Dota 2 at EWC 25 Champions: Team Spirit Sweep Team Falcons

A clean Esports World Cup sweep

The hometown crowd in Riyadh was left speechless as Team Spirit delivered a knockout blow to Team Falcons in the finals of Dota 2 at the 2025 Esports World Cup. Securing a convincing 3-0 sweep over the Falcons, Spirit claimed their first major international victory since April.

Team Spirit had been dominant all tournament, dropping just a single game – their only loss all event – back in the group stage. The squad then went on a perfect run in the playoffs. Team Falcons weren’t about to let them have an easy victory, though. They started the first game by utilizing an unorthodox strategy: letting Stanislav "Malr1ne" Potorak’s Primal Beast proxy two waves from both the bot and mid lanes at the start.

While this gave him enough early-game resources to effectively mitigate the awful lane matchup Primal Beast has against Queen of Pain, it just wasn’t enough to hold back Team Spirit. The Eastern European squad massively outfarmed their opponents, controlled Roshan, and secured their first win.

Point of no return

It once again looked like Team Falcons had the advantage from the draft and early game at the start of the second match. With Oliver "skiter" Lepko’s Sven and Ammar "ATF" Al-Assaf’s Doom getting strong starts, Team Spirit could have been in trouble – if not for the impressive performance of Illya "Yatoro" Mulyarchuk. His Medusa pick was the ultimate deciding factor, amassing a 11k gold lead and locking in a second win.

Unfortunately, that seemed to be the Falcons' breaking point, and the third game felt like a done deal. A brutal engage composition featuring Dawnbreaker, Monkey King, and Yatoro’s dominant Shadow Fiend left little room for Team Falcons to breathe, sealing the 3-0 win for Team Spirit.

SONY MVP

While Yatoro’s carry performance was crucial, it was Magomed “Collapse” Khalilov who earned Sony MVP honors during Dota 2 at EWC 25. Throughout this series – and the whole tournament – his consistent brilliance made him the standout player.

It’s usually hard to pick a single MVP moment, but PVISION will be having nightmares about the two stolen Aegises in their semifinal game for months. Collapse takes home the MVP award on top of Team Spirit’s $1,000,000 first-place prize.

"I won't stop until no one can beat my record," Collapse said in response to a post-tournament question about what drives him. The EWC 25 MVP won't stop until he's considered the greatest Dota 2 player of all time.