On 18 October 2026 the Brazilian esports team LOUD beat Team Vitality of France 3-1 in Shanghai to win VALORANT Champions, the world championship of Riot Games’ tactical shooter. LOUD had won it once before, in 2022. Nobody else has won it twice, and the five who did it this time are an entirely different group from the five who did it the first time.
Below is who they are, what each of them does on the server, and what they produced over the 18 maps LOUD played in Shanghai. The numbers come from the event’s published match data. Players go by their in-game handles, so that’s how I’ve introduced them, real names in the middle.
Lucca “lukxo” Travaioli, Brazil
The tournament’s top scorer. 355 kills in 18 maps, the most of anyone at the event, against 252 deaths, for a kill-to-death ratio of 1.41. He took the first kill of a round 73 times, which only Vitality’s Derke beat.
His job is the duelist’s: open the fight. In Shanghai he did it almost entirely on Chamber, whom he played in 14 of 18 maps, with Yoru three times and Viper once. Chamber is a sentinel on paper, a character meant to hold ground, but in lukxo’s hands he’s a sniper who wins the first duel and then vanishes. The performance people will remember is the upper bracket final against Vitality on 16 October: 26 kills on Summit in a 13-5 win, then 23 on Haven in the 13-11 decider.
Enzo “tkzin” Zimiani, Brazil
LOUD’s other attacker, and the most specialised player on the team by a distance. He played Neon, the sprinting duelist, in 17 of LOUD’s 18 maps, with one map on Waylay. I’d love to know what the conversation was before that one map. His 325 kills were second on the team, and 35.6 percent of his shots that landed were headshots, the best rate at the tournament among players with at least eight maps.
He saved his best for the final. On Sunset, the third map, he scored 26 in a 13-5 win that put LOUD 2-1 up, and across the four maps he had 77 kills, 66 deaths and 19 assists, the top combat score of anyone in the grand final.
Roberto “erde” Lobos, Chile
The captain and in-game leader, which means he’s the one calling the plan while the round is happening, and he was named the tournament’s most valuable player.
The numbers explain the award. 310 kills, but also 158 assists, the most on the team, and a kill-to-death ratio of 1.28. He split his 18 maps evenly between Omen and Sage, nine each. Omen is a controller who blocks sightlines with smoke; Sage heals, walls off entrances and revives teammates. Neither is a character you pick to pad your own statistics, which is what makes his scoring odd. He led everyone with 24 kills on Haven in the upper bracket final, and had 21 on the same map two days later to close out the championship.
Sebastián “Darker” Castro Cicuamia, Colombia
Darker is the flexible one. Over the tournament he played Omen nine times, Viper seven, and Cypher and Vyse once each, which in practice means he took whichever controller or sentinel slot the map still needed after erde had picked his. He finished with 242 kills and 149 assists, second on the team in assists.
His best map came on a losing night: 20 kills on Lotus in the upper bracket final, which LOUD dropped 8-13 before winning the next two.
David “DaviH” Cruz, Portugal
DaviH is the initiator, the player whose abilities find the enemy before the fight starts. Fade in ten maps, Sova in eight, both built around reconnaissance. 222 kills and 134 assists. Initiators rarely top a scoreboard and his value shows up in other people’s numbers more than his own. He’s Portuguese, the only European on the roster, which gives the champions a lineup from four countries on two continents.
The team
LOUD finished 6-1. The one loss was to Vitality, 0-2 in the group stage on 30 September. They then beat Vitality twice, 2-1 in the upper bracket final and 3-1 in the grand final, the second after coming back from 3-9 at halftime on the opening map. Their playoff run also went through Paper Rex of Singapore and NRG of the United States.
The 2022 title came with a different roster. The 2026 one makes LOUD the first two-time champion in the game’s six year competitive history and gives Brazil its second world title.
The team they beat
Vitality’s five deserve a paragraph, because 3-1 flatters the gap. Nikita “Derke” Sirmitev of Finland scored 353 kills in 21 maps and led the whole tournament with 76 opening kills. Elias “Jamppi” Olkkonen, also Finnish, and Ștefan “Sayonara” Mîtcu of Moldova each had 345. Timofey “Chronicle” Khromov of Russia played Neon in 12 of his 21 maps, and Dawid “PROFEK” Święć of Poland held the controller role on Omen, Astra and Harbor. Vitality reached the final by beating 100 Thieves 3-1 in the lower bracket a day after losing to LOUD, having lost the first map of that series 5-13.
Where I got the numbers
Champions 2026 ran from 23 September to 18 October, 16 teams, a 2.25 million dollar prize pool with a million of it going to LOUD. I pulled the player lines from ValoLive tournaments, which has the bracket and the prize table for this event and keeps a page per player with his match history, so if you want to check whether tkzin really played Neon seventeen times, that is where to look. He did. I counted twice.
