The rumors weren’t bait. The contracts have expired, Falcons have released skiter, Malr1ne, ATF, Cr1t- and Sneyking, and the organization’s Dota 2 run is over. The official announcement came on September 6, closing an era that began in November 2023 and produced a packed trophy cabinet along with nearly three years of glorious, occasionally toxic chaos.
The green banners are coming down.
Table of Contents
From Expensive Experiment to Tournament Bullies
Falcons didn’t arrive quietly.
The original roster looked almost too obvious: two TI-winning veterans in skiter and Sneyking, one of the most experienced position fours in Dota history in Cr1t-, a mechanically outrageous young midlaner in Malr1ne, and ATF being… well, ATF. Add Aui_2000 behind them and enough organizational backing to build whatever support system they wanted.
Plenty of fans called it a bought superteam. Fair enough. Then the supposed experiment started flattening everybody.
BetBoom Dacha Dubai 2024 was the first warning. DreamLeague Season 22 followed, ending with a 3-0 grand-final dismantling of BetBoom Team. Then came ESL One Birmingham, where Falcons beat the same opponent 3-0 again, this time in front of a packed British arena. DreamLeague Season 23 went into the cabinet too. At one point, they put together a 20-series winning streak.
Not bad for a “money roster.”
Their Dota was mean. There’s no cleaner word for it. Falcons punished the first lazy support rotation, grabbed the next two areas of the map and somehow made a 2,000-gold lead feel like you were already trapped in the fountain. Malr1ne bullied lanes. Cr1t- turned small openings into full-scale disasters. Sneyking kept the map stitched together while skiter quietly became impossible to kill.
And ATF?
He gave the whole thing teeth.
His hero pool could be targeted, sure, but allowing one of his comfort picks often meant watching an offlaner take over the match while firing voice lines and all-chat messages at the opposition. Love them or hate them, Falcons understood that tier-1 Dota is entertainment. They weren’t content with winning. They wanted you tilted while they did it.
That swagger made them perfect villains. Every loss generated memes. Every win generated complaints about their drafts, their behavior, their money or their supposedly limited hero pools.
Yet they kept winning.
They reached The International 2024 in Copenhagen as one of the favorites and finished fourth—not a disaster, although it felt underwhelming by their standards. A year later, in Hamburg, they finished the job. Falcons beat Xtreme Gaming 3-2 in the TI 2025 grand final, lifting the Aegis after a proper five-game scrap rather than some forgettable deathball stomp.
That matters. Their era needed an Aegis.
It got one.
The Machine Finally Started Making Noise
Dominant teams rarely break because of one bad draft. The damage builds slowly: another airport, another bootcamp, another patch, another argument that gets “resolved” until it isn’t.
By 2026, Falcons no longer felt untouchable. They could still beat anyone, but opponents had learned how to drag them away from their favorite shapes. Ban the comfort initiators. Pressure Malr1ne differently. Refuse the early brawl when Falcons wanted it, then force one when their cooldowns or lanes weren’t ready.
The meta shifted too. Falcons were at their scariest when durable cores could occupy half the map, supports could play aggressively behind them and one won fight became ten minutes of suffocation. When the game demanded wider drafting, faster adaptation or cleaner execution from behind, cracks appeared.
Then there was the human part.
Three years of constant tier-1 competition is brutal. Riyadh, Dubai, Birmingham, Bucharest, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Shanghai—and that’s before counting online leagues, qualifiers, bootcamps and the glamorous esports tradition of spending twelve hours in an airport because somebody’s connection disappeared from the board.
Burn-out isn’t an excuse. It’s arithmetic.
From the outside, the internal relationships no longer looked quite as simple either. After the split, ATF acknowledged that there had been “so much bullshit” even between him and Malr1ne, despite the two being close. That doesn’t mean Falcons spent their final season throwing chairs at each other. It does suggest that the happy-family version of events would be too convenient.
Five elite competitors, all convinced they understand the game, can build something terrifying. Keep them together long enough and the same confidence can eventually create friction.
At TI 2026 in Shanghai, Falcons entered as defending champions but left in the lower bracket after a 2-1 defeat to Team Liquid, finishing in the top six. Cr1t- had already admitted that the tournament would probably be the roster’s last.
So the final loss wasn’t a jump scare. It was the last page turning.
Falcons Made MENA Impossible to Ignore
Here’s where the roster’s significance gets messy.
Falcons competed inside the Western European ecosystem, and most of the lineup came from established European or North American Dota backgrounds. This wasn’t a five-man Saudi development project suddenly conquering the world. Pretending otherwise would be silly.
Still, a Saudi organization built and backed the team, ATF became its most recognizable MENA star, and Falcons put the region’s name on tier-1 Dota broadcasts every month.
Before Falcons, MENA was too often discussed as a qualifier problem: Where did it belong? Did it deserve its own route? Was the player pool deep enough? Falcons changed the tone. Suddenly Riyadh and Dubai weren’t side stops on somebody else’s calendar. They were places where a locally backed organization could walk onto the stage as the favorite.
The team also created a strange but lively bridge between audiences. Fans in Riyadh claimed the roster as proof that the region belonged. Western European viewers treated Falcons as one of their weekly pub-born rivalries. In regional watch parties and Dota Discords, ATF gave MENA fans a player they could claim as their own, while EU viewers often treated Falcons as the scene’s natural villains.
Were Falcons a MENA team? A Western European superteam wearing Saudi colors? Both?
Honestly, the ambiguity was part of their pull.
Few rosters could unite an Arabic-language watch party and an EU West pub grinder—although usually for completely different reasons.
Where Do the Five Pieces Go Now?
Cr1t- is the least mysterious. After TI, he announced an indefinite break from competitive play rather than a formal retirement. At this stage of his career, that could mean six months away, a future coaching job or the quiet end of one of the best position-four careers the game has seen. Anyone confidently predicting which one is guessing.
Aui_2000 stepping away from competitive coaching removes another huge part of the Falcons system. He wasn’t decoration behind the players. His drafting, preparation and ability to manage strong personalities helped turn raw power into repeatable tournament Dota.
ATF won’t lack offers. Team Liquid have been linked with him following Ace’s departure, although nothing has been confirmed. The potential fit is both fascinating and slightly unhinged: an established structure taking on one of the scene’s loudest, most demanding offlaners.
Malr1ne is too talented to stay teamless for long. He has said that he plans to keep playing alongside ATF, although no new team has been officially announced. Their chemistry is real. So is the friction. Building another roster around both players would give the scene a ready-made superteam storyline before the first draft even begins.
Skiter remains the easiest carry to build a serious project around. He doesn’t need every draft bent toward his lane, and he understands how to survive ugly games without disappearing from them. He’s also a two-time TI champion. A new European superteam could start with him and work backward.
Sneyking is the wildcard. China and Southeast Asia have both appeared in the rumor mill, and a move east would be genuinely interesting. He brings drafting experience, leadership and an unusually flexible view of support Dota. He also brings a lot of mileage. A break wouldn’t shock anyone.
The Falcons tag may return one day. Organizations leave Dota and come back whenever the calendar, costs and available players make sense. But this exact five-man roster isn’t being patched up after a short cooldown.
It’s over.
Were Falcons the most dominant stack of the modern era, or did they peak too fast?
I’m Alex Mercer, a senior gaming and esports writer at GamingImba. I’ve been involved in gaming for as long as I can remember, and for more than a decade I’ve been writing about competitive play, industry trends, and the culture that grows around games.
My work focuses on esports, online gaming platforms, and how technology continues to shape the way people play, compete, and connect. I’m especially interested in meta shifts, balance changes, and the business decisions that influence modern games behind the scenes.
At GamingImba, I aim to break down complex topics in a way that’s clear, honest, and useful—whether that means analyzing a major tournament, exploring new gaming platforms, or looking at how player behavior evolves over time.
I follow global esports scenes closely, experiment with different games and mods in my free time, and enjoy digging into the details that most players notice but rarely stop to question.
