PARIS: After an intense nine-day tournament, S2G Esports stood the tallest among the 32 teams competing and won the PUBG Mobile World Cup at the Esports World Cup 2026.
After qualifying for the tournament as Turkiye’s third seed, S2G fought their way through the group stage and grand finals to emerge the victors on Sunday, taking down both former EWC champions.
Last year’s winners, Yangon Galacticos, were eliminated during the Survival Stage alongside the 2024 winners in Alpha7 Esports, paving the way for a brand new champion at this year’s competition.
The grand finals took place across three days, with Sunday being the last chance for teams to rack up the points and finish atop the standings. With a prize pool of over $3 million on the line, every point was crucial to the final standings.
S2G locked in their place in the grand final after finishing fifth in their group during the group stage, just narrowly advancing to the grand final and missing having to go through the Survival Stage by a mere two points.
In the second half of the group stage, S2G secured three separate second-place finishes to meet the threshold needed to go straight to the grand final.
On the first day of the final, S2G were inconsistent across their first four games, securing 19 points with a victory in game two, but only tallying a combined six points in the other three games.
The second day saw S2G start to rise up the standings, winning two more games and securing five top-three placements in total.
On the third and final day, S2G Esports were the third team to hit match point eligibility, doing so in game 15. Though the team came close to securing the trophy with a victory, they were only able to do so in the final game.
Four teams stood at match point in the final game: Nongshim Esports, eArena, Aurora Gaming, and S2G Esports.
With no more games left to play, S2G would either need to secure one more Winner Winner Chicken Dinner, or hold onto their points lead and hope no match point eligible teams passed them.
While they were eliminated early in the final game, no one passed their 154 points mark. Tianba secured a final game victory to give them the trophy.
While Faruk “HamsiG” Hamsici is no stranger to winning a top prize in PUBG Mobile, having won the 2022 Global Championship with a different S2G roster, for players Erman “Kamikaze” Topal and Berkay “Lost” Yilmaz, their EWC win marks their first trophy.
Speaking on how the final game played out, Alp “Solkay” Ayyildiz said: “Of course we felt bad once we died, as we knew our biggest rivals were still alive.
“We also doubted it, but then as we saw our rivals slowly getting eliminated, we started getting hopeful. It’s HamsiG’s second championship, but our very first.”
When asked how the team members feels following the win, Hamsici said: “All focus all the time. We did it, we are champions, we are so happy now!”
For both their first-place finish in the grand final, and their placement in the group stage, S2G Esports take home a total of $555,000.
Meanwhile, Tianba’s Zhang “Qzz” Qingbo was named the tournament SONY MVP, racking up 35 eliminations and 32 knockdowns, earning $25,000 in the process.
This marks the second MVP award in a row that he has won in PUBG Mobile Global tournaments, following the PUBG Mobile Macao Invitational just last month; while Tianba finished fifth overall.
