

Introduced in 2021 — one year after the game’s release — VALORANT Champions is the most prestigious event on the competitive calendar. It’s the final event of the VALORANT Champions Tour season: the international tournament features the 16 world’s top teams facing one another for the title of world champion. It brings together the highest-performing squads from each of the four major VCT regions (Americas, EMEA, Pacific and China since 2025), qualified through the results they have accumulated throughout the year and across the season’s principal competitions.

Beyond the competitive stakes, Champions holds a central place in the annual esports calendar. The event concentrates rivalries, highlights the relative strength of each region, and showcases the evolution of the meta at the highest level of play. For spectators, it serves as a benchmark exhibition of elite competition; for teams, it is the most demanding stage, where consistency over an entire season is tested against the strongest international opposition.

Champions is decisive because it is the only tournament that conclusively determines the season’s champion, with qualification designed to reward sustained performance rather than a brief peak in form. The format typically includes a group stage followed by playoffs, and the event is often accompanied by production, broadcast coverage, and in-game content commensurate with its status.

In practice, Champions also functions as a barometer: it can validate a region’s approach, bring emerging teams into focus, and shape how the wider community interprets the game’s most effective strategies, compositions, and competitive trends. Each year, Champions take place in a major global city: Berlin (Germany) in 2021, Istanbul (Turkey) in 2022, Los Angeles (United States) in 2023, Seoul (South Korea) in 2024, and Paris (France) in 2025. In 2026, Champions will be held in Shanghai, China.

Between 2021 and 2025, the Americas region dominated the competition with three titles (LOUD in 2022 as Brazil’s representative, followed by Evil Geniuses in 2023 and NRG in 2025 for VCT Americas). The EMEA region won the inaugural edition in 2021 with Acend, while China claimed the 2024 title through EDward Gaming.