Brazilian CS might be dead. Might. We’re not really sure, but it might be.

Look at the two top teams in the country: FURIA now have two Eastern Europeans on the team, as well as a Kazakh coach in KrizzeN, and paiN have turned their backs to sign two players from other South American nations.

How did we get here?

Not even ten years ago, Brazilians dominated the scene, and with the rise of players like snow and insani, we thought we might see a comeback for one of Counter-Strike’s most iconic nations.

Well, we were wrong. In fact, we’d argue that Brazilian CS is now in the worst place it’s been since before the days of LG/SK.

The good players are spread out across four or five teams, and there’s very little hope of ever seeing them united. A scenario entirely the fault of the FURIA players for normalising terrible contracts and the organisations holding these players to exorbitant buyouts.

The reality is that these organisations now have no other option but to import players from elsewhere.

Fantasy building a Brazilian dream team will never not be fun, but the fact is that we’ll never see these teams come to fruition. It would simply cost too much money, especially when the chance of success is equivalent to the chance that the Earth is actually flat. Sorry, maikelele.

But does this all mean that Brazilian CS is dead? Well, no. MIBR is still Brazilian, and FURIA, paiN, and Imperial all hold Brazilian majorities. At least for now.

Instead, this could just be the jump-start that Brazilian CS needs as a whole. Whether it’s with EU imports or with fellow South Americans, what matters is that Brazilian teams may finally be competitive again. Whichever way you look at it, that’s a good thing.

It could also be the dawn of a new era for South American CS as a whole. One where the idea of “South American CS” means far more than just being a courtesy to BESTIA and 9z. Given how the US has always needed Canada to prop them up in CS, that doesn’t sound so bad to us.

Let’s just hope it isn’t coming too late for KSCERATO. That’s a name that deserves to have achieved far more than it has.