The Valorant Champions Tour (VCT) is a global competitive esports tournament series for the video game Valorant organised by Riot Games, the game's developers. The series runs multiple events throughout each season, culminating in Valorant Champions, the top-level event of the tour. The VCT was announced in 2020, with its inaugural season taking place in 2021.

In November 2020, Riot Games announced the first Valorant Champions Tour, a tournament series divided into three tiers: Challengers, Masters, and Champions. Challengers would act as the lowest tier, split into seven regions: North America, Brazil, Latin America (Hispanic America), EMEA, Southeast Asia (which later included South Asia and Oceania, becoming the Asia-Pacific region), Korea, Japan. Teams that advance past Challengers would move on to Masters, where teams would not be divided by regions anymore, and the top 16 teams from Masters would move on to Champions, the final tournament of VCT. In February 2021, they announced the VCT Game Changers, a supplementary tournament initiative for women and marginalized genders.

Riot hired esports infrastructure company Nerd Street Gamers as operators and producers for all North American Challengers and Masters events. They also hired several third-party companies to broadcast their events, such as Liga de Videojuegos Profesional (LVP) for their Spanish-language broadcasts and LetsPlay.Live for their Oceania broadcasts. The 2021 Champions tournament took place on December 1–12 at the Verti Music Hall in Berlin, Germany, concluding with team Acend defeating Gambit Esports in the grand finals by a score of 3–2.

Over 10,000 teams competed in the VCT in 2021. Outside of Champions, VCT saw its highest viewership at the Reykjavík Masters tournament in May, with a peak viewership of 1,085,850. The Champions grand finals match in December reached a peak viewership of 1,089,068, making it the VCT's highest peak viewership.

Riot made several changes to the format of VCT for its second iteration. While the overall structure of Challengers, Masters, and Champions remained unchanged, it reduced the number of stages of Challengers and Masters events from three to two. VCT Challengers began on February 11, 2022. The 2022 Champions Tournament took place from September 1 to 18 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Riot Games announced a new format starting in 2023. The season will be split into three international regions – Americas, EMEA, and Pacific instead of the 7 regions format used in previous years. Each international region will have its own International League that replaces the Challengers to become the domestic competitions to qualify for Masters and Champions. On September 21, 2022, Riot Games announced the thirty teams that had been selected as part of their new partnership format.

For China, Riot Games showed favor towards players here by giving Chinese teams a number of direct slots to participate in global tournaments (Masters and Champions) through third parties competitions in Hong Kong server, instead of having to play through Pacific league. In a June 2023 press conference, Riot COO Whalen Rozelle confirmed that Valorant would launch in China in July under the name 无畏契约 (lit. 'Fearless Contract'), with hopes to launch a VCT league there in 2024. Shortly after in August, Riot announced an own regional league for China, and raising the number of partnered teams to 40.

As of 2023, 30 teams are selected to be partner teams in International Leagues for five years (to 2027) with 10 teams per region. Non-partner teams compete in many sub-regions of Challengers events to qualify for "Ascension" events. The Ascension events in 2023 and 2024 had one winner per region, which earned them a temporary (initially two-year) promotion into their regions' International League. The promoted teams have a chance to qualify for the global tournaments (Masters and Champions), as well as get benefits provided to other partnered teams. Through the Challengers promotion system, the four International Leagues expanded by one team each, until they reached a cap of 12 teams in each region in 2025 (beforehand this was supposed to be a 14-team cap by 2027). From 2025, the two temporary teams per International League can stay up via qualifying for Champions, compete in Ascension to stay in the league if they finished 5th to 8th, or get relegated back to their Challengers region if finishing 9th to 12th; only one of the guest teams per region can stay up via Champions, with the best performer of the two guests taking the spot if both qualify.