Miposhka’s break makes room for Panto on Team Spirit

Team Spirit changes up their roster as Yaroslav "Miposhka" Naidenov takes a break and Nikita "panto" Balaganin enters.

With a victory at the Esports World Cup 2025, Team Spirit had high hopes for The International 2025. Unfortunately, their disastrous tournament will be something that the team want to forget. While unexpected, the post-TI roster shuffle comes for all, with the team making a small but significant change heading into the closing months of the year.

Panto primed in Miposhka’s absence

On October 8th, Aurora Gaming confirmed that Nikita "panto" Balaganin would be moving off the active roster. Just one day later, and Team Sprit took to their social media accounts to announce their latest addition, as panto gears up to be their new position 5 support player. Having gained a wealth of experience alongside Aurora, panto now looks to put it into practice with Spirit.

Unfortunately, this move comes with a price, as Spirit also announced that Yaroslav "Miposhka" Naidenov would be taking a break from competitive Dota 2. In their post, they stated that he has, “decided to put his career on a pause”. While he joins the reserves for Spirit for the time being, we could still see Miposhka pop up on another team in the coming days.

While there is no further information on this at the current time of writing, after two TI victories and a ton of other wins with Spirit, Miposhka is likely to remain a part of the team.

The full new Team Spirit roster is:

• Illya “Yatoro” Mulyarchuk
• Denis "Larl" Sigitov
• Magomed "Collapse" Khalilov
• Aleksandr "rue" Filin
• Nikita "panto" Balaganin

The team will kick things off with their new roster in just a few days at BLAST Slam IV. But, with the culminating months of 2025 offering us a plethora of Dota 2 tournaments, including PGL Wallachia Season 6 and DreamLeague Season 27, there will be many chances for Spirit to show what their new addition can do.