Vatira will arrive in Fort Worth with two more trophies attached to his 2026 season. The Karmine Corp player won Season MVP and Defensive Player of the Year at the inaugural First Touch Rocket League Awards, leading a list that also recognized zen, Atow, Extra, nass, and jstn.
One clarification matters before the debate begins: these are First Touch media awards, presented on the program's first dedicated Rocket League awards show. They are not the official RLCS World Championship accolades, and they were awarded before Worlds. That does not make them meaningless. It tells us exactly what they measure: how the voting community viewed the season entering its final event.
The verified award list
- Season MVP: Vatira
- Offensive Player of the Year: zen
- Defensive Player of the Year: Vatira
- Coach of the Year: Extra
- Most Improved Player: nass
- Comeback Player of the Year: jstn.
- All-RLCS First Team: Vatira, zen, Atow
- All-RLCS Second Team: Firstkiller, nass, Oski
- All-RLCS Third Team: Nwpo, trk511, Kiileerrz
The first team is an especially tidy picture of the European season. Vatira and Atow represent Karmine Corp; zen represents Team Vitality. All three enter Worlds with a separate path to the trophy, and two of them — Atow and zen — will also play together as No Miss Just Fake in the inaugural 2v2 World Championship.
Why Vatira led the community vote
Karmine Corp built the strongest trophy case of the regular season. With Vatira, Atow, and juicy, KC won the Kick-Off Weekend, two European Regional Opens, and the Paris Major. Vatira was central to that consistency and left Paris with the Major MVP as well.
The combination of overall MVP and defensive honors fits the public case made for him all year. Vatira's value has never been limited to one line on the scoreboard. He can absorb pressure, turn a save into controlled possession, and still supply enough offense to make a defense respect him early. The First Touch vote rewards that total influence rather than treating “defensive” as a narrower consolation category.
It also sharpens the one unresolved part of his résumé. Vatira has won Majors and individual awards, but he has not won an RLCS World Championship. We made that the center of the GOAT debate earlier this season, and another media MVP does not close it. Fort Worth still can.
zen owns the offensive side
zen's Offensive Player of the Year award and First Team selection recognize a season in which his individual threat remained obvious even when Vitality did not collect the same major title haul as KC. Defenses have to account for his first touch, recovery, and ability to turn a small mechanical window into a shot before a normal rotation can settle.
That makes the First Team interesting rather than merely ceremonial. It places zen next to two KC players who will oppose him in 3v3, while Atow becomes his teammate in 2v2. The awards are looking backward at the season; Worlds immediately rearranges those relationships.
Extra, nass, and jstn. tell three different stories
Extra earned Coach of the Year in his first season on Karmine Corp's staff. Coaching awards are always difficult to evaluate from outside a team room, where preparation, communication, and adaptation are largely invisible. The public evidence is KC's result sheet: sustained European success, a Paris Major title, and a roster that remained in the championship conversation throughout the year.
nass won Most Improved Player after becoming one of the defining pieces of Gentle Mates' season. M8 won the Boston Major, and nass now heads to Fort Worth both as a 3v3 contender and as Europe's qualifier in the 1v1 World Championship. Improvement here does not mean he appeared from nowhere. It means his impact expanded until it could no longer be treated as a secondary storyline.
jstn.'s Comeback Player of the Year award belongs to a different arc. The former World Champion returned to the season's biggest stage with FUT Esports alongside Chronic and CHEESE. FUT had to win the North American Last Chance Qualifier to reach Fort Worth, making the honor less about nostalgia than a successful route back into meaningful RLCS competition.
A snapshot, not the final word
Giving out season awards before Worlds creates an obvious limitation. The most important tournament has not happened yet. A player can be the best across the season to date and still watch someone else produce the defining performance of September.
That is why the label matters. First Touch has given us a media snapshot of 2026 before the last chapter: Vatira as the complete player, zen as the offensive standard, Extra as the coach behind the most decorated team, nass as the climber, and jstn. as the return story. Worlds does not invalidate those choices. It gets the final right of reply.