Fort Worth got a clean sweep on 20 September. Team Falcons beat Spacestation Gaming 4-0 in the Rocket League World Championship final at Dickies Arena, which makes it, remarkably, the first RLCS world title for a team representing the MENA region, and it came with $300,000 of the $1.2m pool.
Four games, all settled by one goal
The 4-0 makes it look more one-sided than it was, to be honest. Falcons took the first game 3-2 and the second 2-1, then won the third 3-2 again after an overtime that ran for a minute and 34 seconds, and closed it out 2-1 in the fourth.
Kiileerrz (Yazid Bakhashwin) topped the final series on BLAST’s rating with 7.59, playing alongside his twin brother Rw9 (Saleh Bakhashwin) and the Moroccan dralii (Samy Hajji).
The long way round
Falcons started the group stage comfortably enough, beating FUT, R8, MIBR and Spacestation themselves, the last of those 3-2. Then Karmine Corp beat them 1-3. That hurt, because it dropped them into the lower bracket where one more defeat meant going home. From there it was a grind. FURIA and Shopify Rebellion both went down 4-1, then the reigning world champions NRG fell by the same score, hardly the expected result against the holders. Karmine Corp were dealt with 4-2 at the second attempt.
Spacestation did not win a single game in the final. That makes twice in five weeks. At the Esports World Cup 2026 Falcons beat them 4-0 in the deciding match as well.
How many people watched
Nobody has published an attendance figure for the arena. Online numbers are out, though. Esports Charts puts the peak at the Falcons semi-final against Karmine Corp. 722,347 people watched it at once, which is a lot for car football. Across the week the tournament ran to roughly 7.5 million hours watched.
Esports viewers rarely stay inside one game. Rocket League today, a shooter or a strategy title tomorrow, a stream or a card game open in the next tab. Online casino audiences have their own interest in tournaments of this size, and Spinchester Casino advertises live dealer tables to them at https://spinchestercasino.bet/ alongside slots. For Rocket League itself, 722,000 people watching one semi-final at once is news in its own right.
For the first time the deciding day also reached cinemas, with the final screened in 50 AMC theatres and official watch parties at seven American universities on top.
Americans and Dutchmen
Spacestation Gaming took home $153,000. It is an American organisation, although the roster includes one Brazilian, diaz, next to Americans reveal and Zach. Before Texas the side won NA Open 4, finished second at Open 6 and sat third in the North American standings on 69 points.
NRG, top of the same table on 90 points, finished joint fifth with Virtus.pro and banked $84,000 each. Modest, for last year’s world champions.
Dutch interest ran through Ninjas in Pyjamas. Joreuz (Joris Robben) and oaly (Ole van Doorn) played with the Spaniard crr, and the team finished 13th to 16th for $17,250. How much of that reached the players themselves BLAST does not say (aggregators split it three ways, but that is only an assumption).
What comes next
There is no venue or date yet for the 2027 World Championship.
Next up is the RLCS club cycle, and arguably that is where the bigger money now sits. Its $2.5m prize pool covers the whole season, from the opening event to the 2027 finals. It starts on 9 to 13 December at the Copper Box Arena in London, with fans admitted for the last three days. BLAST still runs the series under its agreement with Epic Games, which owns the game’s developer Psyonix.
World Championship prize money, meanwhile, has barely moved while the field has grown. In 2024, 16 teams played for $1,165,500, roughly $72,800 a team on average. Since then the pool has edged up to $1.2m. Split twenty ways, that is $60,000 a team on average, about 17.6% less than before. Not a chart organisers enjoy. The event is growing wider, in other words, not richer.