Bad news, North America.

ESL has announced their invite distribution for Katowice and Cologne in 2024, and have reduced North American world ranking invites from two to one.

Except, it’s not like the spot has gone to another region. It’s been replaced by global world ranking invites. If the teams are good enough, they’ll qualify anyway.

When we look at the current ESL world ranking, though, we can kind of see the logic.

Whereas there used to be Liquid, Complexity, and EG (In 2020) fighting for those two, now it’s Complexity and… Nouns? Party Astronauts? Wildcard?

Yes, NRG are coming back. Plus, it’s hard to get ranking points as an NA team with a fairly sparse LAN scene and fewer CCTs to farm. You can see why it seems unfair over the pond.

It also adds to the lore of ESL as NA-killers after the North American Pro League was cut. There’s reasonable outrage at the decision.

But this is Katowice and Cologne. It’s not a charity. It’s the two biggest non-Major events of the year.

Want to qualify? Get the ranking points. NA has the players to do so. It’s time to put up or shut up.