Team Liquid wins their second Aegis as an organization, the first time with this specific roster, and the second time for one of their team members, seven years since Team Liquid's last Grand Finals victory at TI7. Let's take a look at how they got here.
With thirteen years in regulation, it's not unusual anymore for teams and players to win more than one Aegis of the Immortals in their careers. However, Team Liquid would be the first organization to win two Aegis with two rosters that don't share a single team member.
Team Liquid's lineup that won this year's The International is as follows:
- Michael “miCKe” Vu
- Michał “Nisha” Jankowski
- Neta “33” Shapira (captain)
- Samuel “Box” Svahn
- Aydin “Insania” Sarkohi”
They are coached by William “Blitz” Lee and Mathis “Jabbz” Friesel.
Among the team members, miCKe, Boxi, Insania, and Blitz have all been together since October 2019. Incidentally, it was also at this time when the original Aegis winners of Team Liquid left the organization when its former members led by KuroKy formed Nigma Galaxy. In a way, you can call this iteration of Team Liquid's roster as a direct successor to its previous championship team.
Emotions ran high when the team won, especially their coach Blitz who was visibly tearing up on stage as his team received the Aegis of the Immortals. Fans of the team celebrated Team Liquid's success, remembering how they always knew they were championship material after falling short in 2022 when they finished third at The International.
Insania, miCKe, and Boxi: Teammates since Alliance
The year that KuroKy, the former captain of Team Liquid, won the organization's first Aegis, miCKe, Insania, and Boxi were all still playing with a different organization. Back in 2017, the three were already teammates in Sweden's The Alliance.
Back then, 33 and Nisha were not yet part of Team Liquid, and instead, the three were joined by their two other teammates from Alliance, Tommy “Taiga” Lee, and Maximilian “Qojqva” Bröcker. Due to these departures, two legends joined the roster in the form of MATUMBAMAN (won in TI7 with Team Liquid), and zai, considered to be one of the best Dota 2 players to have never won an Aegis.
MATUMBAMAN would retire with the team when they failed to secure the Aegis in 2022, which would open the doors to Nisha, formerly of Team Secret, to join the team. Zai would also leave the pro player's life when he left Team Liquid when he became the General Manager of Tundra Esports.
Interestingly, zai's departure to join Tundra Esports would be how 33 would end up in Team Liquid, who himself came from Tundra Esports.
In a sense, this roster's core has been together since 2017, back when they were still in The Alliance. Blitz would join and stick with the team in 2019 as their coach, and having seen the potential of the squad, stuck with them until they won the Aegis five years later.
33 raises another Aegis with a whole new team
33, who won the Aegis with Tundra Esports in The International 2022, would leave the organization to join Team Liquid late last year. Having joined the team last November during the post-TI shuffle, 33 is the newest member of Team Liquid. His joining the team led to Team Liquid placing third in ESL One Kuala Lumpur 2023 and then second in Riyadh Masters 2024, showing that he is a great fit.
With his win in TI13, this makes 33 the most recent Dota 2 pro player to do a repeat win at The International.
Nisha finally steps out of Puppey's shadow
Team Liquid's other core piece in this roster was Nisha, the youngest player on the team. Prior to joining Team Liquid, he spent most of the prominent years of his career with Team Secret, joining legendary support captain and former TI Champion Clement “Puppey” Ivanov in 2018.
Puppey is well-known for being a strict captain and tough to keep up with in terms of skill, but throughout his time in Team Secret, Nisha flourished and would often be the reason for the team's wins. He would even win the Esports Awards PC Player of the Year in 2020. But it's clear Nisha needed to leave Team Secret to grow and thus joined Team Liquid upon his release in December of 2022.
Now, Nisha is Puppey's equal, the prodigy has now the same number of trophies as the captain who has been crucial in developing his skills in the game in recent years. Puppey himself is gearing up for another run at The International, starting afresh with a new roster for the 2024-2025 season, showing no signs of stopping even 13 years in the professional scene.
Blitz's and Jabbz's Retribution
Finally, we get to the coaches of Team Liquid: Blitz and Jabbz, themselves two veterans of the esport. Jabbz joined Team Liquid in 2020, coaching for the first time in his career after multiple stints in other organizations went nowhere. He established himself as a genius in analytics and is clearly an integral part of Team Liquid's successes.
Blitz, on the other hand, has been coaching high-profile teams since 2016. He would coach teams like Digital Chaos, Thunderbirds, and Planet Odd, often delivering great results with avant-garde strategies and tactics. However, he'd find his place as the coach of Team Liquid, which he found promising. He stuck with the team even after it failed to make The International in 2020.
Blitz's faith in Team Liquid's core in spite of the rut they found themselves in the 2019-2020 season finally paid off and shows what sticking to your principles and doing things together as a team could get you.
Team Liquid's faith in its roster brought it its second Aegis
And of course, we should acknowledge that this wouldn't have been possible had Team Liquid not placed its faith in this roster and fostered them through thick or thin. Team Liquid didn't give up on its team even if there were times that the team couldn't make the playoffs, even when fans demanded the team to disband.
It's worth noting that this is also how Team Liquid won their first Aegis. They stuck with KuroKy and his teammates MATUMBAMAN, Amer “Miracle-” Al-Barkawi, Ivan “MinD-ContRoL” Ivanov, and Maroun “GH” Merhej, a team that stuck together for years before finally winning it all in 2017.
Team Liquid does not have a history of disbanding its teams, and its willingness to see things through and stick with its core roster is one of the reasons behind its success as an organization.
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