ESL One Birmingham 2026 qualifiers — All qualifier results

The new Dota 2 season continues in 2026, with the ESL One Birmingham regional qualifiers chugging along as the third such tournament in the month of January.

Teams all over the world are currently vying for the right to play Dota at the highest level in the United Kingdom later this year, which will naturally give us an even more complete picture of how each club stacks up against the rest right now.

Southeast Asia — REKONIX

It’s pretty safe to say that Indonesian squad REKONIX are on fire right now, after having qualified for both DreamLeague Season 28 and now ESL One Birmingham as well. They also defeated the same opponents in the form of Execration in order to qualify for Birmingham, so it’s clear that we’re starting to see a fierce rivalry forming between these two clubs forming in real time. It wasn’t very close, either — REKONIX pretty much ran away with the series in four games.

WE ARE GOING TO BRIMINGHAM!!!! Lower bracket run every match is an elimination, but we survived. GGWP @ExecrationGG see you at another series~
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Let’s make Dota Indo great again — the REKONIX way 💜⚡#GGRKX #REKONIX pic.twitter.com/1qEM10seyd

— REKONIX (@rekonixofficial) January 18, 2026

And even though I might be a homer for Filipino teams, I am all for exciting competition in the region. It’s always great to see new faces come out of Southeast Asia, so I’m definitely rooting for REKONIX to keep being successful as far as qualifiers go.

Eastern Europe — BetBoom Team & Aurora Gaming

No surprises whatsoever here. BetBoom Team and Aurora Gaming both swept their respective final matches in the Eastern European qualifiers, thus solidifying their positions as two of the top teams from the region.

🥳 WE QUALIFIED AT ESL One Birmingham 2026 🥳 pic.twitter.com/yGoOWLK1gf

— Aurora Dota2 (@AuroraDota2_GG) January 18, 2026

Seeing these two clubs in particular come out of qualifiers on the regular should become familiar to all Dota fans as this season progresses, unless some other roster like AVULUS or 1w Team can upset the natural order.

Western Europe — Team Falcons, Virtus.pro, MOUZ, & Nigma Galaxy

Team Falcons came out of the Western European qualifiers first without breaking much of a sweat, dropping only one map on their way to the upper bracket finals. Only Zero Tenacity gave them any sort of pause here, and even then it took almost 73 minutes of play for Zero Tenacity to put them away in game 2. Falcons then locked in and closed things out in game 3.

The defending International champions can’t really afford to drop the ball at any qualifier tournament right now, given their not-so-great form as of late. Their consistency has been kind of questionable over the last month or so, but it would have set off some huge alarm bells if those issues showed up here as well. They won the whole tournament last time they were at ESL One Birmingham, so they’ve also got a title to defend.

Following in their wake was Virtus.pro, who are steadily improving more and more as a unit despite my (and most of the Dota community’s) misgivings about their roster, as they are repeatedly subverting expectations that most if not all of them were simply too washed up to compete at the highest level. Jonáš “SabeRLight-” Volek seems to be on a mission to prove that he is, in fact, the exact opposite of washed — and that he is ready to lead some of these older players back to where they used to be.

Is anyone even planning to stop SaberLight? 👀#Dota2 #GOGOVP pic.twitter.com/ZNP87paKaA

— Virtus.pro (@virtuspro) January 19, 2026

He even did so against Team Liquid, the very squad that kicked him in the wake of The International 2025 (TI14), sending them to the lower bracket in a bit of sweet revenge for him.

And speaking of Team Liquid, they are back to their losing ways this season. If there’s any tier 1 team right now that deserves any mention of being washed, it’s them all the way. Marcus “Ace” Christensen in particular is still playing as if Gaimin Gladiators were still around; that is to say that he’s still an aura bot from the offlane position despite that style of play being extremely outdated now.

They’ll be missing out on ESL One Birmingham as a result of losing to MOUZ, who will qualify ahead of them after turning their fortunes around in their lower bracket series against Liquid.

Now here’s a genuine surprise, though: Nigma Galaxy actually managed to bag themselves a spot at the tournament, after defeating Na’Vi in a hard-fought three-game set in the lower bracket. Game 2 in particular was incredible to watch, especially knowing that Nigma’s backs were against the wall at that point after dropping the first map of the match.

As a former Evil Geniuses fan, it’s great to see that Syed “SumaiL” Hassan is still this good more than 10 years after he helped EG win TI5. Janne “Gorgc” Stefanovski and Ammar “ATF” Al-Assaf both expressed their dislike of the Void Spirit pick for SumaiL in game 3 on Gorgc’s stream, but SumaiL quickly shut them up with his series-closing performance.

I still don’t believe that Nigma Galaxy will put up much of a fight in the tournament proper, but at least they’re not fumbling every qualifying opportunity after losing both Daniel “Ghost” Chan and Aybek “TA2000” Tokarev.

North America — GamerLegion

If you’re only finding out that GamerLegion qualified for ESL One Birmingham through this article, there’s one thing you should know: they almost got swept by Rottweilas LATAM. Yes, there was a point earlier today when Guilherme “Costabile” Costábile and the rest of his team were one game away from shutting GamerLegion out of this tournament and completing the biggest upset in North America.

Fortunately for GamerLegion, they were able to execute the reverse sweep — but this really isn’t a good sign with regards to their chances at Birmingham. If they were this close to dropping three straight games in a qualification match, then I’m not sure they’ll be able to place any higher than dead last in the UK if I’m being honest.

But anyway, at least they got it done in the end. A W is a W, right?

South America — Perú Rejects

Another qualifier tournament, another victory for Perú Rejects. They completely dominated HEROIC in the grand final match of the South American qualifiers, shutting them out in just three games in one of the most brutal beatdowns I’ve seen this season. David “Parker” Nicho Flores honestly looked like he was smurfing in this match, flexing his insane skill as a carry player and as one of the absolute best in the region at that position right now.

Say what you will about Parker’s maturity and lack of levelheadedness, but it’s clear that he is as good as anyone else when his emotions are in check. Add to that the fact that this roster has Elvis “Scofield” Peña holding things down as the glue guy, and you’ve got yourself a seriously formidable squad coming out of South America.

I’m personally stoked to see how far this team in particular can go. As for HEROIC, well, good luck to them integrating Santiago “TaiLung” Agüero Gustavo into their lineup well enough to actually start winning again.

China — Yakult Brothers

If you watched the grand finals of ESL Challenger China on the 1st of February, you might be confused as to why I have Yakult Brothers in the heading of this section, considering that it was Xtreme Gaming that won the championship match in that tournament three games to one. But in reality, they had already qualified for both ESL One Birmingham and DreamLeague Season 28 by way of their top 4 placement in the ESL Pro Tour leaderboard.

Thus, what would have been their qualifier slot otherwise was given to Yakult Brothers. And while the grand finals still ended in favor of XG, there is no world in which Yakult Brothers wouldn’t take the qualification, knowing how poorly the organization has performed overall since the new season began. They placed 7th-10th at BLAST Slam V Chengdu, not even making it to the LAN which was on their home soil.

I don’t think they’re going to do much better at Birmingham, mind you, but Chinese teams will take any sort of windfall they can get right now no matter how big or small. After all, the region has not been in a good spot since TI14, and neither has this organization in particular.