The most competitive Major of all time looks set to have a clear victor, and I’m here to tell you who.

It’s almost time for the second Major of 2025. A stellar year of Counter-Strike, ten different teams returned victorious from 22 tier one LANs this year, as the scene has hit a level with more talent and a higher level of competition than ever before.

As we reach the end of the year, that fight for the top spot has reached its peak in perfect time for the Major. Unlike the Austin Major, where Vitality failing to win it after the season they had enjoyed would’ve been one of the biggest chokes in CS history, there are now five teams who could lift the trophy and we’d all be saying “Yeah, makes sense.”

But where’s the fun in that? And what if I told you I don’t think it’s even necessarily true? In fact, I think it’s so far from the truth that I’d go out on a limb to say that there’s a team that should already be considered as much favourites for the Budapest Major as Vitality were for the Austin Major.

If you’ve been watching Counter-Strike in the past two months, then you probably already know who I’m talking about, so let’s first talk about the teams we can already be writing off.

The not-a-chances

Although I may be vertically challenged, I’m a big enough man to admit when I’m wrong. When it comes to G2, I was really f-cking wrong.

G2 are by no means a bad team, actually, they’re pretty solid. Their players all contribute to the frags in a way that allows them to be consistent, and there isn’t an obvious weak link on the team. I like them a lot because of this, and I still feel like they should probably have kicked on from their win at BLAST Open London, but they haven’t managed to do so.

Truthfully, I don’t really know what prevents G2 from being the contenders they should be, considering they’ve already won a big event this year. Maybe it’s SunPayus no longer being that guy. Maybe it’s huNter- not quite being an IGL on par with his contemporaries. Or maybe it’s just that their players are all good, but not enough of them are great.

Whichever one of those things it is doesn’t really matter, all that matters is that they’re simply just a top ten team. Nothing more, nothing less. Likeable, but not overly exciting. And with them not heading into the Major in a great run of form, you can consider them out of the running.

Another team to consider 100% without a shot is, sadly, The MongolZ. Although IEM Chengdu was a promising start to their stint with controlez, BLAST Rivals Hong Kong is a stark reminder of the reality of the situation.

To put it simply, controlez just isn’t Senzu. If he were, he would already be on the team. The truth of the matter is that controlez is a 28-year-old, average player from a small Counter-Strike nation who, when he looks back on his career, will hold a stand-in period on The MongolZ as its one true highlight. That’s not a Major winning player right there.

Yes, I know Devilwalk won a Major. Yes, I also know that it’s harsh to say out loud. No, I don’t care.

Senzu, even for all of his rough games when it actually matters, is just too important to The MongolZ. Call him a Group Stage Stomper if you want, but someone has to do it, and the fact they’ve lost that player is what allowed The MongolZ to lose to Passion UA in Hong Kong. You need a player like Senzu for a Swiss stage, and without him I fear that they might not even make it to the Playoffs.

Seriously, losing to Passion UA is that bad.

Source: Senzu - PGL / Sebastian Pandelache, controlez - BLAST / Stephanie Lindgren

There’s a few other names that people will be throwing up at this point, so as a courtesy, let’s run through them real quick:

FaZe. The guys who always seem to pull the rabbit out of the hat. The guys who- No, sorry, we’re not doing this. The magic is dead, guys. karrigan killed it. I’m sorry. Get over it. I have.

NAVI. 2024’s team of the year. A team that, despite a lack of firepower, made up for it through the power of vibes and friendship. A team that, just a few weeks ago, suffered the total embarrassment of being reverse swept in a BO5 Grand Final in an event with a poor field. Had the field been stronger, they probably wouldn’t have even gotten close to the final in the first place. Now a team who needs to be blown up to stand a chance at ever winning a meaningful trophy again, like The MongolZ, they’re another team who should be considered a serious risk for not even making it to the playoffs.

Legacy (yes, really). Unfortunately, when a team wins an event and then advances to the final of the next event they attend, it becomes easy to confuse them with a good team. Legacy, though, are not that. They’re a team that attended a couple of LANs with weak fields and profited from being not as bad as everyone else. Again, I’m sorry if this hurts you. And dumau? I’m a big fan, keep up the good work.

Aurora. The team I’m honestly only mentioning because I’m going to screenshot this and post it on Twitter, in hopes of making Turkish fans angry enough to click on the link and give me some interactions. The team who has done nothing but disappoint me all year, so much so that I’m now sick of the sight of them. They’re not going to magically turn it around now. I’m not sorry about this one.

Source: Karrigan, Dumau, xantares - PGL / Sebastian Pandelache, aleksiB- BLAST / Stephanie Lindgren

The should-be-favourites

Everything so far has been pretty safe, I’d say. I’ve mentioned six teams and I don’t expect many people to disagree with me on them. This is where that’s about to change. This is where I say that if you think Vitality or Spirit should even be mentioned as favourites, then you haven’t been paying enough attention.

That isn’t to say you should count them out, of course you shouldn’t do that. donk, sh1ro, ZywOo, ropz, and the trophies they’ve won this year are all good enough reasons to never count either team out of any event, but favourites? I don’t think so. Not anymore anyway.

Alright, maybe that was a bit too far. And the above statement does keep them within “favourite” standings, but the favourites? Not anymore - stay with me.

Starting with Vitality, it's clear they're no longer the same team as they were six months ago. Although their victories are still plentiful, they’ve lost that special something that made them win as many tournaments as they did. They’ve gotten sloppy, and some of their round losses against Spirit in Hong Kong and both MOUZ and FURIA in Chengdu have been frankly awful. They probably should have even lost to TYLOO, for f-ck’s sake.

Spirit are also just not actually that good. In fact, at this point their system - or rather, lack of - is so obviously terrible that their coach is now even running damage control about it. Seriously, the way Spirit play CS is awful, and they’re incredibly lucky to have players like sh1ro and donk who make them appear good and carry them to their sporadic event wins.

Both teams are also currently struggling with real map pool issues. Spirit have only played five maps in the last three months, and although their win rates on those maps aren’t awful outside of Nuke (which they’ve won just twice in eight attempts), their highest win rate by far is Ancient, the perma ban of FURIA and Vitality, two of their closest rivals.

As for Vitality, their Train is currently so ugly that I don’t even want to talk about it, and is so bad that they chose to ban it against FURIA and play their perma-ban instead, their Nuke is nowhere near where it should be, and their Overpass is also pretty shaky. They’re a far cry from where they were pre-Austin.

As I said, don’t count either of these teams out, you’d be a fool for doing so. But you’d be equally as foolish heading into the Major and saying that either of these teams should be winning it. That is, unless you’re like me and make really convincing points about expecting more from top teams on a really good CS podcast.

Shameless, I know. F-ck off.

Source: BLAST / Luc Bouchon

When pigs fly

Onto the team that makes me sad: Falcons.

While the rest of you are crying about Falcons spending a sh-t ton of money and being owned by some people you don’t like, I’m crying about the fact that NiKo is just never going to win a Major. It’s a sad realisation, even if it’s slightly funny, that it overshadows the only thing that keeps GuardiaN relevant.

NiKo is one of the best players to ever play Counter-Strike, and for my money, until donk does it for a few more years, is the greatest rifler of all time. A truly versatile player with an incredibly high peak level, he deserves to have won a Major by now, and he really should have, too.

But the fact that he hasn’t yet is also why I know he never will. The shadows of the Majors he has lost loom large over him, and those in which he failed early or didn’t even make the cut loom larger still. It’s a mental barrier at this point, something that sees an all-time great be reduced to your average FACEIT level eight, and it’s something that he’s probably never going to get over purely on the basis it’s gone on so long.

Looking at the Falcons team, it’s easy to say that the likes of kyousuke and m0NESY should be able to carry him to trophies, but if that was the case then they would have won more trophies already. The repeated third-place finishes do give me a little bit of hope, but they don’t wipe away Falcons’ biggest problem: composure.

Third-place deciders, at least when they are fought between top-five teams, just don’t really matter. The pressure just isn’t there, they’re vanity matches. Winning them is better than losing them, but you’re already out of the tournament at that point, do they really replicate the feeling of when it’s do-or-die in a semi-final? No, they don’t. So let me ask you this:

How many times have you seen a screenshot of the radar in a Falcons game showing you a round that Falcons look almost certain to win? MIBR in Austin. Aurora at the Esports World Cup. FURIA in Chengdu. There are three without even thinking about it.

These are rounds that truly great teams just don’t lose, and the fact that the Falcons manage to lose them so often is a marker that they aren’t truly great yet. They still rely too heavily on their firepower, they still expect NiKo, m0NESY, and kyousuke to just brute force their way through everyone, and that’s a problem.

Once the Falcons make their next inevitable roster move, something might change. But until then, this will remain the reality of the Falcons’ experience. Close, but no cigar. A team with an incredible amount of firepower, but just not quite enough for nothing else to matter.

In other words: Please welcome b1t to Team Falcons.

Source: NAVI

The smart option

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I actually think MOUZ is the smart option for the favourites for the Major.

MOUZ, as aura-less as it might make them, are a team of five entirely solid and dependable players. No player on MOUZ is the best in the world at their role, but no player sticks out as someone who can be improved upon. It’s a team of people who are at worst top five and more often than not top three within their respective roles, and that’s what has made them so consistent over the year.

MOUZ have finished in the top four (or higher) in all but three of the tournaments they’ve attended this year. In the tournaments in which they’ve failed to do so, one was their final event with siuhy, one was with a stand-in before they could bring Spinx into the fold. The other was EWC, where they still finished in the top eight.

They’re consistent because they play solid CS. They have solid flash stats, solid traded percentage, and very respectable conversion rates in both 5v4 and 4v5 situations. Perhaps the only thing that slightly lets them down is their opening duel success rate, but it doesn’t seem to affect them too much; they rely on clutches to win their rounds on fewer occasions than any of the other top five teams.

It could be true that MOUZ remain as the bridesmaids and never become the brides, but if they hit the right gear as teams so often need to in order to actually win a Major, that could all change in the matter of a few BO3s and a BO5.

The REAL option

That brings us to the real option, the current clear and obvious favourites to win the Major: FURIA.

FURIA currently position themselves as Cloud9 pre-Boston, except with a little bit of crack running in their system. And I don’t mean YEKINDAR.

They’re the most in-form team in the world right now, and that really matters in the run up to the Major. The one big commonality between Gambit in Krakow, Cloud9 in Boston, and VP (sorry, Outsiders) in Rio is that all three of them were in solid form when approaching their Major wins. FURIA are in the same boat, except their wins are coming at much bigger events than any of those teams.

Form isn’t everything, though, so it’s a good job that FURIA have plenty of class, too.

If you look at the above chart, FURIA also stick out as playing a more sustainable brand of Counter-Strike than the likes of Vitality, Spirit, and Falcons. Although they aren’t lacking in firepower, they’re spreading their strengths across the team better than anyone not named MOUZ, and doing so helps win games more consistently than hoping your biggest stars always manage to come up clutch in the late rounds.

You know what I mean, FaZe.

It’s not just that either, like many teams will have tried to do after their first half of the year, FURIA modeled their system on Vitality’s. But they didn’t just copy it, they improved upon it. In Vitality’s system, apEX is required to do far more in terms of fragging than FalleN is, and it’s to the betterment of FURIA’s system that the Brazilian has made it that way.

This is to say that, although FURIA’s current form might be the real difference maker when it comes to them lifting the Major trophy, you shouldn’t expect them to drop off after winning it. Their system and their players are just too strong for that to be the case.

That sustainability, that solid foundation that allows them to win even with a player underperforming in the obvious metrics like frags, is what has made FURIA the best team in the world. Each one of their players has impact far beyond what you see in their K/D ratio, and each one knows exactly where they fit within the system.

What makes it even better is that FURIA are also visibly not the finished article yet, nor are they afraid to take risks. In an interview with BLAST after winning in Chengdu, YEKINDAR spoke about how much room for improvement they still have, and how they expected Vitality to take a risk with the veto and were already more than prepared for it.

So, whilst it’s still crazy to me that FURIA even have this team, let alone being the best in the world because of it, there’s just no other option except to anoint them as the favourite to win the StarLadder Budapest Major.

And, as I said earlier, thanks to the falterings and misgivings of the other teams at the top, I think they’re as much favourites to win in Budapest as Vitality were in Austin. It might seem like they’re not, I’ve said not to count out Spirit and Vitality, I’ve also called MOUZ favourites and said that Falcons could win if pigs were to fly, but was that not also true back in June?

Spirit, MOUZ, Falcons, they’ve all been at the level they are at now all year. Falcons might be better in terms of firepower, sure, but the problems they face still persist. Either way, any one of those teams had as much of a chance at winning back then as they do now.

So I guess that you could say that with five favourites instead of four, FURIA does still have a slightly smaller chance of winning than Vitality did, but where’s the fun in that? Making sweeping statements is far more entertaining.

Anyway, what’s the difference between having three teams to beat or four when you’re as good as FURIA are right now and you’ve beaten them all already? It’s time for Brazil to win its third Major, and I know you know it too.

Vamos.