For the first time since its inception the Valve Ranking System (VRS) delivered an exciting climax to the season. Top teams that tried to be cute by skipping some events watched with growing anxiety as their smaller counterparts went to less prestigious but VRS approved events to harvest points and climb in the rankings. That brought eyeballs and sponsors to these competitions and for a moment it looked like we had a functional habitat. Sadly, in the upper echelons of esports there is a breed of management that feel so self-entitled they believe the scene should bend to make them immune to the consequences of their own incompetence.

As someone that had openly called for something like the VRS for years, having worked in two other esports that had a unifying tournament structure between major events, it was great to see the upside. It was the first time in years that large community hubs such as HLTV and Reddit had spoken about smaller, grass-roots LAN events with any interest. Finally, they were connected to their much larger cousins over in the world of S-tier. Inexperienced players had a chance to put themselves in the spotlight and maybe earn a call-up to bigger teams desperate to min/max their way to a profit. Fans finally had something to focus on that felt like a “race,” a reason to cheer every game no matter how insignificant it seemed. All of this, especially as it happened with a bitter tournament organiser war in the background, should be something for all CS fans to celebrate.

Of course, a great thing has to be exploited by the same bad actors that have tried to turn Counter-Strike - a game many of them have only ever taken from - into the means through which to fund their failing businesses. After all, these are the minds that brought us the Overwatch League, League of Legends franchising, Call of Duty buy-ins, the franchise era of CS:GO and the sale of 25 years of hard work by others to the Saudi Arabian state. We never purged these people for their transgressions and as such they are free to once again take something good and pervert it to suit only themselves.

This has manifested in the end of the VRS season seeing an unprecedented disregard for rules, one of the most embarrassingly transparent roster moves ever made and the most open acts of corruption since Akuma genuinely thought they’d convinced the world they were the best team in the CIS RMR over prime Na’Vi and Covid-era Gambit.

FAZE Down

Going through them in order means we have to start with FaZe. A string of embarrassing performances that saw the finalists of the previous major lose to Pain, Astralis, Aurora and TyLoo - prompting low finishes at both ESL Pro League and BLAST Rotterdam - meant they had to seek VRS points before the cut-off wherever they could be found. Piling on the commitments, they attended DracuLAN. What should have been easy pickings proved anything but as they lost to Passion.UA and fnatic to crash out of a competition that roster could have won with its eyes closed a year ago. Everyone thought that was the end but it turns out another event in Belgrade, HLC Pro 2026, would provide them with just enough points if they could win it and other results went their way.

The problem? Well, they’d not planned on attending and had already agreed to attend PGL Bucharest, having assumed the matter of their major qualification would be done and dusted by that point. They hadn’t foreseen a need to attend HLC Pro 2026 and might not even had known it existed when they made their agreement. Now it was the smaller event, not the one that literally paid the organisation to attend as part of its partnership agreement, that was the priority. With no time to replace them they told PGL they intended to attend both simultaneously, forfeiting their first two competitive series and Bucharest with the view to flying from Belgrade to come and play the third and continue from there as if nothing happened.

Some have suggested FAZE'S decision was not only a victimless crime but also absolutely necessary from an organisational perspective. That is of course ridiculously selfish nonsense, the type of shortsightedness that is the superpower of the new modern org owner. The assertion that it affects no-one else is absurd on its face. Their overlapping attendance denies an opportunity to another, most likely smaller team to attend an event with significant prize money. It also perverts the tournament trajectory, granting free wins to the teams fortunate enough to draw them in the seeding. The forfeit will still count towards VRS ranking, so two teams will go out 0-3 by virtue of not having faced a row of empty seats. Finally, and in many ways the most important part of this, is it shows a complete disregard for the ecosystem that allows them to earn outside of the bi-major arc. PGL have sponsors and peak viewership will always be an esports metric, as is the now mostly preferred “hours viewed.” Faze are a big draw so this absence harms the former, and anyone skipping a game reduces the latter by definition. These are the "partners" demanding tournament organisers take 50% of money meant for players and hand it over to them as an unspoken "appearance fee" per event. There isn’t a pocket they won’t steal from provided that at the end of the day theirs is full.

The FaZe situation is a uniquely ugly one given the organisation’s history with Counter-Strike. As a historic Call of Duty organisation, the only reason their eye was mostly caught not by the game but by the incredible monetisation possibilities brought about by the skins economy. Once they realised that they could use Valve’s own API to create a skins casino and then, according to themselves, bribe an official in Antigua to obtain the “correct” licensing for it, their desire to be in CS was as high as it ever was. These days, when everyone is wise to the scams and Valve sent out a flurry of cease and desist letters, FaZe don’t even buy players for their CS roster. Hell, they don’t even haggle with the ones they have, letting world class talent leave for nothing rather than increase their salary. By all accounts the team is mostly run independently of the entertainment organisation FaZe claims to be, although that itself seems to be a busted brand undergoing a death so long and drawn out even the emperor from Warhammer 40k would be inclined to say “just switch it the fuck off, yeah.”

Of late though, the players have continually pointed to some shadowy figure that is making decisions about them again. Cutting a player? It wasn’t their decision. Removing a coach right before a run of competitions that they themselves framed as the most important in the organisation’s history? That wasn’t any of them either. Who was it? They don’t seem to know and I guess that means none of us will either until one of the players spills all the beans on the podcast circuit when they are free from any NDA induced consequences.

Does that offer any excuse for not attending a LAN event you had pledged to? No, absolutely not. Through that lens the desperate attempt to get to the Cologne Major doesn’t read like “one last shot at glory” but more “one last shot at payday” before everyone goes their separate ways into unsure futures. Everyone knows this line-up is done. If the only punishment for doing this does indeed go on to be a theoretically non-existent core taking penalties around attendance of the Major in Singapore, then that will not be sufficient at all and it would be in Valve’s best interests to tack on the penalties to whichever teams they are likely to join. If you recognise this might give pause for thought when another organisation weighs up signing them then congratulations, you’re getting the point. Simply put, the precedent this decision sets is atrocious and as it was done in service of Valve’s system, it is contingent on Valve to ensure a suitable punishment is dispensed.

Liquid Assets

Team Liquid were another organisation that cynically abused the VRS system to try and secure the sticker money payout. They decided, part way through the season, they were a North American team again and agreed to a ludicrous roster move to ensure it. Doing quick, greasy business with a friendly org to send a superior player in one direction, for a player who had the right nationality coming in the other at least differs from their usual transfer policy of weakening the team unintentionally. Still, it’s true to the letter of the law, so why would anyone get bent out of shape about it? If they want to be kings of the NA scene again? Isn’t that a good thing? I mean, sure, if you think it’s good when he parties that reduce a space to rubble then get to return, rebuild and profit from it at the expense of the people who had never left. Generally speaking social media indicates that most people disapprove of this but hey, it was only people’s livelihoods and not lives in this metaphor.

Just to clarify for the confused, Team Liquid actively participated in negotiations that contributed to wiping out a North American based league in the form of Flashpoint and then also signed an agreement with ESL that effectively took earned league slots from two smaller US so they could be sold to bigger orgs. They have certainly played their part in the cascading chain of events that have led to North America being a largely dead region in competitive Counter-Strike terms. How nice it must be to come back and be the big fish in the small pond you helped drain.

Even then, their claim to being an “American” team at this point is largely spurious, even if we were to extend it to the meaning of the Badbunny half-time show. They’ve been an international line-up since 2023. Their offices are in Rotterdam. Their coach is Hungarian. One imagines their fanbase today is drastically different to the one they had in 2019, when they won an Intel Grand Slam in 63 days which is remarkable in that it is the single longest period of time a North American team could keep its shit together. How many fans from that period remain today after close to seven years to terrible general management and iterations that had nothing to do with the continent that they now claim to be proud to represent?

Team Liquid management will tell you that such a move is necessary because sticker money is a necessary return of investment to keep their team running. Let's quickly assess that claim based on other business decisions they’ve made. They wasted no time in climbing into bed with the Saudi Arabian state, not only taking their annual World Cup Club stipend but also making sure they hit every promotional "stretch goal" to ensure the maximum return from such a partnership. They enjoyed years of payments from the franchise system that turned that last years of competitive CS:GO into a bore and were the loudest voices in pushing for a system of appearance fees in the CS2 era that has lifted 50% of most prize money directly from their players pockets.

Despite their seemingly being no payment scheme they won’t be a part of - they balance being bought by Saudi with promoting Unicef - they continue to make layoffs , just never the people that have wasted money on terrible transfers and staffing decisions around their Counter-Strike team. Team Liquid is after all bigger on accountants than they are accountability. A reminder, they were partially in this mess to begin with because they decided to not attend the PGL Cluj event at the start of the year for reasons that have nothing to do with fealty to anyone.

Unlike FaZe, their moves paid off. Not only did they switch region, a luxury FaZe couldn’t muster, but they too attended a series of smaller LANs in a bid to earn as many points as they could before the cut off. Embarrassing losses against Famalicão, Gaimin Gladiators, OG, Alliance, M80 and Sashi are now permanent stains on their copybook but they managed to slither over the finish line and take the last Americas spot courtesy of the two teams that could have eliminated them both failing to win the Urban Riga Open Season 4. Enjoy the sticker money I guess.

Forget It, Jake.

If you felt like the official stories for the those aforementioned incidents insulted your intelligence then buckle up for the latest from Asian Counter-Strike. Have you ever heard of a team winning a LAN without having to play a single playoff game? Well that’s what happened to Lynn Vision in the Yuqilin Pinnacle of Battle Season 3 event.

First things first… When it comes to understanding the Chinese scene there are a few rules outsiders should know. Listing all of them would upset most people but the one that is relevant to this case is that there is no grievance that cannot be put away in favour of national pride. At this time there was a sentiment brewing among Chinese fans that the Australian teams were themselves not playing fair as they had only competed in local LANS comprised of other Australian teams. Chinese and Mongolian teams had been out there in the world competing internationally to earn their points and this was seen as simultaneously more noble but also an unfair expectation place upon their scene. To frame it as a question, the average Asian fan was asking “why are our slots valued as equal in a region when Australian teams aren’t doing the same to earn them.” And look, this is a valid concern. Maybe we need to look at the composition of the region for VRS purposes because it is hard for any except the largest Australian teams to get out and play internationally.

So with all of that context in mind, wouldn't you know it, in an incredible set of "coincidences" the only Chinese team that could leapfrog an Australian one - Lynn Vision - was granted a series of forfeits from teams whose positions were either not relevant or unassailable. The first came against Rare Atom, supposedly late for a playoff game despite their being no valid reason for them to be late. Even though the penalty was just the first map the team apparently decided to not play the match at all in protest. Next came a forfeit from TyLoo who were also competing at another event and thus cited a scheduling conflict. This pushed Lynn Vision into the grand final where they would also be due to play TyLoo again. Their opponents were now in an unassailable position and could receive no benefit from participating in the best of five final and so it came to pass that just a few rounds in the first map they withdrew on medical grounds after two players complained of feeling unwell. Lynn Vision were crowned champions having forfeited their way through the playoffs, earning 161 VRS points, $6000 and jumping above the Australian teams Flyquest and THUNDER dOWNUNDER to secure third. Lynn Vision say they are the "the lucky guy that benefited most" from a strange series of events.

They also say you're entitled to be suspicious, which of course you should be. Just to remind everyone last year saw Lynn Vision forfeited their match against Rare Atom to help have more Chinese representation at the Shanghai Major.

It is fairly obvious what occurred here but like a lot of things that occur in Chinese esports we're not going to be talking about it. Too big a market to risk offending with any interpretation of actions as an insult resulting in coordinated action from fans. We'll just have to overhaul the rules again, same as we do each time people look to abuse a loophole. Good luck with the forfeit rule though... My mind has already fast-forwarded to a future where a team forfeits a match to somehow deny their opponents the points they need to qualify out of nothing more than hilarious spite.

Absentee Landlordism

It’s clear that with the creation of VRS Valve were looking to create a sustainable competitive framework that would mean LAN events had to maintain an appreciable standard for attendees while also finding a unifying quality between all events on the calendar. Crucially, they wanted to create that and walk away from it so they can go back to the mad scientist laboratory that is Valve’s offices and not have to preoccupy themselves with the comparatively boring day to day of esports. Unfortunately, since as they have never come down on the people that continually run schemes, scams and every other dirty trick to monopolise CS for profit, this type of shit is going to keep happening. Valve, as IP holders, are the only entity with any true authority to stop this and until they do they’re going to have to keep listening to the righteous complaints from the affected.

Ahead of Cologne they need to issue some clear and concise updates to the rules that achieve the following:

1. Each FaZe player must carry a significant VRS penalty no matter where they end up. Normalising double-booking and forfeits harms the scene in ways that will always favour the bigger organisations otherwise.

2. The act of region swapping has to come with significant penalties if performed while a season is underway.

3. Penalties have to be issued against forfeiting teams. Given the number of contingencies, including substitute players, support staff, flexibility with schedule from tournament organisers, failing to meet a competitive obligation should only occur in the most extreme of circumstances.

These would shore up a system that has already proven this year that it is capable of delivering excitement, narrative cohesion and economic bolstering of the CS ecosystem when it is engaged with in good faith. Let’s also make sure those who would look to push “good faith” beyond the boundaries of believability are punished accordingly.

Disclousre: The author works freelance for one of the organisations mentioned in this post, namely PGL.

Like many of you I just got done watching ESL’s inaugural Krakow event, the long-term replacement for the storied but impractical Katowice. Well, it was a great event notable for a few things, one of which was Counterstrike getting it’s Tony Romo moment… Kind of.

Justinas “jL” Lekavičius was their special guest desk analyst and on paper it sounds like an excellent choice. He’s a semi-retired, former Major winner and MVP that is currently gaining in popularity due to his streaming and vlogging while he’s on hiatus from competitive play. He also isn’t shy, having co-opted the Ronaldo “SUIIIII” celebration as his own during a year where his incredible clutch-play made you believe it might be valid to make such a comparison.

Why then did it go so wrong? And let me qualify that first by pointing out what did… A delivery stiffer than Goldberg, sometimes not even making it to the end of sentences, trite observations that didn’t tap into his experience as pro or even his own relationship with players. By the end, with Reddit and X.com making their criticism known, it sounded like he resorted to reading scripts off a paper with the same cadence as first-gen AI. On the final day he wasn’t included in the show, something I’m sure was always the plan but felt more conspicuous based on what had gone before.

Now I’m not here to twist the knife on Mr. Lekavičius, nor do I think any of this is his fault. Desk work is hard, a lot harder than people would think and it certainly isn’t for everyone. Understanding the game is the tiniest part of it and for most ex-pro players that makes up the largest part of their suitability for the job, as it should. As in all sports only a handful of ex-pros actually meet the standard to be a full-time broadcaster once they retire.

I have no idea if it’s something Justinas wants to do again, although I’d wager probably not. Trust me, I know what it’s like to have what feels like an entire fanbase shitting on you for doing a bad job. If it is there might be something of use in here but really this is more aimed at the CS fans who never seem to understand how good they have it at any given moment until it has faded into the rearview of nostalgia.

Just to speak to my credibility on this topic, I’ve done my fair share of talent selection and hiring. At ELEAGUE while we were waiting for visas to process, we needed an American who could come on the show and play the role of the confident, brash, know-it-all. Many names were suggested but I didn’t hesitate on staking my reputation on my old friend Mohamad “mOE” Assad to do the job. He’d never been on television before, was considered to be controversial and I was told in no uncertain terms if it didn’t work out, I’d have to take the blame. He crushed it and gave us what might be the best moment of the first season. Fans wanted us to keep him on permanently, but the reality was he just made more money streaming.

After ELEAGUE I worked as a Director of Talent for an esports startup called WOE. Mostly forgotten these days, I’m still proud of the work the team did over there and we did unearth some gems. I watched a lot of reels back then and we hired people from community gems like Moustache Dave, or polished media workers like Lauren Jbara who now works at TNT Sports. The product we put out was always better than the viewership it got but that’s just how it is sometimes.

Hopefully none of that comes across as braggadocious but I do believe I have a good eye for these things and I have to say I was kind of surprised when the announcement was made. More than anything else there’s a unique type of charisma you require for desk work. It’s hard to describe. You know the difference between being funny round a table with your friends or being a professional stand-up comedian? It’s like that. To the point, I’d never seen Lekavičius show that type of charisma although I acknowledge his youTube content reveals a type of charm that obviously works in that more casual environment. I bet he’d be a riot on a podcast.

An average desk segment will flow something like an interview. The analysts, remaining separate and distinct from each other’s conversations, will be served up questions by the host and they answer them in an abbreviated manner so as to be served another question. A better desk segment will feel similar to this but will have a reactive component to it, where analysts will react to graphics or statistics that are presented by the producer who is following along with the conversation. The best desk segments are dynamic conversations where the analysts talk directly to each other, have back and forth, interrupt even if necessary. All the host has to do in those instances is ensure you have enough conversational fuel to keep the engine stoked.

Pulling off the best desk segments is harder than you’d think. Chemistry is vital as you have to know that if you disagree on air, it’s just for the show, nothing personal. A lot of broadcast talent catch feelings over things you think they wouldn’t. You always need to be spontaneous but also have prepared points in the chamber. If you’re overprepared it sounds stiff, if you’re under prepared all the flashy waffle in the world won’t hide that fact. On top of that you have to be able to reach body language and verbal cues, subtle nudges that we need to move on to another topic, or wrap it up for an ad break, in an environment where we cannot directly communicate that information. Every host has their own hand signal semaphore to be used when not on camera to facilitate this, but when everyone is in the flow state, they often aren’t necessary. Oh, and there’s nerves. I mean not nervous like reading in class because we’re all people who seek out the camera. I mean nerves like you’re on live TV where one bad joke, one unfortunate spoonerism can lead to a cascading chain of linguistic failure that will be clipped and shared potentially forever. That’s the tightrope act we’re all walking only to be told “all you do is yap.”

Fans and pros have at least one thing in common. They think the talking part of the business is easy. I can tell you with very good authority that almost every ex-pro I’ve worked with on a desk has to concede it’s a lot harder than they assumed. It’s not just talking. It’s all of the above, it’s days and days of stats prep, it’s the pre-production meetings where we spitball ideas, it’s the pre-written segments where it’s your responsibility to make sure the show has the graphics you want… And then it’s that tightrope walk as well, sometimes in your second language.

Justinas found all this out the hard way, thrown into the deep end by a combination of poor talent selection and his own enthusiasm. To have him as a mainstay of the desk during a huge prestige event is a huge risk for the product and puts a lot of weight on his shoulders. After all, he was marketed as a surprise “extra,” something special for the special event. It was clear from the first segment that he needed more reps to try and fit into the structure of what a sports desk is supposed to be. Even the world class broadcast talent around him couldn’t make it work. Still, people acting like he is the worst thing to happen to desks since the Dudley Boyz are out of pocket.

Specifically, for Justinas I would say this – don’t get mired down in predictions. They are low calorie, largely worthless analysis in a part of the show where time is at a premium. I only do them as a last resort if we’re filling, or if someone has been so catastrophically wrong it’s inadvertently hilarious. Also, avoid talking about “mindsets” of players you don’t have any specific insight to. You can just as easily replace that with a “I remember when we were beating them at this tournament and they changed x, y and z to mount a comeback.”

My more general advice to ex-pros who come to the desk is make sure you give the fans what they want. Anecdotes from your career that they can’t get anywhere else, the juicier the better. They want you to point out moments that non-pros might miss and explain their benefits. Finally, they want you to appeal to your authority as a professional and actually risk an opinion or two. Argue with your colleagues if needed, be direct and explain why you know better. You look like a genius if you’re right and it’s hilarious if you’re wrong. That’s a win/win for a show. Epitácio “TACO” de Melo understood the assignment when he was on the couch at BTS.

What fans don’t want – even if they pretend they do – is some extended tutorial about the optimal way to play. Those segments have their place on YouTube, but they suck all the energy out of a broadcast which is why they are usually jettisoned. Those segments only work on a show if they are well constructed in advance and often as we jog from game to green room there isn’t a lot of downtime to produce them on the fly. You want to keep a broadcast current, so having a segment like that from the first map of a series when you’re on to the third is really not worth the effort.

Anyway, I’ll end these ruminations by saying that for Lekavičius the worst is over and he shouldn’t let it phase him too much. It takes a big set of stones to step into the spotlight and run the gauntlet of live broadcast work. The vast majority of fans ridiculing you for trying would piss their pants if that spotlight was turned on them. If you’re ever in the neighbourhood during the PGL circuit drop by and we’ll chop it up, maybe even a guest segment. You’ve still got something to contribute to the game even if Krakow didn’t give you the best opportunity to show that.

Previous Winners

🥇 2010: FM Toxic At Slap #2

🥇 2011: mTw At ESWC

🥇 2012: Michael “mK” Zaidi (Team VeryGames) – Copenhagen Games

🥇 2013: Curse / IBUYPOWER at DreamHack

🥇 2014: CLG, post Korean boot-camp, NA LCS Summer Play-offs Quarter Final

🥇 2015: No Award

🥇 2016: No Award

🥇 2023: Evil Geniuses CS Team At Every Event

🥇2024: NRG Valorant

And the winner is… Falcons CS2 Team

One of the easiest criticisms you can make about esports is that there are no guardrails to prevent the “haves” from obliterating the “have nots” often to a point where members of the latter group find themselves out of business. You see, with an unlimited checkbook one can simply go out and acquire the best talent, which at any given moment in the esports landscape will be apparent to even the casual observer. It doesn’t matter if their salary demands break the industry, it doesn’t matter if the buyout is a figure most smaller organisations would dream of as an annual budget

So it is with Falcons, an organisation so obviously playing with house money their owner may as well be cosplaying as the monopoly guy. They hate that you point it out, that they spent millions to jump the VRS queue, fucked that up, then spent more millions to get put back in the queue, fucked that up, then just spent more millions to remain in the queue and build a winning team only to win one trophy. The rest of the time they either lost to opposition whose entire organisation could be caught for the cost of one of their players or had emotional meltdowns in finals because they cannot handle the pressure of being that team.

It’s true to say that the roster they have assembled is a superteam but it’s also fair to say it’s one filled with idiosyncrasies, less Avengers and more Doom Patrol. I hate to say it after years of denying it but there might just be something to Niko being a choker. M0nesy also seems to be wasting his prime by focusing too much on what his legacy will be while he’s still in the process of shaping it. Kyousuke, who the geniuses on HLTV and Reddit forums assured us would be donk 2.0, turned out to not even be the best rookie of the year, in reality an excellent prospect purchased not because he fit the team but because of the inexplicable popularity the “donk 2.0” label conferred on him. Kyxsan, a highly touted IGL with exceptional midround calling, seems to have stagnated tactically in an environment where moments of individual talent can make a playbook moot. Teses, bless his heart, is very much along for the ride with the knowledge if anyone’s going it’s going to be him. Add to this a coach who, while it is indisputable he is greatest CS:GO has ever seen, really doesn’t seem to have any creative ideas about CS2 and is cruising on reputation like post Ajax Louis Van Gaal.

None of which is to say that isn’t enough to win trophies. It absolutely should be, especially when you consider that in the same amount of time they flopped and floundered, rivals with far fewer resources added to their cabinets. Hilariously for 2026 the memes around “just one more superstar” has clearly gotten into their heads, where it will no doubt join all the other doubts and anxieties, because they’re going to try and stick it out with the same roster. In doing so they missed potential roster moves that would have made sense based on the structure of the team but hey, they’ve got a point to prove I guess.

Their consistent failure is even more hilarious when you consider this is the only organisation in the world that has a tournament created for them specifically to win. On home soil in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, surrounded by a purchased crowd of sycophants in fresh jerseys, the entire spectacle of the Esports World Cup is designed to give Falcons a fictitious prestigious trophy once a year regardless of what else they win. The CS2 team this year couldn’t even beat Aurora, a team from Turkey not only operating on a fraction of the budget and with limited player options due to geography, but also one notorious for underachievement.

They did win one trophy though, PGL Bucharest to be specific, and all it took was the non-attendance of three teams above them in the world ranking at that time and the fact everyone knew they were buying the star player of the team they had to play in the finals. Under those circumstances Falcons were capable of winning a competition in 2025, the rest of the time not so much.

But in a way it only makes me enjoy them more. They’re so hilariously in their own heads when it comes to closing out games, the weight of their reputation and salaries crushing their ability to find a winning flow state. One of the funniest moments of the year was Falcons being knocked out by MiBR at the Austin Major after losing an impossible to concede 5v3 post plant on Inferno’s B bomb site at 18-17, they would go on to be knocked out in the next round of overtime.

When they were put together I told everyone in the Counter-Strike world to get real comfortable with them being number one. After all, everything else is controlled by and run to pander to Saudi Arabian interests now. Why would this project be any different? Fortunately, through some insane miniscule chance, they managed to throw together a collection of basketcases that fold faster than Superman on laundry day as soon as real pressure presents itself.

Even if they do go on to win in 2026, the gift they gave us in 2025 is one we should always treasure. It proves that money isn’t everything and that some curses are real, maybe even deserved, based on the choices we make.

Previous Winners

🥇 2010: ESL UK

🥇 2011: CS:GO Beta Key Distribution

🥇 2012: Absolute Legends Ghosting

🥇 2013: Alexey ‘Solo’ Berezin of Team Rox.Kis Match Fixing

🥇 2014: “I’ll just boost you up there” – Fnatic

🥇 2015: Leigh “Deman” Smith Leaves League

🥇 2016: PEA Enters The Fray

🥇2023: Astralis Hire Hunden

🥇2024: Demon1 to NRG

And the winner is… The Short Lifespan Of The Wretched LTA

While technically the decision to create LTA was made in 2024, it was 2025 where its critics – read everybody with a working brain – got to see it play out in exactly the way everyone except Riot could foresee. Riot promised the decision to merge LCS and CBLOL into one league would be “good for fans, teams, and pros” without really bothering to explain why. LCS had just had its first increase in average viewership in years and CBLOL had been enjoying rising popularity thanks to the always highly engaged Brazilian fanbase. Of course, that minor success story for LCS was a rare one. The bigger picture showed that the league was on life support,

The mishandling of their North American league, while no Overwatch League, will be studied as one of esports great failures. Once upon a time the big teams, driven by flawed but entertaining personalities, would come together and create a spectacle that would bring all of the esports world to watch. The broadcast was the gold standard everyone wanted to emulate, the goofy imperfection turned into charm by endemic personalities who knew they were steering a multi-million dollar product into unchartered territory. Riot couldn’t stand that others may get some credit and so slowly started chipping away at the components that made it what it was. Pricing out the orgs, refusing to work with personalities they felt wouldn’t drink Kool Aid when it was time, bowing to their ownership cartel to keep bigger personalities from sticking around and then pushing that same cartel out afterwards. Remember the magic of the TSM and CLG rivalry? Neither of those brands are even in the game these days.

Brazilian esports fans, who never miss an opportunity to cry about how much they are persecuted when in reality they are pandered to, also considered the decision a betrayal. The league had essentially bootstrapped itself into a position of success and its reward for doing so was now to be used as a band aid to cover the mortal wound Riot themselves had dealt to LCS. Ultimately, it’s hard not to sympathise. There’s no other way to read the decision beyond Riot choosing to sacrifice two regions to try and save the one they’ve always prioritised.

Not content with inciting the ire of two entire regions, they added to that one of the worst formats seen across all of competitive gaming. The conferences were split, creating a disjointed season, as well as there being travel burdens placed on teams that were not there before.

Now, let’s be clear. Prior to it beginning the fans and pundit class alike all said it would fail. Brazilian esports experts explained that it wouldn’t just fail but it would permanently damage their league of legends infrastructure. A lot of fans said they wouldn’t watch, others that they couldn’t. The convoluted format didn’t even come with a website that would accurately inform the viewers who were left of when and where to watch. All of those things and worse came true. So, of course Riot walked it all back at the end of 2025 explaining that while the “LTA delivered valuable learnings” it was the fans that had forced their hand to revert the changes. “Fans feel the deepest pride and connection to their original leagues, and missed that element in LTA” they explained. “Regional pride and history are core to the League of Legends esports experience, and our communities consistently told us they wanted their leagues back.”

Here’s the problem. Things once broken are never the same when apparently fixed and so it’s likely to prove here. Droves of people now realise they can live their lives quite comfortably without watching LCS. Some Brazilian teams have simply exited the game and are unlikely to return. Many North American owners, having seen the most brazen attempt to bail out their region fail miserably, are desperately trying to offload the depreciating asset that is an LCS franchise slot. Ultimately the world has seen that once again Riot simply don’t know how to run a successful esport and like Blizzard there is now a vast amount of empirical evidence that shows their success in that realm has been mostly accidental.

The whole pathetic affair is classic Riot. Make a decision too late for it to be good, refuse to listen to everyone in the world who understands why it’s bad, gaslight the community with lies about why it’s not only the right time but also the right call, watch it fail spectacularly and then walk it back pretending that it was still the right thing to do and walking it back isn’t a sign of failure. You see Riot, made in the image of the lord and saviour of esports Marc Merrill, are infallible. It’s you who are the problem.

Previous Winners

🥇 2013: Sons of Starcraft Documentary

🥇 2014: Harold Goldberg: The League of Legends Experience

🥇 2015: No Award

🥇 2016: No Award

🥇2023: Overwatch 2 And The Overwatch League

🥇2024: BLEED Esports

And the winner is…

🥇2025: ESL Changes The Definition Of Prize Pools

A lot has happened in the competitive Counter-Strike space in the last eighteen months or so. Apart from its near complete capture by the Saudi Arabian state – via ESL and the Esports World Cup – it has also become driven by endemic politics in a way it hasn’t for the best part of a decade. In shades of what happened in North American League of Legends for the LCS, the space is now essentially controlled by a cartel of popular esports organisations that leverage their fanbases to effectively syphon off money intended for players to themselves. If you think that’s an extreme definition of what is happening, then look no further than the ridiculous framing of ESL’s “prize” pools.

You see, what has always made esports exciting is the prospect of the best players being able to earn life-changing amounts of money for moments of excellence produced under the duress of competition. The reason normies would come and rubberneck for The International once a year is because the prize pool grew so large the winners went from being scruffy nerds to scruffy nerds that were theoretically set for life. That mechanism is what brings in the audience, it’s what drives emotions, it’s what garners outside interests. There is no prior world where the term “prize pool” has meant “some of this goes to players but the bulk goes to their employers as an unspoken appearance fee.”

That is where we are now. And let’s also be clear, ESL’s backroom dealings with organisations to make this the new normal (an incredibly convenient near identical replacement to the “franchise league” system Valve explicitly forbids) has forced every other tournament organiser to run a similar system or face collapse. Combine these new appearance fees with the stipends being provided by the Esports World Cup Club membership and it’s fair to say organisations haven’t been eating as well as this since they were able to con gullible American entrepreneurs out of venture capital.

If you’re unsure why this is happening, then let me explain. You see, large multi-game organisations are generally terrible at two things: scouting talent and understanding talent’s relative value. They simply want whoever the best players are right now and they’ll pay as much as they have to, mostly more than they are worth and very often more than they can afford, in order to have them. As an offset it is expected that in exchange for the stability of a salary the MGO will take a cut of player prize money, often in the region of 10%. What MGOs don’t want to do is ever go beyond that because it means they then might lose out on negotiations if a rival organisation can stick to that or lower. In other words, instead of negotiating with their players and their agents, they chose to strongarm tournament operators for a cut of the money that had traditionally always gone to players. They almost certainly keep that percentage in the original contract too btw. ESL not only agree to it but encourage it because it then gives them “influence” over what other events their new “partners” attend and it ultimately costs them nothing.

What this now means is that when ESL and the others who followed suit advertise a $1 million tournament that amount isn’t all for the players. In fact, on their tour the smaller events have a split where 70% goes to the organisation and 30% to the players, far below the norm of most American sports leagues where players have fought for 50% or more down the years. In 2025 IEM Dallas, IEM Melbourne and IEM Chengdu all had the 70/30 split meaning players would be flying to the other side of the world to compete not for $1 million but for $300,000. Add to that the now well documented friction between ESL and PGL events and consider that this occasionally meant missing out on an event in central Europe offering $625,000 for players and you should start to see the problem.

https://x.com/CSPPAgg

Why players have let this one slide is beyond me. Most likely a case of not wanting to rock what is a very comfortable and attractive boat. However, I recall a time back when there was a player union where the matter of broadcast talent listening in on communications was worthy of a strike. I also recall a player strike for NA players being prevented from playing in ESL events back when the PEA existed. What should ESL and the organisations that employ you conspiring to hoover hundreds of thousands of dollars out of your pockets be worth? Not a peep evidently.

Understand that I don’t have an issue with the financial divide. While I personally think if an MGO needs appearance fees to survive they are run by incompetents, that is neither here nor there. The issue is the way that with just a wave of a wand and a change of a word we literally took money away from players and seemingly were allowed to keep all the prestige of the previous, actually real prize pools. The scam is in the advertising, the same way that ESL refer to it as “the ESL CS2 ecosystem agreement,” while trying to drive rival companies out of business thus harming the ecosystem. It’s pure Orwell.

Changing this would require Valve to take a stance, which would be easily done with an alteration to their own tournament rules. How about saying tournaments don’t qualify for VRS points unless they guarantee a minimum of 70% of the prize pool goes to the players? That’s never going to happen though. Valve seem reluctant to enforce even the most basic rules of the VRS system when it comes to the major players in the space, which means there is more bullshit likely to follow in 2026.

Previous Winners

🥇 2010: John “jHG” Blackwood

🥇 2011: Marc “virp” Corban

🥇 2012: Dmitry Smilyanets – Moscow Five

🥇 2013: Simon Boudreault

🥇 2014: Noh Dae Chu – AHQ Korea

🥇 2015: No Award

🥇 2016: No Award

🥇 2023: Nicole LaPointe Jameson

🥇2024: Sam “SlayTheMinotaur” Cook

And The Winner Is…

🥇2025: Joe Marsh – T1

There were a lot of options on the table for this award this year around… Not a lot of spectacular failures, few examples of org-killing hubris, gratifyingly fewer tales of abuse towards players. Instead this year I’m going to hand it out to someone that tried to show themselves as being a player but who, through their own ego, essentially got themselves cashed out.

It’s no secret that South Korean League of Legends fans, especially T1 fans, are something else when it comes to “protest.” Not even the CS2 losers hire trucks with complaints emblazoned on them to park outside of the offices of those they are targeting. Similarly, they’ve never released a hostage style list of demands from management about what they want accompanied with vague and mostly empty ultimatums. For T1 fans that is Tuesday.

It was exactly that type of fervour Marsh was trying to leverage at the end of 2024 after contract negotiations with star toplaner Choi “Zeus“ Woo-je cratered. The narrative he didn’t hesitate to feed to his own fans was that the agency representing the player (The Play) were to blame, having been disrespectful during the process.

“It would not be appropriate for me to disclose the specific details of Zeus’s offer from T1” he posted during an ill advised Reddit AMA. “What I can share is that we aimed to give each of our players the top salary in their respective position. With this goal as our foundation, we negotiated with all the players’ agents – including Zeus’s. Throughout the process, however, Zeus’s agent did not provide us with a single counterproposal.” In another answer he added “the agent imposed an artificial ‘deadline” and would go on to imply the agency had prioritised financial gain over the player’s best interests.

These types of deflections would likely have been fine in most esports regions across the world but in South Korea a prominent organisation executive implying that an agency acted against the best interests of a client was never going to stand unchallenged. The Play loudly disputed Marsh’s version of events and released a comprehensive calendar of negotiations that showed they had engaged in multiple rounds of contract negotiations (

) and even issued an explicitly stated final counteroffer that T1 then tried to negotiate down. In other words, all indications were that they tried to play hardball and got told to go fuck themselves.

Needless to say, fans were apoplectic but were divided about where to direct their ire. Some of it went to the player who was accused of greed and disloyalty. Some of it went to the agency who were accused of taking money in exchange to push a move away from T1. Others lashed out at the organisation hierarchy, saying they hadn’t done enough to keep a world championship winning team together. Of course, none of this was ideal or desired in a landscape where reputations are not something to be slandered loosely.

The seeds that Marsh planted at the end of 2024 continued to bear sour fruit for The Play and the organisation Zeus had joined, Hanwha Life Esports. Allegations of “tampering” were still percolating among fans in March and it was reiterated by The Play that despite being an agency they didn’t take a commission or even plan for one as they expected a straightforward T1 contract renewal. The insinuations of impropriety were now bleeding not just onto The Play – an increasingly important player in the South Korean esports landscape – but also Hanwha Life, a subsidiary of one of the largest conglomerates in the company. It wasn’t going to be allowed to stand.

The same month saw the aforementioned trucks deployed to T1’s offices with demands for Joe Marsh to be fired. The hostage demand letter also followed, explaining why Marsh must apologise, resign and moving forward involve the fans in team decision making processes.

By July T1 announced that there would be a public broadcast to publicly apologise to both Zeus and The Play. During the organisation COO Josh Ahn stated that everything Marsh had claimed was wrong and that the falsehoods around what had happened stemmed from “misunderstandings,” most likely meaning no-one could understand why the fuck Marsh had said anything incendiary at all given the facts of the matter.

A classic example of an esports exec, already wealthy and having a secure future, being unable to simply stay out the spotlight. Had this happened between American or European organisations, the stink would have stayed on the player and agency forever, no correcting force influencing the proceedings. In South Korea though, well, let’s just say no matter what Marsh thinks of himself he really isn’t anywhere near as important as he seems to believe.

The worst part in all of this is that T1 continues to enjoy success, having once again won the League of Legends World Championship in 2025 despite the difficulties Marsh caused in the offseason. He could say nothing and be considered some kind of savant, a Western manager that is valued so highly by South Korean executives he truly must have something. His needless comments and subsequent humiliation ultimately provide fans with a second, more convincing narrative, namely that T1 succeed despite Marsh’s input and not because of it.

Previous Winners

🥇 2010: Gamersject

🥇 2011: ESWC

🥇 2012: Northcon

🥇 2013: HoN World Tour Finals

🥇 2014: ESWC

🥇 2015: Gaming Paradise

🥇 2016: Shanghai Major / Nanyang Cruise Cup

🥇2023: CS:GO RMR’s

🥇2024: Global Esports Tour Rio

And The Winner Is…

🥇2025: The Esports World Cup

I have watched many esports events across 2025 that range from the ridiculous to the awe-inspiring. That comes with the territory of having to report at any given moment on the monumental industry fuck-ups that event work brings. Cutting corners no matter how essential there are to the geometry is an esports staple.

Obviously there have been worse events in 2025 just in terms of a competency viewpoint but few can be summed up with a word rarely used in these parts. Ugly. Like, ugly in the same way it was when the junta of Argentina built the “hidden city wall” and painted fake houses to hide their slums. Designed to obscure Saudi Arabian atrocities, even worse to make nominally good people make excuses for them in exchange for large sums of money, the buzz around the event itself is about as real as a three dollar bill.

Having to pay to fly in fans under the guise of it being a giveaway is one thing. Awarding “fans” free jerseys for the best Saudi Arabian team, the one the whole event is designed for them to win anyway, is another. Vocal fans were even allowed to trade in points for prizes such as iphones but only if they cheered for Falcons. Ever inclusive, all the fake fans they flew in were made to stick around to the very end to applaud Falcons (and the Crown Prince) for winning an event that would be near impossible for them to lose.

But it doesn’t end there. Events in esports usually don’t come with expensive documentaries that rewrite the entire history of esports to make their event seem more historic than it actually is. EWC does that. Never forget that if you’re talking about that from a positive or negative standpoint you’re not talking about the women’s rights activists in a prison just down the road from the arena where the event is held. LGBT representation was erased from the documentary when it was broadcast in Saudi Arabia, Team Liquid’s “historic” rainbows only allowed to be shown to people who already champion people’s right to be who they are. Absolutely embarrassing.

Under the hood, the event itself has a ton of stories not told that will all come out in time. Nothing was said about an admin walkout that occurred ahead of one of its significant events. Delayed payments to contractors and broadcast talent also seems to have gone largely unspoken about. EWC uses the phrase “life changing money” over and over to promote their event and yet when it comes to spreading it around the pursestrings are very tightly bound.

Reports did come out detailing censorship of signs (you can’t call any other player a “king” because Saudi Arabia only has one of those) and chants aimed at Falcons for their comically inept overspending. Still, we’re supposed to believe this is a perfectly normal event for real esports fans. Laughable, isn’t it? And on top of that, despite almost every participant having effectively been paid to attend and promote the event via a series of grants, they still use the unbelievable stupid slogan “nothing is granted, everything is earned” in their advertising. No other esports event will ever come as close as to being as fake, contrived and soulless as this state sponsored comedy.

Previous Winners

🥇 2011: Naniwa Probe Rush

🥇 2012: The cruel and savage banning of HLTV from Prague FOREVER

🥇 2013: No Award

🥇 2014: DeMuslim Vs Major

🥇 2015: Rahim Gets Bullied

🥇 2016: No Award

🥇2024: Won’t someone think of Doublelift’s feelings?

And The Winner Is…

🥇 2025: Crying about loser interviews

2025 was the year where I just simply had enough of one phenomenon – fans and even some pundits complaining about loser interviews being bad because they might hurt player feelings. It is something that continues to spread across all esports and it is something that absolutely needs to be rejected. Players should be doing MORE loser interviews and more engagement with the tournaments they compete at in general.

Allocating this award puts me in a position that I rarely want to be in – defending the worst people in esports. Yet, here I must do it for it is true and based. In a press gathering the legendary LoL player Rasmus “Caps“ Borregaard Winther after a 3-0 loss to Flyquest that eliminated them from MSI was asked if he was considering retirement. It wasn’t without reason. The community had been speculating that the player could retire before he extended his contract with G2. He himself had also used the word retirement in interviews prior to the tournament. The question was asked in service of that. Sometimes as a journalist you have to ask shit questions to serve the curiosity of fans. I know because I did this job for years.

While the player handled the question gracefully the community went on to attack the “journalist” who asked – Arsh Goyal, someone who used my work being banned from a subreddit to gain attention by effectively plagiarising my reporting under the guise of “debunking” it – based on a lack of “tact.” I hate to be the guy to break it to everyone. Player’s feelings do not matter when it comes to contributing to the media eco-system that enables them to have a career. Sad because you lost? Fuck you. Win next time. This is sports. Put some shades on and suck it up like a big boy.

As an analog, Tom Brady faced questions about his impending retirement for years, win or lose, and I don’t remember any NFL fan rushing to social media to defend his feelings about that. Why would they? It’s part of the job. You come out and face tough questions when you lose, you accept the plaudits when you win. It’s insanity to suggest interviewers should tiptoe around topics in service of players and their fans maybe feeling a bit boo-hoo about the current state of affairs.

Yet this is just one example. In the pussified shithole known as the FGC their thought-leaders seemed upset that a tenured competitor, Chris Wong, was interviewed after finishing 2^nd in the Capcom Cup at the start of the year. The crime? Apparently doing it too soon. You see, according to the broadcasting experts in that world, it never happens that quickly in any other sport.

You know, except MMA, boxing, tennis or any other sport you’ve seen it happen in. In NFL it is codified that teams, win or lose, give media access to them within 15 minutes. In football I’ve seen players in floods of tears interviewed on the pitch. I watched Jose Mourinho do a press conference after learning a long time friend had died. What the fuck are we complaining about in esports?

We’re entitled to these moments by the way. Anything that has a chance of going viral and gaining engagement is GOOD for business and when business is good players get paid. It’s that simple. Esports for too long operates at the dictate of a fanbase that doesn’t want to pay a penny to watch it. Fuck listening to these people. If they want some input they need to get their feeble, unwashed hands into their pocket and cough up some money, just like they do for their favourite vtuber waifu.

Can loser interviews be done terribly? Oh my yes, as Starladder Budapest went out of their way to prove. Their loser interviews involved the entire team being brought out on to a stage, their captain being asked to remove their logo from a wall and place it into a trashcan and then they all had to sign a photograph from when they were still in the tournament. This, while sad funerial music was played in the background, is not “it” and frankly the only reason not to jettison that segment after you see the reaction to the first one is to save someone’s feelings.

However, whether they are done well or terribly one thing the fans all seem to agree upon in their shared idiocy is that “if player sad, interview bad.” The average esports fan is clearly a parasocial, emotional cripple, viewing the world through the lens of anime and other slop aimed at teenagers. They know little of the world of sports or even competition in any context outside of them being below average at their video game of choice. With a world view such as this, they see anything that their favourite player might not want to do as being “cruel” or “lacking empathy.”

In reality, doing things you don’t want to do, having to try and gather your emotions and talk into a microphone is part of the job. There of course can be exceptions. If someone is truly overcome and can’t speak, we can move it on and grab somebody else. If someone has mitigating circumstances, then factor that in. But spare me the “won’t someone think of the players” especially from a community that took someone genuinely mourning the loss of a relative and turned it into a meme template the same day.

I’ll also throw this in here – this trend of asking EVERYONE a fucking question at the end of an event has to stop. These are professional players, naturally undersocialised by their dedication to their craft. In the same way you don’t line up all eleven football players at the end of a match because it would be excruciating, they pick the narratively relevant players to talk to. The articulate captain? Great. Guy who won man of the match? Makes sense. Young kid who scored their first senior goal? OK, go on then. Let’s be clear, in football if you have an A-level your locker room nickname is “the professor” and esports players might be downstream of that.

The key in all of this is narrative selection. You should know going in what you want to ask, what you expect to get and where to pivot to if you don’t. Stop listening to emotionally stunted children when it comes to dictating which direction your work should go in, be it on the official broadcast or the accompanying media output surrounding it. Players need to stop being coddled. It’s worse in esports than in any other competitive endeavour and it is that, not pundits hurting your feelings on social media, that makes us look like a childish counterpart to the real thing.

Past Winners

🥇 2010: The French

🥇 2011: The French

🥇 2012: 1.6 Enthusiasts

🥇 2013: Dota 2 fans

🥇 2014: Team SoloMid fans

🥇 2015: League of Legends Community

🥇 2016: Brazilian CS fans

🥇 2023: Dota 2 fans

🥇2024: The CS2 “community”

And The Winner Is…

🥇2025: The CS2 “community”

The first insufferable collective to go “back-to-back” since THE FRENCH – which should really show you exactly where the average CS2 player is right now – there really is nothing close across all of gaming right now. To summarise what discourse about CS2 has become imagine the following… A high-pitched keening emanating from a primitive hive mind whose only human quality is sheer entitlement… The modern CS player operates under the belief that not only must the newest version handle exactly the same as end-stage CS:GO (a game that was maligned for most of its existence by the same people who now proselytise about its perfection) but that it must also be updated near daily with new content or it has been abandoned.

Made up of more manbabies than the combined attendance of every anime convention on Earth, the average CS2 player takes more enjoyment from whining about the game than they do playing it. As for playing it? Well, good luck with that since as it is made up of the same people determined to make every interaction with a video game they simply will not put down utter misery. Games are routinely abandoned two rounds in because they are “unwinnable” due to “retards.” Any and every lucky moment is greeted with a cheating accusation, sometimes followed by the accuser actually turning on the cheats they so despise. Despite the game’s design making quick communication vital, approximately 50% of the playerbase are mute and the other 40% can’t afford a microphone. Of the remaining 10%, 9% are made up of big thinkers with a strong grasp of geopolitics who know exactly why you should have intercourse with your mother’s corpse because of some Balkan feud that took place in the 1300s.

Perhaps then it makes sense that complaining about the game has overtaken playing the game as their primary source of enjoyment then. Many of the complaints remain the same. We are still dealing with morons that think Subtick is a number somewhere between 64 and 128, mostly concluding it is a substitute for the latter. They can’t explain what it is but they know whatever it is it is bad. When their brains – typically smoother than a well-sucked Werther’s Original – can’t figure out basic concepts like perspective they blame that on Subtick too. “I am behind the wall” they say, nose pressed to sandstone but half their body dangling round a corner like a child playing hide and seek. “Fuck Subtick” they conclude.

It’s the same for latency. They fire up a game their 10 year old rig can barely handle, on an internet connection that is the technological equivalent of two tin-cans and some string, then connect to a server where “the good players play” on the other side of the world. They spend fourty minutes warping around the map, frustrating everyone as they fill the role of phantom bullet sponge and then upload their clip to Reddit. “Fuck subtick” they say as they die behind a wall while being conscious enough to hide their netgraph. “DAE THINK WE NEED 128 INSTEAD?”

The average complaint can usually be explained by dogshit PC, dogshit internet and / or dogshit player. None of which is to say that CS2 couldn’t use some optimisation. The demands it puts on a network are greater than that of its predecessor, but each update seems to get us closer to what we had before. And I can’t believe I have to keep pointing it out but what we had before was a flawed online tactical FPS that was in no way perfect and was regularly called worse than its predecessors.

It’d be remiss of me to leave out the constant paranoia about cheaters. We’re still doing the whole “VAC isn’t real” thing, only to complain even further whenever a new update brings the occasional false positive ban. It was just three months ago that an update wiped out a number of popular free cheats and forums were gleefully posting the tears of those affected. Today? VAC isn’t reeeeeeaallll, Valve doesn’t caaaaaaarreeee, everyone’s cheeeeeeeating. Honestly, why not just fuck off and do something else then?

The worst offenders though are the people who complain on Reddit every time there’s an update of ANY kind. For instance, Valve announced that the souvenir drops were ready to go after a period of time after the most recent Starladder Major finished. The days between these two events were filled with people asking when they would be ready. Valve, of course, would always make this announcement to ensure people who had paid for something were aware they could now use it. The response? Well, apart from the geniuses that post fridge.gif every single time – may I recommend jump.cliff if you think that’s funny – it was also filled with people complaining that there wasn’t any other update. You see, these idiots genuinely think if Valve make an announcement about something unrelated to the development of the game it means they aren’t developing the game anymore. They genuinely expect everything Valve posts about CS2 to include a new game mode, a new case, a bunch of fixes, a new map and an invitation to meet the dev team. Simply announcing something that needs to be announced doesn’t cut it. Honestly, how fucking thick is it possible for a human to be?

Valve are one of the most aloof, experimental and self-assured companies in all of gaming. It’s an infuriating combination for people who want regular, concise communications about the future of the game they care about. On the other hand, listen to the fucking state of what is now the vast majority of people with the game installed? I wouldn’t want to engage with it either, let alone make a vague promise that later can’t be kept for unforeseen reasons. Alas, whatever Valve do, we are set for another year of mewling if early entries are anything to go by. CS players truly have become what Sartre meant when he said “hell is other people.”

So that was 2025… Impossible to tell if it went by quickly or only seemed that way as we spent most of it concussed by a news cycle that made the most absurdist satires seem mundane by comparison. And here we all are, gearing up for more as 2026 already starts with a bang… But enough about Hugo Chavez’s tomb.

It was a year where I spent most of it in an existential funk and that was reflected in the content. I have got comfortable now with the fact that I am no longer really a journalist and more a glorified shitposter. I can’t be sad about that reality. After all, back in the day my journalism used to change things but in a Saudi captured industry that was populated by sellouts and shills before they arrived change is now impossible. No, instead we must wait it out, get ready for the day the whole house of al-Cards comes tumbling down and be louder than those that would try and retcon history. Still, this year we did what we could at least.

Back in February we pointed out to everyone that there were some inexplicably hidden ties between Ralf Reichert of Esports World Cup fame and the company that was acquiring Starladder. It seemed so upsetting to simply point out a few facts that the Starladder who was doing the deal posted to say actually their Major in Berlin was good (it wasn’t) and that any form of speculation around the very real things that happened was a “conspiracy theory.”

Since then, they have had to cancel some events and ran a pretty crummy, but by no means the worst, CS2 Major in Budapest. We expect to be writing more about them in 2026, either as part of a shuttering or sale if we were guessing.

We also spent a significant part of the year trawling through and posting about ESL FACEIT Group’s financial records. This would be the year the grim reality of the Saudi sale would coalesce, with multiple rounds of layoffs, constant cutbacks, offices being closed, executives taking severances and all of it in service of becoming a company capable of breaking even. It really begs the question why the previous management couldn’t have made these cuts themselves to bring the company to this same point but then in asking that you realise it wouldn’t come with a slushfund to pay off outstanding debts and the huge buyouts and bonuses for the executives that knew their equity would be worthless had they not dealt with this one specific buyer.

We headed into Summer once again covering Joe Biden’s cognitive decline – a story that Jake Tapper assures me the mainstream media “missed” but I had written about and accurately predicted the trajectory of back in 2019 – and it seemed to upset a lot of the regulars. For some reason pointing out that the president of the USA’s cabinet had engaged in a cover-up about his fitness for office hiding not one but two disqualifying health conditions from the general public was a much larger scandal than Watergate was being a useful idiot for fascism. I’ll say this – you’re gonna need much better material than “but Trump” in the coming years, especially as Republicans are on course to get wiped out in the midterms. Start practicing.

Back to esports and we ran an exclusive about the behind the scenes sale of Astralis, who would now officially be the most mismanaged organisation in the modern era had the clusterfuck girlboss reboot of Evil Geniuses didn’t exist. If old EG was “The Empire Strikes Back” that dogshit was “The Acolyte.” Fortunately for the Danes they will always be protected from claiming that title despite, as we revealed, a debacle that propelled them into financial crisis.

Then June came and as is our way we covered the new normal for Pride Month in esports… Which is to say it has become like the oldschool rule about gays in the military, except those in the military were never given the fistfuls of oil money they were deployed to secure. Let’s be clear, for as long as Saudi signs the checks then no-one is going to be waving those rainbow flags anywhere except the privacy of their own home. Don’t worry though, the same American shitlib voices that will report you to your employers for wearing a sombrero at Halloween assure me that the Saudi Arabian state is this close to changing and totally legalising homosexuality in their country. Any minute now… Oh, no, wait. As we also covered, if you’re openly gay in any of their media they will just erase you from that product. I guess it’s better than being one of the people they erased from existence though, eh Team Liquid?

That Esports World Cup documentary – Level Up – wasn’t just deleting people who talk about their LGBT identity in Saudi… They were rewriting the entire history of esports. In what might be the most brazen piece of propaganda we have ever had in competitive gaming (and trust me there’s been more than you could possibly believe) there were more lies in the first twelve minutes than you could count. Well, except I did count them and write up the much needed reality instead.

A subsequent review of the terrible series on a podcast resulted in some more accurate reviews – from other parts of the world than Germany and Saudi Arabia – in bring down its overall IMDB score. Amazon have since released it on YouTube for free on its Prime channel where initially the views showed what an embarrassing failure it had been. Since then, as with all things to do with the Esports World Cup, the viewers must have rallied because episode 1 sits with the very typical stats of 1.3 million views, 396 likes and 13 comments.

Wrapping up Esports World Cup coverage we also ran an exposé on how the event was essentially bussing in fans from around the world in order to make the event seem more vibrant and diverse. In exchange for that the participants would be made money based on the number of fans they brought. Hilariously, Na’Vi tried to play it cute and fly in fans for later stages of the event only for their CS team to be knocked out before the fans arrived. Good news though… Those attending fans still had to go to the end ceremony and cheer Falcons as they raised a trophy they cannot fail to win for yet another year.

We then went on to break news of even more layoffs at ESL FACEIT Group, the gift that keeps on giving.

While at the same time having to lament one of Counter-Strike’s oldest brands finding themselves struggling for sponsorship outside of the Middle Eastern clubhouse. Complexity was once again in its founders hands but once again has had to scale back operations due to economic realities. A sad story, especially when you see so many other organisations able to burn through millions because they were part of a bloc that effectively works in tandem with ESLFACEIT Group to reduce player prize pool in exchange for appearance fees. Valve remain absent while all this occurs and players, who not so long ago walked out of an event because an analyst listened to in-game comms, simply take it on the chin because they remain in the most profitable segment of the pyramind. None of which helps Complexity who now must wait for things to go back to normal with the rest of us

On the back nine, it was this publication that announced the official sale of Astralis to the world, although so far it’s not clear what that means for the organisation as they go “international” on a budget.

We published internal emails that showed ESLFACEIT Group, not content with dominating the calendar and doing backroom deals that mean the “franchise era” is effectively alive in everything but name, would also be tightening the expectations of what neighbouring events you can and can’t attend.

We also got to the bottom of the Gamin Gladiators mess over in Dota 2, showing evidence of a lawsuit that is soon to bare either documents or settlements. We’ll be there for either.

We also obtained recordings of ESLFACEIT Town Halls, where executives use jargon to inform demoralised workers that it’s been really hard on them but it’s all going to be worth it. Lord Farquaad would be proud.

Speaking candidly, 2025 was a wild and mostly shitty year for me but both the good and bad kept me from content. On the positive, being a fixture on the PGL tour for both CS2 and Dota has been something that has enriched my life, the downtime was spent cremating friends and family then drinking too much in some botched sense of honouring their spirits. This really meant that being productive was hard and I can say I left a lot of stories on the vine for reasons of time and motivation.

Was it a great year of reporting? No, not by my standards but honestly there’s barely anyone doing any of it anyway. Whole publications have either been explicitly bought or in other ways bought off and sites that specialise in esports are closing everywhere. Still, I have rallied and am committed to keeping the number of hangovers this year to under 150 and this will mean a greater output of content in 2026. I can’t promise a lot of it will be reporting. You can never gauge how many stories you’ll be poised to break ever. But we’re expanding the podcasting output by bringing back the Premier League Review for the sports section, reworking The Esports Gospel to be more of a behind the scenes and advisory product and will expand the editorial side of things, maybe even with guest writers.

We still managed to put out 42 episodes of Belly Of The Beast in 2025, which fell short of the target but still covered most of the big news stories affecting politics in the US and the UK. Expect that to continue in 2026 as well as the return of some an old favourite (we’re currently auditioning a new co-host for I Hate It Here) and a new content idea that should be evergreen and more interesting than esports.

As always none of any of this is possible without you and your generous support. Thanks to the Subastackers, Twitch Subbers and Patreon pals. You keep me moving.

Next up, 2025’s Gonzo Awards. See you there.

The news of Ricky Hatton’s passing came through on the 14^th September. Reports stated there was nothing suspicious about his passing, a phrase we know is used in a euphemism for suicide. He was found by his manager after missing a prior engagement.

A sporting death hasn’t rocked me like this in a while. This is like losing Gary Speed, Arturo Gatti or Ayrton Senna, seeing someone with years ahead of them cruelly plucked out of existence, which feels like an all too common theme right now. For someone like me, who grew up in the North of England, Hatton always felt like one of us. Close to my own age, I knew dozens of people who carried themselves with the same warmheartedness and self-deprecating humour. Hatton just happened to be a supremely talented boxer and one who crucially never let the trappings of fame change who he was at his core, a true Manc and proud of it.

The lack of flash was there in his boxing style too. He had grit, a desire to come forward at all costs and lethal bodyshots. The word lethal might only just qualify as hyperbole. When he hit Jose Luis Castillo bang on the liver he broke four of his opponents’ ribs and folded him like a deckchair. Hatton at his best was no frills, power and determination, an embodiment of the British working-class spirit anthropomorphised and given a pair of gloves.

I can still remember the Hatton vs Mayweather fight like it was yesterday. I was a young aspiring sportswriter, plugging away in the media world of what was then known as the blogosphere and it’d be years before I’d get a run as a columnist with the now sadly defunct Sabotage Times. Still, boxing was my thing, a sport I’d wanted to compete at before my inherent lack of discipline and exposure to alcohol and drugs turned me into the type of slob that walks into a boxing gym, not out of one. The build up to this fight cannot be understated. This felt like a bona fide superfight, two undefeated champions that had absolutely earned their reputations. The other great British champion Joe Calzaghe had been criticised for “dodging” the big American names during his career but here was Hatton walking into Vegas to take on a fighter many would consider the best ever pound-for-pound.

Due to the timezone venues had to apply for late licenses to show the fight and have drinking hours extended. The pub where I watched it was charging people on the door. To do this on a December weekend in Middlesbrough was a bold choice when most were saving up for Christmas. It was packed to the rafters anyway, literally shoulder to shoulder like the front row of a concert. It was boozy too, insanely so for the small hours of a Sunday morning. Every time Ricky came on the screen in the build-up the place would erupt.

We were so jubilant for those first few rounds. Ricky really was doing it until that classic Mayweather counterpunching style cut him. Mayweather came forward and dominated the fight and the final nail in the coffin was that point deduction for punches to the back of the head. My brain remembers the call as total bullshit. People threw their drinks at the screen and screamed that it was rigged. Mayweather compounded our collective misery by bullying Hatton for what was left of the fight. Ricky had the heart of a lion, getting up after being dropped when almost anyone else stayed down. Shortly after he went down again

He lost that night but there is no shame in losing to the transcendent. To have even stood toe-to-toe, however briefly, with an opponent is something few can ever say they could do. It should have ended there, a Spartan carried back home on his shield with a 43-1 record, but combat sports perhaps more than the others leave a void that can rarely be filled. The training is so all-encompassing that it dictates almost every aspect of your life. When that’s gone, how do you re-learn to be something other than a warrior?

Not many British fighters pierce the cultural bubble and become big in America. Lennox Lewis did it mostly by virtue of who he fought and Tyson Fury did it by being an antidote to the dull era of heavyweight boxing that preceded him. Hatton was almost there, the HBO documentary series about the build up to Mayweather fight being celebrated at the time and appearances on WWE after Pacquiao teased what might have been. Honestly though, and I say this as a loving compliment, he was fundamentally too unassuming to ever have been the type of celebrity they typically embrace.

Back in 2012 I wrote the above article when he was announcing his first comeback. I talked about the importance of fighters knowing when to walk away and cited some of the most irresponsible comeback fights of all, such as Larry Holmes taking on a clearly unwell Ali. By that point in his life he had already admitted substance abuse problems and had been placed into a rehabilitation facility. He finally looked healthy and had got back his trademark smile but the call of the crowd proved too strong, and he would suffer another defeat that was depressing to witness.

The fact he was in line for another comeback makes me feel a lot of things. His prescribed opponent, Eisa Al Da, had a record of 8-3, had only fought once professionally where he was knocked out and was also 46. It was the type of fight that served no purpose. If Hatton won, well of course he should. If Hatton lost it would be unbearably sad to see him brought so low. I don’t know how it got approved. It feels like the type of fight that can only be made in this era we exist in, freak fights, pointless exhibitions, curated mismatches to benefit YouTubers. The beautiful sport of boxing has been reduced to a mechanism for content.

Despite the fight being, in my opinion, a bad idea, Hatton genuinely seemed to love being back in the gym. He posted regular updates of his training regimen and had the glow of his old self. He was battling against the thickening trunk that befalls a man in his fourties but showed he still had some of the old instincts. It truly seems unthinkable that now is when we lose him.

I don’t want to dwell on his demons, especially now it seems they have got the better of him in what I am sure was a constant struggle even before retirement. I will say though that it is worth remembering him not just as a great boxer but as a powerful spokesperson in the fight against diseases of despair. There’s a clear line from what Hatton has said and a younger fighter like Pimblett speaking about mental health. Hatton, in typical fashion, was brutally honest about his struggles.

When appearing on Loose Women, a daytime UK TV show that is essentially The View without the political slander, he took a usually lighthearted interview segment into serious territory. “I contemplated suicide many, many times” he said speaking of dealing with his period post defeat. “I started thinking of different ways to get through it and I thought I could drink myself to death. So consequently, I got more depressed and I ended up taking drugs to enable me to drink more and it was a vicious circle.”

Years later he would repeat a similar story to the BBC saying “I tried to kill myself several times. I used to go to the pub, come back, take the knife out and sit there in the dark crying hysterically.” He promoted suicide prevention charities such as The Samaritans and became an ambassador for the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) in 2023. He literally shared the darkest times of his life with the public to save lives.

This type of generosity of spirit is why he was adored much further afield than his native Manchester, although it is worth noting that the greatest testament to that affection took place in the city this weekend during the Manchester derby. It’s probably only Hatton that could unite the blue and red halves of that city in mourning and celebration.

Mayweather said it best after that night in Vegas. “Ricky Hatton is a hell of a fighter.” He truly was, in every sense. Rest in peace Hitman.

While lots of organisations have been and gone over the years in Counter-Strike this week saw a true gut-wrencher for those of us who have been around a while. Via video a crestfallen Jason Lake told us that Complexity would be exiting the game that made their brand. Founded in 2003 and present in every version of the game, Complexity managed to hit almost every speedbump that can lie in the path of a speeding esports organisation. They tussled with bigger and wealthier names, were folded into failed conglomerates, existed under a pseudonym in the form of coL, wrestled with lawyers to acquire talent, accepted corporate ownership and fended off a subsequent merger… Whatever it took they somehow survived and when Lake raised the capital to bring back Complexity to the only steward suitable to protect it, namely himself, things were looking up. Now, they are no more and it’s uncertain when we’ll see them again.

How did we get here? Well, let’s just say Counter-Strike has been a broken business in one form or another for as long as I’ve been writing about it. It doesn’t need to be re-litigated here… You know who did what and you know that it’s the wider story of esports. Small people, poisoned by the twin venoms of greed and insecurity, made decisions only informed by that heady cocktail and they turned a potentially sustainable business into a Jenga tower of impossible expenses and conflict of interest. The only way for it to survive? Find itself a constant stream of steady-handed sugardaddies all willing to underwrite the impossible costs until one day even the pretence of possessing ethics has to be jettisoned to appease the owners of end stage esports.

Appropriately the announcement happened ahead of the Saudi state owned Esports World Cup, an event where those who took the sportswashing money get to compete for more of it, all for the low, low cost of your tongue. A truly artificial event in every sense of the word, fans that are literally being bussed in will unenthusiastically applaud as teams meet their financial obligations to esports biggest paymaster. The press releases will talk about prestige but we all know the truth… That’s if we even watch at all. If the games don’t tickle your fancy stick around for the state-owned awards show that will dole out accolades to everyone connected to the Saudi machine. Smile, wave and say after me… “They drive now.”

This is the grim reality that has took over Counter-Strike esports, something far, far worse than the so-called “franchise era” of the game. There, haves and have not were divided only by an amount somewhere between $3 – 5 million. Now, they’re divided by a number bigger by multitude, an ethical quandary and a market that hasn’t been this inflated since the American VC companies threw tens of millions at grifter owners who then blew it on doomed to fail projects like the Overwatch League.

For context, let’s look at Complexity’s recent history. In 2017, a period we can now safely refer to as “the good old days,” Jerry Jones and John Goff bought a majority stake in the organisation for an undisclosed amount. In 2021 the brand was then sold for $27 million to Gamesquare, a tech and media company based in Texas. Complexity was to be their esports project but when they were presented with an opportunity to buy the beleaguered FaZe organisation in 2024, including the esports division, they pulled the trigger on a $17 million purchase.

Now, this presented something of a problem for Complexity as not only could the two brands not be further apart in values and heritage but also the resultant conflict of interest would mean only one team could prevail. Understanding this Jason raised $10.36 million and bought his brand back for the second time in his professional life. In the time since he worked tirelessly to not only bring in investors and sponsors – spoiler, Jason’s colleagues poisoned that well to a point where we may never feel safe drinking water again – but also min/max his teams so they could run for as long as possible if the money didn’t come in. Fifteen months later they are closing their historic division, maybe for the last time.

So, what’s the lesson? What do we learn? Well, it’s now safe to say that operating a Counter-Strike team, particularly if you happen to be North American based, is contingent on whether you are able and willing to be brought into the Saudi Arabian fold. Outside of it is barren. There’s no real way or means to run a meaningful esports organisation. You can either have no aspirations of winning, in which case who cares what roster you assemble, or elect to become a talent farm for others, selling your best players repeatedly to fund the discovery of their equivalent.

And just to be clear I don’t think we “need” North America in Counter-Strike. Frankly, after what the supposed custodians did to the scene – ESL stealing away earned Pro League slots, the wastefulness of MGO owners across multiple titles, the attitude of players all too easily seduced by streaming money over trophies and a constant public flip-flopping about whether CS is a good investment or not – it simply didn’t deserve to succeed. I can say unreservedly that Jason did.

You won’t find anyone who cares about the game more. I watched him stood up and argue with TV executives over at Turner when they were talking about gimmicks that the broadcast could have. A stalwart of the CGS years, Jason understood the simple truth about Counter-Strike is all you have to do is put it on the screen in order for people to fall in love with it. He could have driven away a big payday there but he didn’t care. He wanted it done right or not at all. Many of the other owners in that room said nothing and gave him dagger eyes for the rest of the meeting.

It says something about priorities and passion and purpose. Why do we love the things we do? Why do we fight to make them better? Why do we neglect more rewarding pursuits to do so? I can’t answer that. I got the same sickness Jason does. He could have sold the brand, walked away, put his feet up and spend the rest of his years with his family and smoking cigars. I’ll also not romanticize it too much. There’s a timeline where he takes a bunch of Saudi money, same as everyone else, and I’d stay mostly silent about it. If anyone deserves a pass it’s him.

The fact that we now have a cabal of kingmakers in Counter-Strike should worry every fan. Those who show fealty to the Saudi Arabian state, who go forth and proselytize about how misunderstood their monarchy is and participate in all their projects, are showered in money and included in their propaganda. Those who don’t, or won’t, or aren’t deemed worthy enough of the opportunity, they have to go it alone in a market ruined by those now in league with Riyadh. In America especially the term “esports” now is about as attractive to investors as pitches featuring the phrase “this might look like a pyramid scheme but…”

You see it turns out running a real esports organisation, one with a soul and history, is pretty complex. If you prefer you can run an offshoot of the Saudi Arabian reputation saving mission and then things get real simple. Attend our event – we’ll pay. Don’t have that kind of team? We’ll pay. We can’t get our own fans… We’ll pay for yours. Fill social media with how great we are and we’ll reward you. Oh and of course you get a share of the prize money too. In the end there really is no complexity at all.

Following on from our summary of all the propaganda contained within the Esports World Cup documentary “Level Up,” one of the funniest things of 2025 happened. Fellow reporter Mikhail Klimentov revealed that after all of Team Liquid’s posturing about their “historic” use of a rainbow on their jerseys in Riyadh, the logo was blurred out for anyone geolocated as watching from Saudi Arabia. In addition to that a two-minute segment where the team’s CEO Steve Arhancet states that he himself is gay is cut completely from the final episode. The kicker? The organisation only seems to have learned this through Klimentov’s request for comment.

“We are disappointed to learn, upon your request for comment, that the Saudi broadcast of Esports World Cup: Level Up has been altered to remove images of our Pride jersey, as well as important parts of our Co-CEO Steve Arhancet's story as a gay man in esports,” Team Liquid’s reply read. “While we understand that streaming services may change content to comply with local regulations or content policies, we disagree with this kind of censorship and we have reached out to the Level Up production team and Amazon to look into the matter. Progress doesn't happen overnight, but we are hopeful in our conversations around the topic, and we will continue to wear our jersey with pride across the globe, including at the Esports World Cup.”

It is the perfect punchline to the joke Team Liquid have perfectly set up, namely that it is going to be them wearing the vaguest of rainbows on Saudi soil that moves the dial and not the activism of groups like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. Arhancet, in an interview with gaymingmag.com, said “we had all of our players wear a pride jersey on broadcast, not just on Twitch and YouTube, but being broadcast through the linear TV network in Saudi Arabia and the rest of MENA. It was potentially the first time that queer Saudis would stop and see themselves and their life represented in their home country…Maybe there’s a queer Saudi that has suddenly felt seen.” It now seems that version of events might not be entirely true and Liquid management didn’t think to check what actually was broadcast domestically in Saudi.

So, after months of enjoying the cultural cachet afforded to them by the most brazen attempt to double dip I’ve seen in this ridiculous business, they now must answer a tough question. Namely, “if the point of the exercise was to have people from Saudi see LGBT representation, what will you do now that your business partner is explicitly censoring it from the people that need to see it the most?” They won’t answer it. They will instead do what every other organisation participating in the EWC has done; they’ll stay quiet and take the money. After all, that has always been one of the points of the exercise, to buy their silence.

It is awful but it is still impossible not to see the funny side. Since Team Liquid partnered with the EWC, Arhancet has been on a media tour where he has talked openly about being gay for the first time in his esports career. In his mind it was in service of showing that you could changes hearts and minds with earnest engagement. Now, after this latest revelation, it should be clear that his new friends in Riyadh don’t respect him for who he is. They’ve taken one of the industry’s most influential CEOs and reduced him, very publicly, to the status of useful idiot and they are loving every second of it.

Now I understand that this will make some of you squeamish because I am essentially talking about someone else’s sexuality within the context of critique. Well, if you feel that way, fuck you. Anyone who has been paying attention instead of cashing checks knows that the claims of “progress” within Saudi have been wildly exaggerated by people who are trying to facilitate how they sleep at night. It was the same when Riot Games had their LGBT representatives lecture staff who had concerns about their EWC partnership that the use of their game is also a big win for the LGBT in Saudi. Their rationale? The canonically gay characters in their game will be shown on the big screen and everyone watching will know that as soon as Twisted Fate gets done exploding the nexus he’s off home to get in a hot tub with Graves… Except they are not canonically gay in Saudi and if you could make the characters hug or kiss the game would be banned. Like all gay video characters in Saudi they are in fact Schrodinger’s queer; gay in the territories where gay rights are accepted, very fucking straight in the places where they aren’t. Similarly, it seems Arhancet has been reduced to the status of a character. He is NOT gay on Saudi TV. He never will be. Team Liquid will never support the LGBT there either. You see, gay doesn’t exist in Saudi the same way pride – in every sense of the word – doesn’t exist in esports.

What did anyone expect from a country that had agents from the Ministry of Commerce seize toys and clothes displaying rainbows from stores? A place that banned the truly transgressive piece of work Pixar’s “Lightyear” for a same sex kiss from beings rendered by software. Where this post of a shirtless man in shorts was deemed a “cybercrime” under morality laws and the person responsible sentenced to three years in a maximum security prison.

The hubris it takes to think a logo on a jersey, or a few self-aggrandising interviews are going to change a nation’s culture, especially the aspects of a theological nature, is a special kind of deluded. And so, we arrive at the lesson. It seems it is only esports executives that are not aware of the old fable about the scorpion and the frog. It is often mistold so the potency of the message gets diluted, but it goes like this… A scorpion is at a river and unable to cross as he cannot swim. A frog happens upon the stranded arachnid and is duly asked for a ride across the waterway. The frog is hesitant because scorpions are known to sting and eat any animals they encounter but the scorpion makes a compelling argument. “If I sting you while on your back I would surely drown” it said. “Climb aboard” replied the frog and began to swim to the other side with his new passenger. Suddenly the fire of a thousand suns burned into his back and his limbs grew heavy. He realised that he had been stung. As the frog slipped beneath the water he asked, “why would you do this when you knew what the consequence would be?” The last words of the scorpion were “How could I resist? It’s in my nature.”

For more than two years now I’ve watched people that should in theory be my colleagues tie themselves in knots trying to explain to me that the more exposure to frogs the scorpions receive the more likely the scorpions are to become frogs too. They’ve made complete, but wealthy, fools of themselves in the process. None of it was necessary as this is the easiest landscape to negotiate from a PR perspective. You simply admit that when the price is high enough you will betray your stated values and choose self-interest. That’s it. Most people aren’t into being martyrs for causes in their single experience on this plane of existence so most will understand and at least respect the honesty. We get it, you’re shit at running an esports business and you believe you have a divine right to operate and the Saudi money enables that. Hell, you can even frame it that it is a necessary evil to keep the hundreds of people you employ from losing their jobs. People will shrug and say, “well at least they’re being honest” and get on with their day doomscrolling. This collective attempt to deceive everyone that you place LGBT rights, women’s rights, the treatment of migrant workers and civil liberties above your bank balance is absurd on its face now. Just stop doing it.

To end, let me provide some food for thought for Mr. Arhancet and Team Liquid, who still insist that there would be nothing to gain from publicly boycotting the event. Over in Apex Legends a trans competitor publicly stated they refuse to compete in a country where the state could choose to murder them. This isn’t just a one-off “life changing money” tournament either like it was last year. It’s their official ALGS circuit this time around. At great pain to their professional career and personal finances they stood down from the competition for the second year in a row. I doubt this will be featured in a documentary either.

By now most esports fans will be aware of the existence of the “Esports World Cup,” the Saudi Arabian state’s domestic foray into esportswashing. Repurposed from the Gamers8 festival in order to tap into the world of competitive gaming, the EWC has tried very quickly to synthesize credibility in a space where most true fans wield potent bullshit detectors. So far, despite tens of millions of dollars being thrown at the project, it has failed to convince the esports audience it is authentic… There’s something about the participants bleating in unison about how great it is, the contrived marketing and the same old celebrities for hire acting as mouthpieces that just give the game away. People aren’t buying it and so, right on cue, we get a five-part documentary series dropped into the slop section of Amazon Prime.

Before we get into it, there are a few things to know about why the Esports World Cup exists in the first place. Most obviously it is part of the continued “bread and circuses” domestic policy of the Saudi Arabian kingdom’s Vision 2030 project, designed to extricate itself from relying on its oil to remain culturally influential. In addition to that it also enables Saudi to control pretty much all the esports industry by essentially underwriting the costs of participants, as well as offering other publicly unspoken incentives for cooperation. Finally, and I’m sure you have noticed this, it is ultimately constructed in a way that Falcons will almost certainly win it. Why do you think other attending organisations enter far fewer teams than the Saudi Arabian hometown heroes? After Saudi’s entrance into multiple sports the lessons are clear. They want total control of the space, all roads must in some way lead back to Riyadh and where possible Saudi Arabian nationals must be beneficiaries, either in work appointments or in hollow victories.

With all that in mind it makes total sense to create a documentary series that not only creates the illusion that all these things are just organic, the inevitable positive outcomes from the royal family’s interest, but also to rewrite history for the benefit of those who don’t know any better. It is propaganda in the purest sense, filled to the brim with convenient inaccuracies, glaring omissions and blatant lies. Even the initial press release made it sound as if a SONY production team simply stumbled across the event and were compelled to make this series about it. Alas, the credits give the game away… “All rights reserved Esports World Cup foundation” at the very end. This was commissioned and as such can’t be regarded as a documentary in the traditional sense. It’s purpose isn’t to document anything other than what those involved with EWC want to tell you and it turns out what they want to tell you is a series of easily disprovable fabrications.

While it is my aim to review the whole series – spoiler, it’s terrible – right out the gate I wanted to demonstrate how absurd the series is in terms of how it frames both the EWC event and the Falcons organization. I would wager even someone with relatively little understanding of esports history knows something is off… The way the documentary cuts around crowd shots because of the tonal disconnect of the “biggest event” having little attendance… The way the narrative suggests pursuit of the trophy is competitive when in actuality Falcons, by design, win it at a canter… The constant recurring use of the phrase “life changing money” from the online promotional material that suggests no other esports competition has a prize pool that comes close.

While I certainly wouldn’t recommend watching the whole series, especially if you are an industry person that hasn’t been bought off, it’s worth watching the first twelve minutes of the first episode just to see how densely packed the set-up is with weapons grade bullshit. However, just in case you don’t have the time or inclination I’ll break down every ridiculous thing they say in that span of time.

Background commentary states “this is the Superbowl, World Cup and Olympics rolled into one.”

You might consider it a cheap shot to start with what is clearly a statement of self-aggrandizing designed to hype the event, but it only gets worse from here. Direct comparisons to the World Cup and Olympics don’t seem to make sense as, while the event has teams from across the globe, their nationalities play no part in the event itself.

Perhaps they are referring to prestige then. Well, if we look at that metric it’s hard to believe any serious esports competitor would consider a World Cup victory, which is contingent on other titles that they may know little to nothing about, superior to the best competitions in their field. For instance, The International for Dota will always be considered career defining for those who have won it and those who haven’t. It is also an event that has earned multiple comparisons to The Superbowl for at least seven years and Valve never had to tell anyone to make that connection.

Equally the EWC does not replace League of Legends World Finals, nor a Counter-Strike Major, nor a PUBG Global Championship or the Starcraft 2 tournaments of yesteryear. For the smaller esports titles, it might well be a Superbowl of sorts but that is mainly by virtue of the prize pool and little else. Even games that have fallen by the wayside of popularity, such as Overwatch, have previous events that will be more highly regarded than anything that occurs in Riyadh.

At approximately 2 minutes and 15 seconds, a snippet of commentary says “Falcons vs Liquid… Bitter rivals since the dawn of esports”

While it’s hard to say for sure, this piece of commentary sounds like two pieces of footage spliced together. That would at least make sense as it is hard to imagine any professional commentator stating the above, even if they were relatively new to the work.

For context, Team Liquid are one of the original esports organisations, having been founded in 2000 by Victor Goossens. They grew from being a Starcraft “clan” based in the Netherlands to become one of the most successful and best run multi-gaming organisations (MGOs) in the world today. By contrast, Team Falcons didn’t come into existence until 2017 and focused primarily on FIFA until things changed in 2021 when an influx of money enabled them to expand into multiple titles. Since then, they have used finances from investors that, according to the organisation’s CEO, “wish to remain private” and have enough rosters to all but guarantee success in a format like the EWC.

So, Falcons were not in existence at the dawn of esports and weren’t competitively relevant until about 2020 if we’re being generous. How then could they and Team Liquid have any kind of rivalry, let alone a bitter one? Analyzing the games where they have competed also shows this statement to be laughable. Dota 2 might be arguably Falcons most successful esports division thus far and while Falcons have beaten Liquid more times than not since 2023, the year they were established, it’s not much of a rivalry. Falcons beat Liquid in exactly one event final, BetBoom Dacha Dubai 2024. Compare that to 2023 when Gamin Gladiators beat Liquid four finals, three of them in a row, as well as beating them in the final of 2024’s “Riyadh Masters” at the EWC and you can see what a genuinely bitter rivalry might look like.

In Counter-Strike their teams have barely played each other and never in a high-stakes environment, let alone for a trophy. They’ve met in Rocket League once, they don’t seem to have competed directly in Apex Legends, the same for Valorant, the same for League of Legends… The list goes on. In addition to this if you simply look at the comparative trophy haul of the two orgs – Team Liquid having won over 75 major trophies, Team Falcons a fraction of that if you discount their smaller regional tournament victories – and you can see that these two organisations are not even in the same universe.

The reality is that for the purposes of the documentary, with the narrative being that Team Liquid had a genuine shot of winning the EWC when they entered five fewer events than Falcons, their rivalry had to be “established” even if it has no basis in reality.

The recurring use of the phrase “life changing amounts of money”

Not so much a lie as a semantic argument that is repeated across all the promotional materials for the tournament. Let’s be clear, esports has been handing out “life changing amounts of money” for years and years. Tournaments like League of Legends Worlds, The International, the Counter-Strike Majors, Fornite’s World Cup, Arena of Valor, Call of Duty and PUBG have all held competitions with prize pools in the millions of dollars if not tens of millions. The very best players have become millionaires and even where that isn’t the case they have enjoyed a standard of living far above what they would have had in the timeline where they didn’t pursue esports. There’s nothing unique about what the EWC is doing.

The framing across the documentary is as if no other tournaments have ever offered “life changing” prizes but that of course isn’t true. For instance, the first episode revolves around the Call of Duty: Warzone tournament which, of course, Falcons win. The prize pool for that tournament is $1 million, admittedly the largest on the calendar, with the winner taking home $200,000. However, the second highest tournament of that year was the World Series of Warzone Global Finals, held in Las Vegas. That “only” had a prize pool of $950,000 however the winner of that tournament (incidentally Falcons as well) was awarded $300,000. Now by my estimations that makes it 100,000 more “life changing” dollars in the non-EWC competition but why split hairs?

The Esports World Cup is referred to as the “biggest trophy of the year”

While this was a passing piece of commentary, across the series the notion that the Esports World Cup is the “biggest” trophy in the eyes of participating organisations comes up constantly. It isn’t clear by what metric they mean but ultimately none of them really stand up to any scrutiny.

You could make an argument that it is based on prize money but that may or may not be true. For instance, we don’t know what the prize pool for the next Dota International will be as the crowd funding element of it hasn’t begun yet. The recent prizes have been significantly smaller than past years due to Valve’s change of direction for the Battle Pass, there’s every chance that they do something different this time around and the prize pool ends up eclipsing the $3 million allocated for Dota in Riyadh. In League of Legends the World Championship has a prize pool of $5 million, more than double competitors will be awarded at the EWC. In Counter-Strike the prize pool matches that of a Major with $1.25 million. Rocket League’s World Championship hands out $200,000 more than EWC. Again, we can go on. For a handful of tournaments this argument can be made but not really for any S-tier esports.

Viewership then? Well, again not really. League of Legends at the EWC had a 1.1 million peak, which sounds impressive until you compare that to the 2.8 million enjoyed by MSI 2024 just a couple of months beforehand. The World Championships boasted 6.9 million excluding Chinese viewership. Counter-Strike managed to get up to 756,000+ but that pales in comparison to the numbers put up by Copenhagen and Shanghai’s Majors that year, 1.8 million and 1.3 million respectively. The competition featured in this first episode, Call of Duty: Warzone, achieved 135,281 peak viewership compared to 286,630 for the aforementioned Las Vegas event.

Factor in to this the arguments about prestige and history and it’s not clear in which way it is the “biggest trophy of the year” beyond net spend. A lot of money has gone into this very inorganic competition and a lot of the social media interactions around it feel forced, whether it’s the contractually mandated cringe-inducing replies from participating organisations or the YouTube videos that get a ridiculous disproportionate number of views to comments and shares. It is a physically large trophy though so this argument can be made literally without any valid critique.

Ralf Reichert: “The Crown Prince himself came up with the idea”

Like all good propaganda it is essential to pay tribute to the glorious leader. Ralf Reichert, co-founder of ESL and now kingpin of the Esports World Cup, states that this elaborate esports competition was the idea of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud. While much has been made in the media about how the Crown Prince is a huge gamer, the gulf between casual play and understanding the intricacies of competition across multiple titles is vast. It is also a matter of record that while Reichert was still at ESL they worked closely with contacts to set up the acquisition by the Savvy Games Group, funded by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) and as a requirement of accessing those funds appointed MBS as the chairman of the company.

While it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the Crown Prince was aware of esports and maybe even would have liked tournaments in Riyadh, the narrative he is the progenitor of the Esports World Cup looks incredibly unlikely. What is more likely is that esports veterans such as Reichert, having negotiated one deal with the PIF, moved across to a new state funded entity and used their expertise to repurpose the Gamers8 festival to something more esports focused with MBS’s blessing.

Patrik “cArn” Sättermon: “It’s a milestone in esports… It’s the first time we are gathering our teams competing exclusively under the fnatic umbrella against other multi-title organisations.”

This quote from fnatic’s CGO is something of a car crash. I can’t disagree that the EWC is a milestone in esports. It is certainly the first time a state has decided to underwrite an entire tournament ecosystem for their own political purposes. It must also be said though that beyond that it’s hard to decipher what Patrik meant beyond trying to promote the tournament as something far greater than it actually is.

The statement “it’s the first time we are gathering our teams competing exclusively under the fnatic umbrella against other multi-title organisations” makes no sense because that is literally the premise of every esports tournament. Fnatic’s line-ups go to events such as the Intel Extreme Masters, which have multiple titles being competed in at once. This fits the description Patrik is saying is a “milestone.”

So, let’s be charitable and assume he meant it was the first time “multi-title organisations” competed across multiple disciplines with the victories contributing to an organisation being crowned an overall winner. If that was the case, he would of course be lying as well. The Championship Gaming Series (CGS), a $60 million creation of David Hill and News Corporation, operated a similar format between 2007-2008. Each participating organisation had to field a Counter-Strike: Source (CS:S) team as well as entrants in Dead Or Alive 4, Forza Motorsport 2 and FIFA 2008. Each tournament contributed points towards a total and the organisation with the highest number of points was awarded $1 million.

While Patrik was at that time an active competitor in Counter-Strike 1.6 and his team did not participate in the CGS, it’s impossible to imagine he wasn’t aware of its existence. It was widely criticized for choosing CS:S as its version of Counter-Strike by professional 1.6 players, with several luminaries from that scene lobbying for CGS to change their mind and pick their version. It also represented a huge bump in prize money given that the record set for a 1.6 prize pool was in the region of $200,000 at that time.

CGS was of course a spectacular failure and many, especially those involved, have attempted to downplay its existence, particularly when other disasters popular with the esports grifter class such as the Overwatch League emulated its structure. Regardless, it remains absolutely incorrect to say that this is the first time this has happened.

OJ Borg: “What that [The existence of the EWC] has meant is an arms race for talent.”

OJ can be forgiven as he may not be aware of the minutiae of why this apparent “arms race” is occurring. Many organisations have suddenly gone out and picked up new teams and players in titles they haven’t participated in before for the sole purpose of entering them into the EWC. This isn’t the full story though as it overlooks the fact that the EWC, via its World Cup Club Program, provides a stipend for organisations that essentially underwrites the cost of having these teams. In essence, you can think of it as being paid to enter the competition because having all the big names do so adds an air of credibility that it may not have without their attendance. It also appears in some cases that there have been agreements with the EWC to bring in certain personalities for the function of further promoting the event and bringing it closer to the Olympics, such as the inclusion of chess as an “esport.”

The so-called “arms race” is ultimately just teams taking advantage of a slush fund to cover the costs of a team they would not have otherwise recruited. There are also doubts about the long-term future of players and teams either side of the EWC or should the EWC ever decide to stop funding the organisations in this way. More succinctly, this is part of the agreement and if for any reasons things drastically change with how the EWC operates the interest in beating Falcons and winning the EWC through funding competitive talent will change rapidly.

A montage of Vitality’s Anne Banschbach, Gaimin Gladiators Joseph Turner, G2’s Alban Dechelotte and Team Liquid’s Steve Arhancet parroting that Falcons are the “biggest competition” for each of their respective organisations.

Part of the documentary’s narrative is framing Falcons as anything other than an organisation enjoying massive handouts through its investors and state sponsor of the Saudi Telecom Company. Here formerly self-respecting executives pretend that Falcons are in some way the “biggest competition” for each of them. While that might be true exclusively for the EWC it’s not true for similar reasons listed above for Team Liquid.

To be clear, Falcons outside of the EWC have not been a broadly successful organisation. Their Rocket League team has been outstanding, almost flawless, and their Dota 2 team was the team of 2024. Apex Legends has started excellently for them in 2025 and we’ve already highlighted their strong Warzone placements. Considering they are playing with “house money” so to speak it’s not a fantastic return and it’s certainly reasonable to say that they don’t engage in the same level of scouting and forethought as other organisations when it comes to recruitment. Their strategy is simple – buy the best at almost at any cost and then pretend they didn’t spend any money to acquire them. It’s highly unlikely that in private conversation these storied and tenured organisations would view them as their biggest competition except for when it comes to keeping any of their players who actually win things.

It's worth noting that despite winning the EWC at a canter Falcons still only won two competitions at the event out of the eighteen in which they participated. Team BDS from Switzerland can make the same claim. An Esports Award for esports organisation of the year might add some credence to the belief they are the entity to be envious of but then you remember the Saudi Arabian state did a deal with those awards too, that they are tacked on to the end of the EWC and that mysteriously as long as you’re in good standing with the Riyadh clique you can win.

Grant Rousseau: “The assumption is Mossad and I went out and spent millions/ It’s just… I mean, that is a natural reaction when you see the calibre of players we’re signing. I get it.”

Since saying this, Grant Rousseau has… Parted ways with the organisation. One wonders how he’ll view his time there, like making the one-finger Islamic salute and pretending it’s to say Falcons are “number one.”

But I digress. It’s an objective fact that Falcons have spent millions of dollars to acquire the rosters they have and that they pay exorbitant salaries to the best of talent on their roster. It’s not a secret. Falcons like to downplay that their success comes from money, but they simply hoover up whatever they want knowing desperate esports orgs run into the ground by incompetent executives can’t say no to the cash. They can have any player they want in any game and when that’s the case it requires little insight to figure out a good strategy. Despite that, they’ve had high profile embarrassing failures like their Counter-Strike division which alone must have conservatively cost them a total of $8 million thus far.

Falcons are not a typical esports organisation and while the goals may appear the same as everyone else’s – to acquire talent capable of winning tournaments for the sake of promotion – theirs is very different. They must be successful to show Saudi competence, to infer that anything Saudi Arabia and the royal family touches is destined to be prosperous. Fortunately for them the pressure to achieve that is alleviated by their contributors and close connections to the Saudi Arabian state. They are not operating in the same plane of existence as everyone else has been historically speaking.

So, June is soon to be in our rearview and the corporations can all go back to distributing their insincerity across the other social causes they don’t actually care about. In the world of esports, it has to be noted this was quite possibly the quietest Pride Month we’ve had since organisations realised they could raise money in American markets by synthesizing concern for the twin masters of diversity and inclusion. There were fewer rainbows floating across social media and fewer saccharine soliloquies about how the orgs see you and stand beside you. What gives?

Well, an interesting but not unexpected thing has happened since dozens of the world’s top esports organisations have partnered with the Saudi Arabian state. Many of them have elected to shelve the values they very publicly traded on just a few years ago to avoid offending their new paymasters and potential fans. Turns out values and principles have borders and there is little interest in fighting the good fight in territories where to do so will cost you money instead of making it.

You will recall that one of the key arguments put forward by those who have openly agreed to partner with Saudi Arabian state entities is that in doing so they are presenting Western cultural values around equality to them and softening their resolve about implementing them into their society. I’m old enough to remember when this argument was made about Russia as news footage of citizens queuing a quarter mile to enjoy a McDonalds for the first time did the rounds. This argument has been made about the Chinese state as a rationale for doing business there and instead we delete gay love scenes from movies, airbrush black people out of advertising and even invent entire scenes to pander to their sensibilities. If there’s one thing you can safely ridicule the attempted export of Western values for, it’s how quickly our self-appointed ambassadors sell them out as soon as the check clears.

And so it has been with the esports relationship with Riyadh. When the organisations are challenged, they explain that long term it will be a good thing not just for them but for the Saudi Arabian people. They say that progress takes time even as they spit divisive venom into the eyes of their domestic fans and colleagues for their accused ethical sloth. Yet the reality is this the cultural backwash has only flowed in one direction and this is demonstrated by the actions across June.

Many organisations were slowing down on Pride Month anyway. There are a variety of reasons for this which include partnership with Chinese businesses, expansion into MENA territories or as one owner told me on background “it was always something we did for the fucking Americans because Europeans are generally less hysterical about that shit.” It’s also impossible to ignore the cultural backslide Americans generally feel on these issues… As always when people are paying attention you must win hearts and minds rather than claim to know about the secret nazi thoughts that live in the hearts of minds of anyone who expresses mild disagreement. Yet the LGBT movement in America let wokescolds and posers poison their message so potently that even moderates can’t metabolise it anymore and are loathe to try.

But it was at one point a dogma readily adopted to unlock marketing budget and gather fans from different backgrounds. Between 2016 and 2019 it was a slam dunk way to achieve both that and publicity as the world became obsessed with “resisting” things, some of them real, some of them whole cloth fabrications. “We’ll never be like that in esports” they said but of course the only foundational principle in esports is the people who run it will do and say anything to never have to go back to whatever world they came from and end their play pretend celebrity lifestyle. This June we’ve seen that reality play out as barely any of the organisations that were heading to Riyadh and Qiddiya mentioned Pride.

Now understand I don’t think you have to. I’ve explained this many times but what I label Performative Pride, that is fake and loud support for LGBT causes does more harm than good. Most importantly it warps the expectations of LGBT people fooling them into thinking they have powerful allies they can rely upon. My brothers and sisters know you do not. We are very much on our own and even the most immediate and obvious of support networks is a fractious alliance held together by necessity and quick to come apart afterwards. These companies are welcoming only in so far as you can serve as a shield from criticism or when they can take your identity and turn into a line of merchandise. They won’t even boycott an event in a country that has the legal authority to murder you. Take note and spend accordingly.

The second danger of Performative Pride is that it provides easy fodder for the bigots when the cracks in the façade start to show. “Look, they don’t even care about this deviant shit” they say and then they are emboldened to speak about how the Rainbow Mafia is a minority that can be silenced. Wavering support suggests there may very well be something wrong with the support in the first instance, but it isn’t the businesses that suffer in the long term. Sure, they get humiliated on social media for a few days, a briefly tough time for an anonymous admin. Once that dies down that energy is simply channelled back into your common-or-garden homophobia. In short you beat someone over the head with it then leave us to face the retaliatory blows.

Which isn’t to say Riyadh won’t throw a few token gestures at their new business partners. The world of sports shows us that ultimately when it comes to making money the Saudi royal family themselves can be somewhat flexible. For instance, Team Liquid are peacocking about how they are once again going to be allowed to wear a jersey with a rainbow on it while competing in Riyadh. While I see little victory in being given an exception that the people of Saudi would not, I also have no doubt they will try and serve this up as a “told you so” à la the “they drive now” justification. It must also be noted that while both times have involved rainbow colours, nothing specifically about the design screams “pride” and it’s hard to believe that discussions and concessions didn’t occur along these lines.

Where Saudi Arabia and their sportswashing enterprises are involved, I do not believe in coincidence. See for example their decision to release a documentary series in June and how their partnership requires the esports organisations to post about it as much as possible. The series, which we will eventually get round to reviewing, sees an episode of propaganda released every week in June, creating so much noise as to drown out any other efforts anyone else would be talking about. The series so far serves as the standard normie, esports documentary slop with the added exception that it actively rewrites history to make both the EWC and Saudi organisation Falcons seem like the pinnacle of esports.

Still, that presupposes these organisations would be publicly expressing support for Pride Month anyway. Let’s look at some examples starting with Cloud9. As North America’s largest esports organisation they used to never miss an opportunity to speak up about Pride and social causes. See for yourself. This June they decided not to but their main account did manage to tweet a total of twenty (20) times about the Esports World Cup. For what it’s worth they tweeted more about Father’s Day than they did Pride Month in 2025.

Or what about Fnatic in Europe? Another organisation that has talked a good game, even having a diversity and inclusion page on their official website. There they state that “Fnatic is a long-standing supporter of the LGBT+ gaming community: for example, our 2019 Pride collection saw 100% of proceeds from a one-off apparel drop channelled to London Gaymers and Stonewall. As an issue, continued support of LGBT+ participation in esports is emblematic of Fnatic’s vision of gaming as a space for all of humanity to connect.” Obviously with such strong committed beliefs you can imagine they’ve been vocal for this year’s Pride. Except there’s nothing there, even as they managed to tweet about the Esports World Cup fifteen (15) times in June.

Similarly, you can laugh at Vitality whose last tweet about Pride or LGBT causes was in 2022 where they proclaimed “this is the right time to acknowledge that people are still discriminated for their gender identity & sexual orientation.” It sure was because the following year they were in attendance at Riyadh’s Gamers8 festival and have gone on to become one of the Esports World Cup’s most faithful servants. Accordingly Pride Month or anything to do with LGBT causes have not been on the agenda since.

While there might be a swing in the social pendulum and a number of factors that makes Pride posting no longer the money raising meta, there are a few things to remember before you shrug it off. The first is it is no coincidence that it has died down at the exact moment the largest sources of money are now coming from sources where it isn’t culturally accepted to speak on such things. American marketing budgets for esports have been rightfully slashed, hilariously as a direct result of the lies and incompetence of the people now latched on to the Saudi money teat. The second thing to never forget is that no-one forced these people to go so hard on these causes to begin with.

Let’s end with a story. You may recall that FaZe Clan, also now part of the Esports World Cup stipend program, wished a happy Pride Month and “love to our LGBTQ+ friends, family, and community” on June 1^st 2022. When one of their members, Talal “virus” Almalki, an adherent Muslim, stated publicly that he did not support the LGBT community due to his religious beliefs he was attacked by many in the esports community for such an open expression of bigotry. By January 2023 he had left the organisation citing the treatment he received, which according to him included him being frozen out of brand deals due to his comments. He also stated that he had suggested collaborations in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, all of which were declined as being non-compatible with the organisation’s values. By August of that year FaZe would attend the Gamers8 event in Riyadh and go on to promote that festival’s conversion into the Esports World Cup. They’ve since gone back and deleted the 2022 tweet.

You see, when it comes down to it, quite literally the organisations that take the scraps from the Saudi table have no pride at all.

Previous Winners

🥇 2010: John “jHG” Blackwood

🥇 2011: Marc “virp” Corban

🥇 2012: Dmitry Smilyanets

🥇 2013: Simon Boudreault

🥇 2014: Noh Dae Chu – AHQ Korea

🥇 2015: No Award

🥇 2016: No Award

🥇 2023: Nicole LaPointe Jameson

And The Winner Is…

🥇2024: Sam “SlayTheMinotaur” Cook

Esports is never going to beat the allegations that it’s where failures come to thrive. Historically a lot of our managers and executives – from grass roots to the very top of the scene – have come to esports not because they’re passionate about the product but because they see the one last place they can deceive others about being competent. Often they are cast out of other industries, ones with higher expectations, measured performance and background checks. When they arrive here they quickly realise that it is all too easy to exploit under-socialised young adults with the type of transparent lies that likely brought them to esports in the first place…

So, once again, we’re talking about a manager who essentially used their player’s efforts as a vanity project and personal piggy-bank for their proclivities, an esports tale as old as time. Better yet, it’s someone from UK esports, a scene that is an absolute shell of what it once was that only seems able to produce the type of bedroom organisations ran by chancers that the space outgrew ten years ago. Of course, you can’t be too hard on esports when that same description has applied to our government for the last twenty years.

Still, the scene that gave us the great Biggsy and Baggsy has given us another legend for the history books in the form of Sam “SlayTheMinotaur” Cook, founder of Into The Breach. The UK organisation had its time in the spotlight after its Counter-Strike team made it to the final eight of the Paris Major, after a flawed regional qualifier that effectively airlifted them into the top sixteen teams after beating the powerhouses of Sprout and B8. All joking aside the organisation had of course done nothing wrong, mere beneficiaries of a broken system that used enough of their talents and luck to get an outcome that while absurd on its face helped lay some foundations for growth.

The problem with that? Well, Cook by his own admission was unable to keep his hand out of the cookie jar and players past and present were suddenly starting to have to chase backpay and prize money. Always there were execuses… The esports classics such as a change of bank accounts or a freeze on processing payments. Money would turn up sometimes but so far removed from when it was earned that it never felt that things were heading in the right direction. Players and staff alike were always chasing what they were owed and for those that had won the highly coveted sticker money there’s still ongoing disputes today. More on that in a moment.

This would all come tumbling out into the public discourse after months and months of attempts to reconcile things privately, which at one point even involved this author. A story for another time perhaps. In the end the unsustainable game of robbing Peter to pay Paul came to an end with an announcement that Into The Breach would be ceasing operations. The resultant comments from Cook are a David Brent-esque goldmine of detached contrition, an unintentionally hilarious series of blunt apologia mixed with attempts to be philosophical and poetic at the wrong time.

“Unfortunately, I, the CEO, was acting as two people” he would write on X.com “one trying to match their efforts and another a destructive, alcoholic narcissist hellbent on self-immolation. I think everyone whose met me has likely seen one of these two sides, with the former able to convince everyone around me I was a sensible person, acting responsibly and not betraying their trust, while the later disappears in fiendish pursuit of dopamine and self-harm. The ultimate caricature which embodies the worst of people and this industry.”

You see, for all you esports managers there exists in you two wolves. One a competent go-getter determined to do the right thing by the staff you have a duty of care to. The other one has all the decency and self-control of Gollum with access to a VIP account to Ringhub. That’s just the way it goes in esports… When life’s losers get even a small taste of success and status they simply cannot go back to being the person they really are. The whole industry has been ruined essentially due to the vanity of people unable to accept that they’re awkward nerds or mediocre talents.

“ITB goes under, people lose employment, salaries will go unpaid, money lost, hate created – all my fault and responsibility” he would continue. “They’ll be several legal consequences of this, all of which I’ll accept and face. People will be made as whole as possible with what funds are available. This’ll be managed outside my influence.”

Just to give you an idea of the scale of the problem it’s fair to say that for players of Into The Breach the sticker money would be life-changing. By Cook’s own description in a now deleted post, he said it was “$241,071.61 per player” before adding they were contractually owed “$178,850.21.” You’ll notice the discrepancy in the two amounts and obviously while there’s salaries and operating costs to cover it’s hard to shake the feeling that someone’s getting fleeced somewhere. This is especially true when the manager is simply shrugging off the spending as something his alcoholic alter-ego did.

In addition to anything outstanding to the players Cook also by his own admissions in another deleted post took out £600k in directors loans that he blew the entirety of on “benders and self-harm action.” The crazy part is the organisation, which had recently expanded into Dota 2, had made a total of £4 million in 2024, which would have made it a relative success story even if achievements were sparse. Now it’s dead and there’s a nagging sense that Cook might never face any real consequences for what appears to be textbook embezzlement.

It is further proof, if any more were needed, that even in the rare cases where esports works out as is claimed it can, there will always be someone who is willing to break it for their own short-sighted selfish desires. Truly an industry populated by the bungled and botched, a circus and freakshow rolled into one where the attractions wear cheap suits and fake jewellery… A Narnia for the incompetent and this year Cook gets kicked back out of the wardrobe.

The long-running Ukrainian esports tournament producer Starladder was purchased by Nodwin Gaming for the sum of $5.5 million. The deal comes after Starladder had revealed they were making a return to producing Counter-Strike events in 2025 with some reports suggesting one would be an official Valve Major. Nodwin Gaming, owned by parent company Nazara Technologies, have produced esports events in the past, particularly in India and surrounding countries.

The deal however has raised some eyebrows due to a number of potential connections with the Savvy Games Group, owners of ESL, ESEA, Esports Engine, FACEIT and DreamHack, as well as overlap with executives of the Saudi Arabian Esports World Cup, namely CEO Ralf Reichert. While there is nothing explicitly forbidden about the move some industry experts are viewing it as a means to shore up control of the Counter-Strike space by a wealthy coalition of significant influence.

It comes at a time when Valve have taken a greater interest in regulating their tournament circuit. Their new rules hold tournament operators accountable in a number of ways, most notably by forcing commitment to tournament dates as well as ensuring there can be no exclusionary business dealings with participating organisations.

The Timeline

In 2018 Nazara Technologies acquired Nodwin Gaming specifically for the purpose of “executing its own esports tournaments. Shortly after that purchase ESL invested in Nazara to the tune of 1.11% in shares. As part of that agreement Nazara were given licensing rights to run events under the ESL India brand for five years which was executed by the Nodwin team. We know that in 2021 Ralf Reichert was given the designation of Director for Nodwin Gaming, that designation explicitly being referenced as active in the most recently available financial reports from Nazara.

Also happening in 2021 was a partnership agreement between ESL and long-running German esports marketing company Freaks4U. That agreement gave them the rights to produce ESL and DreamHack events with shared commercialization. Why would that be relevant? In 2024 Nodwin Gaming International, a subsidiary of Nodwin Gaming, purchased the majority stake in Freaks4U and placed several of its executives on the board of directors.

At the end of last year Nodwin “secured” investment from parent company Nazara to the tune of £5.9m.They then make the purchase of Starladder for a deal worth a reported $5.5 million with a $2 million cash payment. The owner of Starladder Roman Romantsov, will stay on to run the company but it isn’t clear who else will have influence over the operations. Certainly we know that there’s a number of former ESL staff now currently executive positions within Nordwin.

In February 2024 an eighteen-year company veteran Niels Wolter left ESL to work as Nodwin’s Chief Integration Officer. In the press release announcing the move Nodwin Gaming specifically stated that Wolter was the point of contact for their DreamHack India projects. Merlin Wiedeking who spent ten years at ESL and five years at Nodwin is now listed as a Director of Starladder on Linkedin. The Nodwin Co-founder Ashkat Rathee also explicitly listed ESL/EFG as being a partner that had “funded” them in a blurb for a n upcoming conference on Blockchain in Dubai.

Internationally Nodwin Gaming is also partnered with the Global Esports Federation (GEF) in a deal that enables them to operate approved esports titles in “India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Dubai, Bahrain, Jordan, Thailand, Vietnam, and the entire African continent.” In turn the Global Esports Federation is merged with the International Esports Federation (IESF) in a strategic partnership called the Esports Leadership Group (ELG). That entity is chaired by Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud.

Starladder Events For 2025

For additional context many were surprised when Starladder announced their comeback for 2025. The scale and stature of the events the company was now producing was a far cry from their glory days. Being based in Kyiv had also, as expected, taken a significant toll on their both their livelihood and lives. Their last Counter-Strike Major, Berlin 2019, was plagued with problems and widely regarded in one of the lesser entries in the illustrious tournament’s history. So, when they confidently tossed their hat in the ring for four events across 2025 and 2026 there was a lot of surprise about their return. That surprise turned to shock when reports were circulated that they would be given the rights to another Major in December of 2025.

Starladder’s first event was due to take place in the last week of May this year but a decision by Valve to extend the timeline of the first Major of 2025 meant the events would overlap and therefore it was cancelled. In retrospect that decision could now take on a different significance.

There’s an industry-wider perception that ESL have fallen out of favour with Valve as they haven’t been awarded the rights to a Major since the Intel Extreme Masters Rio in 2022. If Starladder were indeed the choice that were producing the second Major of 2025 that would have been five in a row without ESL inclusion and none since the release of flagship title CS2. It’s not difficult then to see why people might believe ESL were on the outs. ESL have a long history of aggressive activity in the marketplace historically designed to hold dominant positions over certain esports titles. This includes an attempt to create an “exclusivity league” in 2015 purposefully scheduled for when Valve take their annual holiday in Hawaii. The sociopolitical implications of them being wholly owned by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund has also further complicated business relationships by implication.

Valve

Valve have never explicitly made any public statement regarding these matters although a 2019 blog post entitled “Keeping Things Competitive” was viewed as a response to ESL’s LANXESS Agreement conditions being leaked to the public. Back in 2023 this publication revealed that Valve were going to create a framework that would mean the ESL and BLAST business models of “partnered leagues” would no longer be sanctioned by the game developer.

They’ve since constructed a new set of rules around their tournament circuit designed to stop tournament operators from having business relationships with teams that obligate their attendance at competitions or exclude non-partners. Now everything must be done via the Valve Ranking System (VRS) where teams are guaranteed invites based on points earned via sustained success over a competitive year.

Many recent business dealings have created a new set of potential conflicts of interest across the Counter-Strike ecosystem that aren’t explicitly covered by any codified rules. For example, the Esports World Cup (EWC) Club Program distributes stipends to its members that come with a number of explicit caveats. This creates an environment where organisations are beholden to certain tournament operators and goes against the spirit of the open tournament circuit, one that would empower players, Valve envisioned. We’ve already seen a questionable decision to not attend a PGL event from one of the EWC club program recipients. That came at the same time as a Na’Vi player stating that they “have contracts signed from the beginning of the year that determine when and where we compete.” These incidents certainly lend themselves to a suggestion that there are agreements being made behind the scenes.

It's hard to believe that with this latest acquisition at least creating some theoretical concerns that Valve wouldn’t want to know more about it.

Disclosure: The author has been hired for a number of events by tournament operator PGL who are mentioned in the article.

In March of this year Romanian esports tournament organiser PGL ran the latest instalment in the Counter-Strike Majors in Copenhagen. It was Denmark’s first event of its kind and surprisingly was not run by the Danish company BLAST. Still, it represented a continuance of Denmark’s long history as a hub for esports having historically fostered a positive and accepting culture around what is still seen in many other countries as niche. As is to be expected then the Danish government had taken a great interest in the event but not the kind you might expect. Rather than focusing on the prestige and pomp of the tournament itself, what it meant for the development of Danish esports and the ever-growing fanbase in the country, it seemed they were more interested in creating a very public stink about the attendance of Russian participants.

"As long as Russia continues its illegal war on Ukraine, I don't think Russian athletes should be allowed to compete in international sports," Jakob Engel-Schmidt , the Danish Minister for Culture said in an interview with Danish outlet Berlingske "That of course includes E-sports.”

"Even though it is a Romanian tournament organizer, I want to encourage them to ban Russian participation," Engel-Schmidt continued. "I also want to heavily encourage Royal Arena to be more critical when deciding what they want to host.”

While this was the public statement on the matter behind the scenes things were a lot more severe. The Danish government had contacted PGL and made several “requests” of the Major broadcast which all amounted to nothing that could be construed as political messaging about Russia being used on the broadcast. This translated to decisions not to use international flags for the competing teams and on-air talent not using the word “Russia” on broadcast… No, it was safer to avoid the whole mess since, as we’ll get to, the Danish government were potentially incentivised to shut the event down under even the flimsiest pretext.

Suddenly small details you may have noticed should come into sharp focus. Think Cloud9 player Abay "HObbit" Khassenov doing the playoff stage interview usually reserved for captains in traditional Kazakhstani garb. Oh yes, the players were more than aware of the situation too and it’s hard to imagine the increased scrutiny wasn’t very much on their minds. It wasn’t just weird moments like this either… I know of at least two organisations who advised players not to say anything about the ISIS massacre that occurred in Moscow during the tournament lest it be construed as a “pro-Russian message.”

How strongly did Engel-Schmidt really feel about all this? Before you answer that question consider the following. At the BLAST Premier Fall Finals in November of 2023 he stood on stage in the Royal Arena to introduce the semi-finals of the tournament. Playing that day was Cloud9 a team comprised of four Russian players. He had said nothing about their participation in the build up despite them being the first match of the day and was actively speaking about the positives the event had brought to Denmark. Also of note in January BLAST expanded their partner teams to include Team Spirit and Virtus Pro, both of whom include Russian players on their roster. Again, Engel-Schmidt didn’t express any public dismay about this development. When confronted about this by the website Dust2.dk he simply dismissed it and said “It is news to me that Russians were present at BLAST last year, but of course I am not part of the planning.” He added nothing further seemingly lacking an opinion on the matter as it pertains to the Danish company that, as we’ll get to, is partially owned by the government he represents.

It’s probably also worth noting that BLAST have themselves penned deals with multiple human rights violating governments. While they walked away from a deal with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund’s mega-city project NEOM they have done deals with the governments of Bahrain and Abu Dhabi. These partnerships were rightly scrutinised in the Danish media although BLAST themselves have never commented on these relationships. Funnily enough neither has the paragon of virtue Engel-Schmidt.

What won’t come as a surprise to you will be the revelations about Engel-Schmidt’s own moral failings. For instance, perhaps it’s not great messaging that the Danish government sends a disgraced politician to be the one who attends esports events. Engel-Schmidt was convicted of driving under the influence of cocaine and had his license revoked for three years. During his interaction with police he refused to co-operate and tried to game the system, absurdly stating that he “genuinely” believed he had nothing in his system. How did that cocaine into his blood? Apparently that was also news to him. Maybe the families who have lost loved ones due to drivers getting behind the wheel of a vehicle while intoxicated can similarly implore that the Royal Arena be more critical when deciding who they want to host.

A Deeply Stupid Time In Esports

We’ll revisit the ridiculousness of Engel-Schmidt in a moment but first let’s take a trip down memory lane and recall a deeply stupid time in the industry. The invasion of Ukraine led to esports tying itself in knots as it tried to decide which way was going to generate the largest collective pat on the back possible. For the first month or so it was “esports is a space of togetherness and politics won’t tear us apart.” Then, invariably, politics tore us apart and suddenly we were dispensing inconsistent sanctions that to this day have not been explained. Gambit Esports were essentially forced out of business and had to sell their CS team to an American owned organisation using a Norwegian talent agency as a proxy at a time when giving money to Russians was “funding Putin’s war machine.” Virtus Pro had to pretend they were an organisation called “Outsiders” and wear plain white jerseys with no sponsors on them. Meanwhile ForZe, sponsored by Russia’s LUKOIL, turned up to events with their team, logo and sponsor intact, even as their executives kept dying in the type of mysterious circumstances that seem prevalent in Russia. Of course no-one decided to issue sanctions to anyone taking money from Saudi Arabia or the US military despite the bombs being dropped on Yemeni children because it’s just different when civilian casualties are brought to you by Raytheon.

BLAST had been a dissenting voice in the Counter-Strike community issuing an edict to ban “Russian based teams” from their competitions in March 2022. A typically inconsistent message, this didn’t apply to teams with a majority of Russian players nor did it theoretically apply to Russian operated teams that temporarily rehoused to Balkan nations. Even the accompanying statement was absurd saying that “gaming and esports unites people from all races, countries and beliefs” as they actively put rules in place to divide people.

In reality it was an easy decision for BLAST as none of the teams the sanctions would have applied to at the time – Gambit, Virtus Pro, ForZe, k23 and Team Spirit – were partners and therefore would have had to qualify to participate in any of their large events. When Virtus Pro won the CS:GO Major in Rio that November though they wasted no time in attempting to steal the thunder from their victory by posting about how they had qualified for their world finals event so long as they attended under their “neutral” name and identity. Once again you will note no strong feelings about Russians when it helps strengthen the credibility of their tournaments.

Of course no such stipulation should have been required. In September of 2022 it was already public knowledge that the Russian ownership had sold their stake to Armenian businessman Aram Karamanukyan who was also taking over as CEO. Their legal address is listed as being in Armenia. While many publicly were sceptical about the sale and threw around accusations of Karamanukyan being a puppet there was zero proof this was the case and the tournament operators that made the biggest song and dance about “Outsiders” were also the least equipped to be able to investigate any of the allegations they effectively intimated.

BLAST would not be alone in participating in this farcical public dance. In January 2023 the Armenian owned Virtus Pro would unveil the Rio Major trophy they won under the “Outsiders” name. Keep in mind the purpose of the “Outsiders” pretense was simply to avoid promoting brands that were believed to have ties to Russian oligarchs and as such there never was an Outsiders organisation. It was simply a temporary and ultimately needless rebranding of Virtus Pro, a brand name that has a prestigious heritage across all of esports, in a bid to avoid public controversy and placate Ukrainian stakeholders. Only the most ill informed esports fan could be under the delusion they were a new and separate organisation that just so happened to inherit the squads and staff from Virtus Pro. Incredibly the Vice President of Product Development at ESL Michal Blicharz publicly proclaimed the “reveal” of Virtus Pro as being the real Outsiders was an “unwelcome surprise” and that by celebrating their win they were “misrepresenting” reality. To underline how ludicrous this statement is I would ask if you agree with it do you also believe the fictitious Richard Bachman really wrote those books because Stephen King used a pen-name?

Blind To Exceptionalism

In the end all of the posturing slowly and quietly stopped and by the time the Copenhagen Major had arrived the scene seems to have mostly arrived at the correct decision to not sanction people based on nationality. To do so would only have invited more scrutiny regarding the layer cake of double standards on which esports is built. On that note let me editorialise for a moment on the matter of banning Russian citizens from competition. My personal views have been clear and unwavering since the invasion. I am of the belief that to hold individuals accountable for the actions of their government, ones they might not support nor even have voted for, is immoral in all but the most fringe cases. Governments very often act not only contrary to the wishes of their theoretical electorate but often against their interests too and so to further penalise these people seems equal parts ridiculous and pernicious. This becomes especially true when you consider the fact that the young and well-travelled demographic that makes up those who compete in esports are, for the most part, exactly the type of comparative cosmopolitan that do not support the activities of dictators.

“Oh, so why don’t they vocalise this” you gnash and wail, desperate for your own type of public validation for being on the right side of history… What an equally outrageous demand from people who risk nothing by speaking out. I have never seen this standard applied anywhere else, one where the majority demand that others must speak out against their government and risk prison time, persecution for themselves and their families or even worse to satisfy the sensibilities of people who would never take equivalent risks. Why do we not make similar demands for those toiling in the fields of North Korea, or paying taxes in Xinjiang, or doing business in Riyadh? Why is this the one and only despotic regime that you must let crush you to show fealty to the global in-group?

Still, if we must keep this energy then let us be thorough and consistent. It seems no great leap that if you believe Russian people must be banned for the crimes of their government then you would absolutely support a ban on US citizens suffering similar sanctions. After all, we know that they invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq against the explicit outlines of the UN charter and started a war deemed illegal according to the Secretary General Kofi Annan. This action led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the resulting occupation saw multiple incidents that meet the modern understanding of being a war crime. Yet not only do we shrug this off in our exceptionalism, we then don’t bat an eyelid when the same war criminals sponsor the very esports events people would seek to ban Russians from. Social media morality is the playground of the absurd.

For a final point on this, if any must be made, I’m a British citizen whose government was also complicit in the aforementioned invasion of Iraq. Tony Blair’s cabinet was so desperate to justify war they lied to the people through falsified intelligence, forced the journalist who exposed those lies to reveal his source and then that source died in a strange suicide which dozens of expert coroners rejected as being the cause of death. The public sentiment at the time was vehemently anti-war and I know because I was there and I, living in a country where peaceful protest was a right, marched against it with the rest of the motivated populace. Parliament voted to invade anyway. Have I then forfeited my own right to attend or work events? What more could I have done? What should the appropriate penalties be for me? Exactly how much Iraqi blood is on my hands?

It is my belief that these arguments are all much stronger than those that inform the position to ban everyday Russians from travel and competition. The arguments against my beliefs seem to comprise of assumptions such as “well, we know Russians secretly support Putin whatever they say publicly” or “all competition that glorifies Russia is used by the state to encourage war efforts.” These are hollow proclamations that again could be copy-pasted against any nation that engages in aggressive acts against others and they have no real connection to individuals. It’s just a form of “othering” that makes taking extreme stances such as these easier to commit to. There’s a simple question I would ask Engel-Schmidt that should underline the weak foundations of his own beliefs and that is “if you feel it is essential to ban Russians from competition why have you not petitioned your own government for a travel ban?” The option was most assuredly there and yet Denmark instead elected to reclassify Russians from Group 3 nationals to Group 5, meaning that while applications would receive greater scrutiny and they could only apply for single entry visas, they could still enter the country to participate in business and tourism just with difficulties that didn’t exist before the Ukrainian invasion.

I’m sure you will have noted that countries issuing blanket bans on Russian travel are thin on the ground and not without reason. Many European countries have spent decades building ties with Russian oligarchs and using their country’s looser attitude to financial regulation to make money. Only this year the UK’s home office was embroiled in a scandal over “golden visas” being dispensed to wealthy Russians even as the government seized Russian owned assets including Chelsea football club. It’s equally worth remembering it’s not exactly ancient history that Denmark’s largest bank was involved in a money laundering scandal that was going through – you guessed it – Russia. European politicians wouldn’t want to make shady backroom dealings needlessly difficult by actually enforcing the rules they would demand of private businesses so for now you can rest assured no such travel bans would manifest; it is fairness enacted for most likely the wrong reasons.

Who Owns BLAST?

Of course it’s not a shock when politicians traffick in hypocrisy. It’s not only the nature of their business but I’d argue the type of person that gravitates towards politics has it in their nature to begin with. Yet what if I told you that there wasn’t just double-standards at play here but rather something that appears to be more traditionally cutthroat in nature? You see what most people don’t understand is that the Danish government owns a significant portion of BLAST and would therefore have a vested interest in the continuing success of that tournament operator. This isn’t a whispered conspiracy theory or unprovable presupposition. Because it’s Denmark it’s a matter of a public record.

Anyone can access Denmark’s Central Business Register and peruse the details of companies that operate there. When you do you will find the following details about BLAST’s ownership that certainly hasn’t been talked about enough, especially in light of the antics during PGL’s Danish tournament. Their owners include Danmarks Eksport- og Investeringsfond (EIFO) a government startup fund whose goal is to help new companies establish a footing in Denmark. They provide capital in the form of loans that can be converted into equity, either through choice or in lieu of repayment and now own between 10% and 14.99% of BLAST. Vækstfonden Growth K/S is another investment fund which now falls under the umbrella of EIFO. They are focused on providing convertible loans for startups that have an “aggressive growth plan.” They own 10%-14.99% of BLAST. Heartcore Capital Fund III K/S is another investment fund with a technology focus owns between 10% and 14.99% as of 2021 filings. Not that you would know it from their website they are co-owned by EIFO and the European Investment Fund. Depending on how those percentages break that could effectively make the Danish government a majority shareholder in BLAST which should cast a new light on their attention to PGL’s event. After all, it is essentially a non-Danish company, one who is a direct rival to BLAST, coming into Copenhagen to run an event in a stadium synonymous with BLAST events that was inarguably bigger and better than the ones BLAST themselves have put on. Hard to imagine that would go over well with stakeholders and, in this instance, shareholders.

With all of this in mind it’s hard to really view the disparate amount of attention as anything other than business focused rather than an expression of any genuine sentiment. Speaking as someone who worked the event I saw firsthand how far that attention extended and it would be my opinion that there was certainly a hope that PGL would trip up and an incident would occur. Functionally instead all it ultimately translated to were Russian competitors being worried about expressing any grief for the victims of a terrorist attack on their home soil so job well done I guess.

Moving forward this is something to be mindful of. With an increasing number of global governments underwriting what esports has become their own geopolitical views will come baked in to the events you participate in. Whether it’s using the invasion of Ukraine to apply pressure to business competitors, having to show fealty to “One-China” policy or not being able to guarantee the safety of gay and trans competitors on foreign soil there’s not going to be anywhere to hide from the whims of politicians. It makes it clearer now than ever that no matter how much anyone says to the contrary esports is no longer for everybody and who is excluded isn’t being decided by the players or the sponsors. That is now being decided by the same people who decide everything else.

Disclosure: The author of this piece has worked freelance for PGL on several occasions and will be working future PGL events.

You have to laugh at the naivety of some people. One Youtube video of a drug addled chav mumbling incoherently about how foreigners have ruined “her Britain” and people are up in arms about how shocking it is. Have they left their house recently? Have they turned on their televisions? Evidently not because there was nothing in that depressing video that I haven’t seen countless times each time I leave my house.

For those of you who haven’t been exposed to this latest political-debate-by-Twitter baiting video I shall give you a more detailed summary. A seemingly intoxicated woman, with a small child on her lap, is riding the Croyden to Wimbledon tram. Unprovoked she starts slurring racial abuse at the passengers, telling them that they should “go home” and that they’re not British. She seems barely capable of speaking English herself. She’s confronted by several passengers, including people who fit into her own demographic. She remains oblivious.

The video, filmed by one of the people on the receiving end of her moronic tirade, went viral and before you knew it celebrities were all chipping in with their views on how shocking the video was. Rent-A-Twat Piers Morgan even declared that “Britain is so much better than that vile bigoted creature.” But is it really?

While one video of someone hurling racist abuse and bewildered commuters was spreading round the internet like wildfire, there were some who were asking why far more shocking ones had been ignored. For example in June this year Brian Whelan posted a video of EDL members indiscriminately attacking Asian passengers on the tube in a super violent “happy-slapping”. The video itself still widely remains available on the internet yet doesn’t seem to have caused anywhere near the same stir. Is it perhaps a matter of some truths being too uncomfortable to face?

Rent-A-Twat Piers Morgan even declared that “Britain is so much better than that vile bigoted creature.” But is it really?

The rise of far-right sentiment in recent times is something that can’t be denied as much as people might prefer to ignore it. It is not three years since the BNP secured seats in the European parliament and in 2008 the party representative finished fifth in London’s mayoral elections, less than 8,000 votes behind that of the Green Party. The chairman of the BNP, Nick Griffin – seemingly a relation to Peter if his appearance on Question Time was anything to go by – achieved 14.6% of the vote in his Barking constituency to put him third. It was a record number for any of the seats the BNP had contested.

From my own personal experiences from living in Birmingham, a city that perhaps embodies the multicultural spirit more than any other in Britain, I have witnessed EDL marches and mini race-riots. I found it inconceivable to think that they would march here, that they would be allowed to try and invoke their hatred, but they turned up in force. The last time, just this October gone, I stood in the rain watching them try and provoke passers-by. Anyone who wasn’t white would be subject to racist abuse. Anyone with the tappings of Islam would be called a terrorist. Glasses and fireworks were hurled into the streets and at the police.

Despite these crimes being openly committed the local police made just four arrests. One of those was for possession of cannabis and the other was for an outstanding warrant. The other two related to weapons offences. None of the charges related to the crime of inciting racial hatred, which seems especially odd given the news that the woman who has sparked this whole debate has been arrested on the grounds of a racially aggravated offence. No doubt congratulatory backslapping shall ensue, as if with that gesture the spectre of racism has been banished from British shores. The reality is while it was vogue to rally against this one ignorant woman, daily far worse examples of racism are allowed to flourish in the dark corners of the British experiment.

The nay-sayers amongst you might say it is one thing to compare a spontaneous outburst in public to an organised and mobilised group of extremists. Yet what the video of our friend from Croyden demonstrates is what happens when the dehumanising mantra of racist language becomes subconscious thought, when racism is made to seem so socially acceptable that it goes mostly unchallenged and is dismissed as mere stupidity.

I would like to tell you I was shocked by the video in question but I wasn’t. Repulsed and disgusted but not shocked for a second.

I would like to tell you I was shocked by the video in question but I wasn’t. Repulsed and disgusted but not shocked for a second. I’ve seen that woman out riding my local buses, I’ve seen her doing her shopping on my high street, I’ve seen her having a drink down my regular boozer and I’ve heard her countless times. The depressing reality is that she is everywhere.

Like a permanent feedback loop of bullshit the racism described as free-speech bleatings of the EDL and the BNP go out into the public domain and are repeated back parrot fashion by people who are looking for easy answers and targets to blame. Racist sentiment goes up in times of recession… Cost of living is expensive, jobs are scarce and the media is all too happy to present images of wealthy asylum seekers on yachts or keen immigrants willing to undercut minimum wage for unscrupulous companies in order to take your labour away from you. Do any of these things actually exist? Hardly, but it’s a convenient scapegoat and one that is so emotive it allows those with their own sinister agendas to take advantage amidst the ill feeling.

As sure as the government is to blame for the collective failings that impact on the lives of its citizens, they are also partly to blame for these issues too. They won’t talk about the elephant in the room, avoid the issues that the extremists openly campaign on. This gives them a credence and authenticity they should not be afforded. These are, for the most part, thugs donning suits and playing at politics. They don’t have the answers. They barely have ideas.

That video is sadly an example of what passes for political discourse amongst a significant and growing number of British people. There’s no getting away from that. For many people exposure to that sort of hate is an almost daily occurrence. Racism doesn’t need an umbrella organisation to proliferate, all it needs for that to happen is to go uncontested by those with the means to expose it for what it is. Is the reaction to this video something more concerned with Twitter trends, or is it the start of a genuine stance against the casual racism that has become part of the day to day? Either way, let’s not use it as an excuse to pretend that Britain is an example of tolerance to anybody.

The professional debut of young boxing aspirant Chris Eubank Jr. lived up to its dull expectations yesterday and showed that nostalgia remains the most popular commodity when it comes to marketing sports. While most of the nation tuned into ITV to watch what had become of the footballing genius-cum- human train wreck that was Paul Gascoigne, those looking for a different type of nostalgia sat and watched Channel 5 hoping to see something that would remind of the former glory of the once noble art.

It was hard not to get swept along with it at first. Has it really been so long since the British middleweight division was full of talent it attracted more interest than the heavyweight bouts? It feels like another lifetime but for the briefest of moments it did feel alive again. The fighter looking lean and mean, dare it be suggested in better shape than his father, came out to the same Tina Turner theme tune. He had the same swagger as he came to the ring, held the same poses… At any given moment you felt he could pop in a monocle and start lisping about his superiority. Either way, the crowd lapped it up.

Then the predictability kicked in. You remembered just why boxing had fallen so far in the sporting hierarchy, why you stopped being interested in it in the first place. Within moments of the fight starting it was clear that, as with all fledgling British fighters, he had been put up against a bum, the sort of athlete that would be known as a “jobber” if this was professional wrestling. They exist only to make the slightly more talented look better than they truly are happy to be a human stepping stone for men they have already conceded are destined for better things than they are.

The big clue to this was the fact that they referred to Kirilis Psonko as “experienced” throughout the bout. There was nothing else more to say about this fighter other than he had been around the block a bit and the Lithuanian didn’t even seem interested in throwing punches. The heavy bag that Eubank Jr. trained on in the build up to this fight would have offered more resistance and thrown more punches in return.

Despite some stylistic similarities Eubank Jr. ultimately looked nothing like the second coming of his father

It was dreadful to watch and it was apparent to all who was clearly manufactured to win within moments of the fight starting. Even when the fight was stopped in ludicrous fashion in the fourth, the referee suddenly deciding that not throwing any return punches was an indication of being in trouble as opposed to the consistent application of the losing strategy Psonko had embraced from the beginning, it was never exciting.

Despite some stylistic similarities Eubank Jr. ultimately looked nothing like the second coming of his father as he failed to penetrate the guard of a fighter who looked hopelessly outclassed even at this level. He seemed to want to only throw that knockout punch, couldn’t apply the basic principles of working the body to open up the head for that winning blow. Without having a test of the chin there was little to be said about the purported prodigy other than he can hit a slowly moving target.

Still, that isn’t the saddest part. It is incredibly hard to be critical about the youngster who, despite being the talent, was only talked about in terms of the heir apparent. All through the fight there were constant close ups of the original Eubank, waving to the crowd in that bizarre regal way he has always adopted, even when most of the British public despised him for being that most hated of creatures –  a successful British athlete.

He liberally walked to and from the corner, giving his son advice, while the cameras followed him and not the fighter. They interviewed him between rounds and the commentators, with a lack of action in the ring to talk about, took to talking about the qualities of vintage Eubank before adding that this event was “all very much about the son”. It’s a statement that would have had a lot more resonance if they weren’t pushing a microphone in his father’s face every two minutes.

He liberally walked to and from the corner, giving his son advice, while the cameras followed him and not the fighter

That’s the blessing and the curse for the boy. He gets a head start because he has the name. He will have instant adoration as the masses go cross eyed and chant his surname without ever really being sure which fighter they mean, or even caring just so long as someone is getting punched in front of them. Yet it’s clear that he’s never going to be free of that, that he will always be held up in comparison to his father and that his father, still clearly hungry for the spotlight, will happily detract from his own son’s achievements to remain fresh in the public memory.

That may well be the curse of following in the footsteps of such a successful father. For every Johann it seems there’s a Jordi, for every Kenny there’s a Paul. Unlike some sports though, where someone will always be willing to take a punt on someone with a famous surname, boxing is so individual and requires such strength of character that anything that dilutes it can not be seen as a positive. No doors it can open are worth the willing relinquishing of identity that is emulating your father’s ring entrance.

To be clear, in case this all sounds too maudlin, the kid has undoubtedly got talent, the product of hard work as opposed to good breeding stock. Fast hands, good head movement and polished technique all point to a fighter that could be something out of the ordinary if allowed to mature and develop without the side show. Boxing is at its worst when it becomes a circus of showboating, which was one of the sides of the Eubank era that many will not remember fondly. In the ring, imperious. Outside of it, impudent.

It’s not likely to be a factor for too long. Like so many British fighters before him he’ll be built up before being torn down, sold to the public as a hero and then used to line the pockets of the promoters, managers and the broadcasters. For all the face of boxing has changed there are some things that remain the same, the most unwelcome kind of nostalgia.

There was lots of talk about the future in the build up to this match, about looking forward, yet once underway the whole affair spent most of its time looking back and not even involving the fighter who was in the ring. It was proof, as if any were needed, that boxing’s best days remain firmly behind it and everyone involved seemed only too happy to publicly acknowledge that fact. The spectacle leading up to this potentially exciting undercard opener seemed like little more than a celebration of days gone by in the midst of mediocrity. If better days are to come for the young fighter one feels that they might arrive sooner if people, famous father included, accept that while it might be a Eubank in the ring it will never be Eubank in the ring again.