EDG Exits Valorant Champions Shanghai 0–2, Leaving JDG as China's Last Hope

The scoreboard that ended EDG's title defence read 13–6, and it was not close. Swept 0–2 by GE in the group stage of the Valorant Champions world championship on Thursday, the 2024 world champions walked out of a tournament hosted in their own country. This year, on home ground in Shanghai, they are out in the last 16 for the second season running, and the club's goodbye note — "the ending of this story isn't perfect, but it isn't the finale yet" — drew more than 3,500 comments, most of them stern.

The disappointment carried extra weight because of who EDG are to Chinese Valorant: the first Chinese team ever to win the world title, and the roster that made a household name of their star ZmjjKK. The Shanghai event was meant to be a homecoming. Instead, after the group stage, exactly one team from the VCT China league — JDG — remains, and EDG's eliminated star spent his press conference redirecting the crowd's energy there. "I hope everyone gives their cheers to them now," he said. "They're the last team still on the stage, still playing. I hope they leave without regrets." Of his own future he was, by his own description, genuinely unsure — a frankness that trended under its own hashtag.

ZmjjKK's accounting of the defeat was blunter than the club's. "In 2024 we never felt we were going to win that championship," he told reporters, "and this year we also didn't know we'd lose this fast." What he took from the run, he said, was the crowd: the arena roared even when the score was against them, and "more and more young viewers like us — so we have to set a good example." The fans' verdicts were less generous. A match report that closed with "EDG just played badly, there's nothing more to say" summed up the mood, and one poster asked the question the region now faces: is the whole VCT China league down to a single team with a winning record?

JDG, that single team, play T1 next — a knockout match against the most decorated organisation in the game's history, carrying a host region's hopes alone. There is an odd double life to Chinese esports this fortnight, and the site has tracked both halves of it: Mu Xinyue becoming the first woman to win Asian Games esports gold for China, complete with a hero's welcome at the airport, and the discipline now leaving the Asian Games entirely after Nagoya for a standalone event in Kuwait. On the national-podium circuit, Chinese gamers bring home gold; in the club game, against the world's full-time franchised elite, the same generation of players is finding the gap has reopened. The crowd in Shanghai, which stayed loud through the 13–6 close-out, is now asked to transfer that volume to a team that has never carried the country's hopes at a world championship alone before.