The 2026 Esports World Championship is heading into the finals, and the title of club champion is still up for grabs

The seven weeks of competition in Paris will culminate in the next nine days. The 2026 World Esports Championship has already crowned champions in Tekken 8, Honor of Kings, Call of Duty, and a dozen other games, and the event will conclude on August 23. The one thing that remains to be seen is which title will pay off the most.

The “Falcons” team has won the club championship two years in a row. As the final stretch approaches, they are no longer in the lead.

Who is currently leading the club championship?

The Chinese organization All Gamers tops the standings after Week 5, and the margin is so narrow that a single victory in the tournament could change the situation.

Standings after Week 5, according to Esports Charts. Results for Rocket League, PUBG Mobile, and chess will be available by the end of the weekend.

All players secured this lead across 13 tournaments and earned four medals, including a Tekken 8 title worth 1,000 points and second-place finishes in Free Fire and Honor of Kings, earning 750 points each.

The “Falcons” achieved this in a different way. They had only one top-three finish all summer—Jaime “Crema” Busto’s victory in Street Fighter 6—and the rest came from consistent placement points. This single trophy is more important than it seems: a club cannot win the Club Championship based solely on ranking points, no matter how many times it has finished in the top eight. At least one tournament victory is mandatory. The “Falcons” have their spots. All the Gamers have theirs. No one at this event managed to secure two.

More than 75 organizations have earned points somewhere in the rankings, which shows just how wide the field is before it narrows at the top.

What’s left to play for?

Four events will decide the rest, and two of them are underway as you read this.

• The PUBG Mobile World Championship Grand Final, August 14–16. Sixteen teams, up to 18 matches, with the Smash rule in effect on the final day.

• Rocket League playoffs start on August 15. The group stage wraps up today. Eight teams will advance to the single-elimination bracket, with matches played to four wins, except for the third-place match. Karmine Corp, Gentle Mates, FURIA, and Falcons will lead the competition with a $1 million prize pool.

• Counter-Strike 2, playoffs August 19–23. The grand final will take place at the Accor Arena.

• Fortnite Reload Elite Series, August 19–22. Forty duos, $1 million, and the first-ever Fortnite Reload World Championship following a complete hiatus in 2025.

Chess also concludes on August 15, with both All Gamers and NAVI advancing players to the playoffs. Denis Lazavik and Nodirbek Abdusattorov will face off in the first round, so two of the top three teams will clash before the quarterfinals are even set.

Why the CS2 bracket matters

Counter-Strike is the last major game, and it’s the reason why Vitality and NAVI still have a mathematical path to the top.

The field is quite large: 32 teams—twice as many as Riyadh hosted last year—are competing for $2 million. The “Falcons” arrive as the reigning champions of a major tournament. Vitality are widely regarded as the favorites. NAVI, Team Spirit, The MongolZ, and FURIA round out the bracket with almost no easy matches.

The group stage begins on August 12, with four groups of eight teams each competing in a double-elimination format; the top four teams from each group advance. Four of these 32 spots were secured through an “Last Chance” qualifier—a truly open tournament, a rarity in modern Counter-Strike—in which anyone could participate. K27, BIG, JiJieHao, and 100 Thieves advanced through this qualifier.

FaZe Clan 2-0 Legacy — Day 2 of the group stage of the 2026 CS2 Esports World Championship. Photo: Esports World Championship / YouTube

Sixteen playoff matches will take place starting August 19; the first two best-of-three series will begin at 2:00 p.m. Central European Time. You can follow the tournament bracket as it fills up on our 2026 CS2 Esports World Championship playoffs page.

It’s worth taking a closer look at the age range in Paris. Finn “karrigan” Andersen is the oldest player in the tournament at 36, while Danilo “s1zzi” Vinnik of B8 is 16. FUT Esports has the youngest roster with an average age of 19.4, while FURIA has the oldest at 26.8.

Is anyone actually watching?

More than last year, and not always where the organizers expected.

Week 5 alone saw a 255.5% increase in viewing time compared to the same week in the 2025 edition. This was largely made possible by Honor of Kings, which drew 700,000 viewers and 4.8 million hours of viewing for the biggest tournament in the game’s history. Tekken 8 set a series peak record of 114,100 viewers, while Call of Duty reached a peak of 271,800, setting a series record for average viewership.

What’s more interesting is where these viewers went. The number of community streams surpassed that of official channels for the first time since the second week, led by Indian YouTuber Raj “Snax Gaming” Varma, whose PUBG Mobile streams alone garnered 3.28 million hours of viewing. French-language Call of Duty streams accounted for a significant portion of the remainder.

The “Falcons” still lead the viewership table with 35.51 million hours throughout the event, ahead of Aurora Gaming with 22.73 million and All Gamers with 22.69 million. Vitality ranks fifth with 19.13 million hours out of ten teams.

So what should Virtus.pro do next?

Catch up on points with Vitality and finish strong.

Virtus.pro has only one representative on any of the other teams—Péter “Pusztitopako” Varga in TrackMania—and there’s no realistic way to close the 1,150-point gap. They will almost certainly finish in the top five and watch the final week from the sidelines.

The “Falcons,” on the other hand, have already earned points in chess and Rocket League, are in the CS2 bracket, and are sending Karl-Antoine “Karl Jr.” Klutier to TrackMania next week. This breadth of diversity is a strong case for a third consecutive title.