Team Spirit manager extremely dissatisfied with The International 2025 invites

Dmitry “Korb3n” Belov, manager of Team Spirit, called the distribution of invites to The International 2025 strange and considers it unfair to invite Gaimin Gladiators, given the team's lack of achievements this year.

He shared his frank assessment of Valve's decision during a stream on Twitch:

“Frankly, well what can I say - strained. Let's see: there's an invite from Gaimin Gladiators. I'm pumped to see GG's results this year. That just devalues the invites. Seriously, these are the results at The International? These are the results when you didn't qualify for half the tournaments? I'm sorry, but this is a very strange decision. I have nothing against Gaimin Gladiators, but this is a very strange decision, incomprehensible to me personally”

Korb3n emphasized that he has no negative feelings towards GG as a team, but he thinks it's illogical to give them a slot because they haven't made it to half of the major tournaments and can't boast of success on the pro scene in 2025. The manager believes that with this decision Valve devalued the Dota 2 World Championship invites:

“They would have been better off just doing some legendary invites, beat that somehow. They'd have a lottery, yeah, a free invite for the teams that are playing. Okay, that's Valve's business - they wanted to invite them. But this way - they gave out eight invites, and gave two more slots to Western Europe, and cut off South America and one to Eastern Europe... Yeah, invites - ****. That's all I can say - absolutely stupid and illogical”

According to him, even a random draw would have looked fairer. Korb3n is sure that this year Valve made an extremely controversial and inexplicable by logic decision.

Recall that earlier Valve announced the list of the first eight teams that received direct invitations to The International 2025.