Every Remaining Team at League of Legends Worlds Carries a Former Champion — So a New Two-Time Winner Is Guaranteed
T1's 3-1 win over KC completed the semifinal bracket at the 2026 World Championship, setting BLG against T1 and iG against GEN. Whichever way it falls, this year's champion will include a player winning a second title — and Faker is still chasing his seventh.
The last quarterfinal of the 2026 League of Legends World Championship ended on Friday with T1 beating Korea's KC 3-1, and with it the semifinal bracket snapped into place: BLG against T1, iG against Gen.G. The arithmetic buried in that result is why Chinese fans cannot stop talking about it — every one of the four surviving rosters carries at least one player who has already won a world title, so this year's final is guaranteed to produce someone winning a second championship, something no edition of the tournament has forced before.
The breakdown, circulated by the video account 万维视频 and picked up across Baidu's trending board, runs: iG's TheShy, Rookie and Meiko won in 2018 and 2021; Gen.G's Ruler and Canyon in 2017 and 2020; BLG's Viper and Flandre in 2021; T1's Doran in 2025. And hovering over all of it is T1's mid-laner Faker, who could lift a record seventh trophy.
The bracket's headline act is BLG versus T1, a rematch steeped in lopsided history. BLG crushed T1 3-1 at the 2024 Mid-Season Invitational — the last time they met — but has never beaten T1 in a best-of-five at Worlds. Faker, after the KC win, delivered the line Chinese feeds instantly canonised: BLG, he said, had "shown the form of a team capable of winning the whole thing", but "it's a pity they met us in the semifinals". On Zhihu, the top-voted answers treat the quote as both respect and a warning, and the site's match thread has become the venue for arguing whether BLG's mid-season superiority survives a Worlds stage.
The other semifinal runs on nostalgia and needle. iG, the 2018 champions back at the summit two years after the LPL's visa debacle made headlines when one team's coach never left China, face Gen.G — and the pre-match theatre is already underway. Rookie teased that Chovy "playing a bit worse is no big deal", and Chovy answered that he hopes Rookie is the one to send him through to the final. Two of the game's most decorated mid-laners, trading courtesy as a weapon.
For the home audience, one shadow hangs over the run: TES, eliminated by iG in the quarterfinals, faces an contract cliff — the deals for Creme, JackeyLove and 369 all expire on November 17, with JackeyLove's six-and-a-half-year tenure at the club among them, and Zhihu's post-mortem thread is already rehearsing the rebuild. When we covered BLG's sweep of DK to reach the semifinals, the question was whether the rematch with T1 would happen; now that it is set, the question is whether history's shape — MSI belongs to BLG, Worlds belongs to T1 — holds one more time.