The winners of the League of Legends World Championship, FunPlus Phoenix, are not just good at gaming: their bot laner Lin "Lwx" Wei-Xiang is also world champion of burns. Their opponent G2 Esports, who they defeated 3-0, was considered a favorite, yet FunPlus Phoenix still took the trophy home. When asked why they think they're better than their opponents, Lwx simply replied, "Today, I don't think it's because we performed especially well. It's because our opponents didn't really perform."
During the post-match interview, Lwx delivered his savage retort with a deadpan expression, to the delight of the audience. The bot laner has every reason to be self-confident: his K/D/A in the three finals games was 21/0/14, making him the first player in the history of the competition to not die at all during the finals. Although the European team's unconventional play style was expected to help them bring the prize to the old continent for the first time since 2011, they could not hold out against the Chinese-Korean team's speed.
A big factor of FPX's victory, which returns the cup to China for the second year in a row, was their jungler Gao "Tian" Tian-Liang. His constant dominance that rendered G2's jungler Marcin "Jankos" Jankowski near useless not only won them the championship, but also earned him the title of MVP. It is therefore no surprise that G2 "didn't really perform" in the words of Lwx, since they could hardly do anything until the third game, when they showed a spark of life that was quickly stomped out by FPX's superior play style. And not to undersell the skill of G2: in the semi-finals, they had taken out fan-favorite SK Telecom T1, as FPX eliminated Invictus Gaming, the 2018 champion. Interestingly, at the beginning of the competition, neither of the two finalists was considered good enough to make it this far.
None of the FunPlus Phoenix players have won a world championship before. In the interview, the team's mid laner Doinb and Lwx talk about how much it means to them to be able to prove themselves, especially in light of being told that their playing style "did not deserve to win the championship." Doinb also revealed that before this, he was contemplating retirement. It was his wife Umi who talked him into giving it one more year – and he said he wanted to take her to Paris. "I couldn't have done it without you," he told her from the stage, to many cheers from the audience.
Next year's World Championship will be held in Shanghai on the Shanghai Stadium, the venue that hosted the Opening Ceremony of the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games, as well as the Supercoppa Italiana Final between Juventus and Lazio in 2015. The event has already been held in China back in 2017 in Beijing.