Overwatch League finals: London Spitfire are Overwatch champions – How did they win?

London Spitfire is the Overwatch League champions after beating Philadelphia Fusion this weekend. 

Spitfire marched to a resounding victory over Fusion, smashing them 3-1, 3-0 across two series. 

The British team – owned by successful e-sports team Cloud9 – is made up entirely of South-Korean players and completely dominated the competition. 

They are now the very first champions in Blizzard’s fantasy game Overwatch, breaking new ground to bring in a wave of successful e-sports franchises. 

The Overwatch League Grand Finals played out in front of 20,000 fans at the Barclays Centre in Brooklyn, New York, with more than 300,000 watching live via Twitch. 

The Grand Final was also the first e-sports tournament games to be broadcast live on ESPN and Disney XD, as Blizzard attempts to normalise e-sports with regular sports fans. 

Spitfire will be bringing home $1 million in prize money as well as a giant trophy to their London fans this October, but how did they claim the win? 

How did London Spitfire beat Philadelphia Fusion? 

The Overwatch League has been a long an arduous journey for these young teams, starting 20 weeks ago during the League pre-season – a series of games Philadelphia Fusion did not participate in. 

Competing against 12 other teams, Spitfire and Fusion battled through weekly games to place first in their respective divisions – Atlantic and Pacific – to reach the Grand Finals in New York. 

Fusion entered the finals as the plucky underdogs but soon took an early lead by winning the first map on the Mexican Dorado map. 

Blasting through the early stages of the map, Fusion held Spitfire on the last checkpoint to claim a quick victory to settle the nerves.

However, Fusion would go on to lose every single map throughout the rest of the Grand Finals to see Spitfire march home to victory. 

The Overwatch League Grand Finals were broken down into three separate series. 

Each series featured five maps, with the winner of each series beating their opponents in a best-of-five format. 

The first team to win two series would become the first champions of the Overwatch League. 

Spitfire seemed to settle their nerves in map 2 on Oasis, dominating map territory and showing off their impressive skill to convincingly win the next two maps and claim the first series victory. 

Fans were drawn to the incredibly high skill cap during the final map in series 1, on the ice-cold Russian map Volskaya Industries. 

The clock was ticking and Fusion only needed to hold out for 30 more seconds to claim victory and take Spitfire to a tie-breaker map 5. 

However, MVP (Most Valuable Player) award winner, Jun-Young “Profit” Park, had other ideas. 

Famous for his incredible reflex and skill on DPS (damage-per-second) heroes, Profit singlehandedly tore Fusion to pieces to claim victory. 

Picking up the slippery Tracer – a British-born character who is capable of rewinding time and quickly slipping between enemy lines using her fast movement abilities, Profit worked his way through Fusion, killing his enemies one by one until his team won the map. 

The skill on show was made all the more impressive when it was revealed by the Overwatch League casters that Profit had only practiced on Tracer for 10 minutes across his last five matches. 

Series two was much the same, with Spitfire making early, aggressive plays to disrupt the enemy. 

Fusion looked to take the London street map of Kings Row, but some incredible play from tank-duo Jae-Huo “Gesture” Hong and Jun-Ho “Fury” Kim, saw the Spitfire outsmart the opponents to win the tournament. 

In a post-match conference, team owner and Cloud9 CEO Jack Etienne said he was incredibly proud of the players he had selected for the Spitfire. 

Mr Etienne said: “We want to thank the London fans for staying up so late in the evening throughout the season to support and cheer us on. We have plans to come and see you guys sometime in October and we can’t wait to meet you all.”