Team Yandex sweep Team Spirit: clean control ends the champions’ title defence

Team Yandex defeated Team Spirit 2–0 in the Esports World Cup quarterfinals, eliminating the defending champions and advancing to the semifinals. The result extends a tournament run in which Yandex have now won five consecutive series without dropping a map after their opening 1–1 draw with OG.

The scoreline was clean, but neither map was short. Yandex won the opener in 44:23 and closed the second after 51:19, showing that their control held even when Spirit remained competitive deep into the game.

The first map was especially revealing. Spirit finished with one more team kill, 24–23, yet Yandex still converted the game. watson ended 8/2/11 with 83% kill participation, while CHIRA_JUNIOR produced the same kill and assist numbers from mid. Yandex’s two main cores were therefore involved in 19 of the team’s 23 kills each, giving the team a stable source of damage and execution throughout the map.

The second game was more decisive statistically. Yandex won 35–23, with watson and CHIRA_JUNIOR both finishing 11/4/11. DM added 6/5/18, while both supports recorded at least 19 assists. The result was not built around one isolated carry performance: all five players remained heavily involved in the team’s successful fights.

That collective structure has been the clearest feature of Yandex’s EWC run. Before facing Spirit, they had already beaten Inner Circle, Virtus.pro, LGD and 1win by 2–0 scores after drawing their opening series. The quarterfinal did not require a new identity; it showed that the same structure still worked against the reigning champions.

Spirit entered the match after beating Liquid 2–1 in the Survival Stage and had won three group-stage series 2–0. Their tournament was not collapsing before the quarterfinal. Yandex therefore did not simply punish a team already in obvious decline—they defeated an opponent that had recovered well enough to reach the playoff bracket and was still defending the 2025 title.

The recent head-to-head also makes the result harder to treat as an isolated upset. Yandex had already beaten Spirit at BLAST Slam VII, ESL One Birmingham and DreamLeague 27, and the EWC sweep continues a repeated pattern rather than creating a new one.

Winio read: Yandex’s advantage came from collective reliability rather than one dominant lane or one standout player. watson and CHIRA_JUNIOR provided the main core output, but DM, Saksa and Malady remained involved enough to prevent Spirit from isolating a single weak point. The strongest signal is that Yandex maintained this structure across two long maps against a team with enough late-game experience to punish hesitation.

Spirit’s elimination also exposes the limits of their current consistency. They could still survive Liquid in a full Bo3, but against Yandex they were unable to turn competitive map states into control. The problem was not a lack of individual production—Larl recorded ten kills on the second map—but that Yandex converted team-wide participation into more reliable fights and objectives.

Team Yandex now move into the semifinals with the strongest possible confirmation of their form: a clean playoff win over the defending champions. Their next opponent will provide another test, but the question is no longer whether their group-stage run was inflated by favorable matchups. They have now reproduced the same control against one of the most experienced teams in the bracket.