TI13 Team Spirit profile: Time to Take Aim

Team Spirit are aiming this year for a three-peat on The International stage.

For the past few years at The International, we had favourites at the title and then we had Team Spirit. In many aspects, this is a team cut from a different cloth. Team Spirit took the world by surprise at TI10 in 2021 when they won their first Aegis. But as almost all title defenders, they were quite far from winning it back-to-back in 2022, which triggered a small roster change and they welcomed Denis "Larl" Sigitov in the mid lane. Larl made his TI debut in 2023 and lifted his first Aegis of Champions with the team. It was the second for his teammates and coming now into TI13, Team Spirit as a whole is once again on a defending the title mission.

Team Spirit roster

Illya “yatoro” Mulyarchuk
Denis “Larl” Sigitov
Magomed “Collapse” Khalilov
Miroslaw “Mira” Kolpakov
Yaroslav “Miposhka” Naidenov
coach: Silent.

_{photo courtesy of Valve}

Ups and downs

What we learned from the past two seasons of Team Spirit is that they do allow themselves to relax, reset, and start anew after each TI, even take a slow start we could add. They don’t seem to focus on dominating the season. More so, the first half of each year seems to be a slow adjustment to new metas and new season formats.

A “slow start” for Team Spirit means anything from top four to not qualifying for a tournament. This season, they skipped the first LAN after TI12 and started with two qualifier rounds for the next tournaments. Their first LAN appearance came with a top 6 finish at BetBoom Dacha Dubai, a tournament where they achieved a 21-0 series win streak.

“We just got a bit lazy. We thought that a low level preparation would be enough” Mira explained to us in an interview at DreamLeague Season 22, when we asked how the team stays motivated after winning two TIs. Through various interviews this year, the Team Spirit players talked about how their motivation never goes away, it’s just that they need a bit of time to turn on all the engines.

Team Spirit’s most successful hero pairings before TI13

It wasn’t until May that Team Spirit would claim their first trophy of the season, at PGL Wallachia Season 1. Heading into TI13, they are not the team with the most wins or most consistent results over the year. They hold just two championship titles and two runner-up finishes.

What makes Team Spirit special

Team Spirit is probably the team with the widest hero pool from the entire pro scene. They always have an interpretation of their own of any metas and will almost always find ways to make comebacks, even in games where 99% of their peers would lose.

They won TI10 with Yatoro playing a different hero in every single match during the playoffs stage. Courtesy of Yatoro, they are also the team with the most rampages in TI main events.

What we should expect from Team Spirit at The International 2024 is nothing less than to be razzle-dazzled once again. They reached the grand finals of the last two events before TI by playing the meta flavour heroes. But that was already more than two weeks ago and it shouldn’t come as a surprise if Team Spirit have already figured out a new 7.37c meta and come to TI13 with something as unusual as an Invoker carry or a mid lane Riki. Their flex potential is huge and so is their creative power, their determination and their capacity to focus when it matters the most.