Spirit are the pick here, and the case is about as clean as it gets at a Major. They arrive at IEM Cologne 2026 on a perfect 10W-0L run, a stretch that includes a 3-0 Bo5 sweep of these exact Falcons, plus wins over G2, NaVi, MOUZ and Aurora, elite opposition throughout. That head-to-head result alone should settle the debate. The numbers reinforce it at every level. Spirit's player aggregate rating (1.48 vs 1.26), ADR (96.4 vs 80.4) and multi-kill rating (1.38 vs 1.12) are all substantially higher than Falcons', the largest gap across every metric of any match on today's slate. On the map pool, Spirit leads on the strongest shared surfaces: Dust2 at an 82% win rate and Ancient at 87.5%. Falcons have no comparable depth on either. The one exploitable angle, Spirit's 33% Overpass record, is a single ban in a veto Falcons can't leverage beyond that. Falcons' match winrate of 60.6% and round winrate of 52.1% trail Spirit's 66.1% and 55.8% meaningfully over the same sample depth. The contrarian point worth making: the market prices Spirit at roughly a 57.8% chance. Our data, the direct Bo5 sweep, the enormous stat gaps, the dominant map pool, puts that closer to 63%. That delta is why we're on Spirit at Duel at 1.80. Top-4 LAN Major preparation is full on both sides, so this isn't a motivation or travel story. The gap is real and it's showing up in the data.