IEM Cologne 2025: Full Breakdown of Format, Matches, Teams & Favorites

IEM Cologne 2025 is an S-tier event with a total prize pool of $1.25 million, where $1 million is the player share and $250.000 goes for the club share. The event will be held in Cologne, Germany, from July 23 to August 3 and will consist of two stages with 36 teams attending. After the summer break, this will be the first tournament with all the best teams attending, including the unstoppable team Vitality, winners of the recent BLAST.tv Austin Major. 

Tournament Format

Stage 1 Play-In (July 23 – July 25)

• Double-Elimination bracket
• All matches are Bo3
• The top eight teams advance to the Group Stage

Group Stage (July 26 – July 29)

• Two double-elimination format (GSL) Groups
• Each group has eight teams
• All matches are Bo3
• The top three teams from each group advance to the Playoffs
• Group stage winners advance to the Semifinals
• Group stage runners-up advance to the Quarterfinals as the High Seeds
• Group stage 3rd place teams advance to the Quarterfinals as the Low Seeds

Playoff Stage (August 1 – August 3)

• Single-Elimination bracket
• The Quarterfinals & Semifinals are Bo3
• The Grand Final is Bo5

Teams

Stage 1 Teams

Main Stage Teams

Favorites and Underdogs

Top Contenders

• Vitality
• Falcons
• MOUZ
• Spirit

The main favorite out of the four is obviously Vitality since they’re the best team in the world and have won seven trophies in a row. Spirit, Falcons, and MOUZ were the main teams that got the closest score while playing against Vitality. 

Team Spirit is the only team that made roster changes after BLAST.tv Austin Major, bringing ‘zweih’ from team Nemiga and benching their support player ‘magixx’.

Learn more about Spirit's recent roster change.

Dark Horses

• Natus Vincere
• FaZe
• paiN
• FURIA
• G2
• TheMongolZ
• Virtus.pro

We would call these teams dark horses at this tournament, considering their past and recent results. TheMongolZ were fighting in the Grand Final of BLAST Austin Major against Vitality. Natus Vincere was the top contender for more than a year, and they went through changes during the summer break, swapping ‘jL’ for a player from their academy team, ‘makazze’. paiN and FURIA showed us a good performance at Austin Major.

Virtus.pro did great at BLAST Major as well. Since then, they benched ‘FL4MUS’, who was struggling with his performance, and brought back ‘Perfecto’, who is a much more experienced player. 

G2 and FaZe also have new players in their teams. G2 changed their in-game leader ‘Snax’ to ‘huNter-’ while also benching ‘Snax’ and bringing in the firepower in young star ‘MATYS’, who was showing promising results for Fnatic before. FaZe couldn’t sign s1mple, so they brought back ‘broky’, and they’re in their original roster. Some time ago, they were also one of the top contenders.

Read about broky returning to FaZe.

Underdogs

The rest of the teams, considering their results for the first half of the year, are basically underdogs when it comes to playing the biggest tournaments like this one, which has all the elite-level teams attending it. Teams like HEROIC, Astralis, 3DMAX, and GamerLegion had some success recently against top teams, but they’re yet to show their consistency. 

Opening Matches Schedule

July 23

• GamerLegion vs. Complexity and TYLOO vs. Virtus.pro starting at 10:30 CET
• Astralis vs. B8 and FlyQuest vs. FURIA starting at 13:00 CET
• FaZe vs. BIG and 3DMAX vs. MIBR starting at 15:30 CET
• Liquid vs. paiN and Ninjas in Pyjamas vs. HEROIC starting at 18:00 CET

How to Watch

You can watch all the matches live on these IEM Official platforms: 

• IEM Cologne 2025 Official Twitch Primary Stream
• IEM Cologne 2025 Official YouTube Stream
• IEM Cologne 2025 Official Twitch Secondary Stream

In Stage 1 and Group Stage of Stage 2, two streams will cover matches happening simultaneously. The playoffs (from August 1 to August 3) will be one stream, as one match will be played at a time.

Keep up with our coverage for more insights on the latest esports news and updates.