Rewind to 2019. Liquid have just completed the Intel Grand Slam in what is still record time, and are the favourites to win the Major. The only team to truly come close to Astralis during their era.

Fast-forward to 2022. Liquid have cut shox, added YEKINDAR. They go on a run that sees them make the playoffs of six out of eight events, finishing second twice.

Fast-forward a little more to 2026. Liquid have now been through multiple rosters, they’re 34th in the Valve rankings, and their chances to make the IEM Cologne Major are bleak.

We all know how it happened. We all know how bang average their team is.

Their supposed prodigy IGL who is only really good with a master tactician behind him. Their mildly washed Americans whose best days are far behind them. Their AWPer who has become a litmus test for how mentally adept teams on the come up are.

And the star rifler and poor coach in his first tier one job - although tier one may now be generous - that have to deal with them.

But how did they get here? How did this legendary org, who at one stage looked set to always stand alongside the likes of NAVI and Vitality at the top of the Counter-Strike world, get to the point where we’re talking about their necessity to disband?

Well, ain’t that a story.

The beginning of the end

Realistically, the story begins with YEKINDAR.

Once touted as the man who saved the team after teaching the poor Americans how to play CS again in the wake of COVID, YEKINDAR soon became a player that many regarded to be the biggest problem with the team.

Upon his arrival, he was a superstar. An incredibly aggressive player, he fragged hard, took initiative, and helped out with a lot of the mid-round calling.

When YEKINDAR arrived, Liquid were transformed. Gone was the washed up shox, and in his place was one of the most highly sought after stars of the time. The difference was night and day, and it was borderline impossible to not rule him out as the only real reason as to why.

They made playoffs, they even looked like winning events, and perhaps they were just one more player away from ascending to the top of the Counter-Strike ladder once more.

And then Paris happened.

Take it from me, as someone who was in the room as they went 0-2 down in the Challengers Stage, you could hear a pin drop during their games. No one was talking, and the team had never seemed more dead.

But then they started to win, and the noise began to return. oSee was screaming, YEKINDAR was calling, and even EliGE, as emo as he can be, was starting to be more vocal. Everyone except nitr0.

As it happened, that event would be nitr0’s last for Liquid. He retired (or maybe went to VALORANT, he did it so many times I lose track) after Liquid were unceremoniously dumped from the competition by Apeks in the quarters, and alongside the departure of EliGE to Complexity, left Liquid searching for a new star and a new IGL.

YEKINDAR, who was already doing most of the calling by this point, was happy to step into the role. Because star players becoming IGLs always works out.

They also signed Patsi and Rainwaker, an exceedingly aggressive player who had shown bags of potential with Spirit, and an exceedingly passive player who had shown bags of potential with 500. It sounds exciting, but to any rolecel at the time, there was plenty of concern to be had purely on face value.

See, in YEKINDAR and Patsi, Liquid had two of the most aggressive players in the world, and in NAF and Rainwaker, two of the most passive players, too. The only connective tissue to be found between these two polar opposites was oSee, their far from perfect AWPer.

Just as it had been when YEKINDAR joined the team, his switch to leadership was night and day. Except this time, it was pretty f-cking terrible.

Both Patsi and Rainwaker were gone before the year was out, and although his recent spell with Monte has shown that there may have actually been some value in Rainwaker, Patsi never quite recovered.

The roster was never going to work, and it’s end signalled the beginning of a new era for Liquid, one that capitalised on the availability of two of the biggest names in the game and a legendary coach, one that should have taken Liquid back to the top.

The men who should be kings

NAF. YEKINDAR. cadiaN. Twistzz. skullz. zews as coach. It’s a roster that sounds like it could have won a Major. And that’s even with skullz, who, admittedly, was actually a bit of a prospect back then. How wrong we all were.

As it happened, it’s a roster that didn’t even get to play a Major, as the team failed to qualify from one of the weirdly formatted American RMRs.

It was so hard to not be excited about this roster. Twistzz was back, and YEKINDAR was freed from IGLing. skullz was a prospect, and the decision to remove cadiaN from HEROIC was utterly baffling. Oh, and NAF was still NAF back then, and NAF was a bloody good player.

But it just didn’t click. There were stories I heard around the time that I won’t share here, but if they are true, then the reality of the team is far worse than most people will ever realise.

It’s funny looking back on it now, because on paper, their results don’t even look that bad. Sure, they missed the Major, but they made the playoffs of Chengdu and had a deep run in EPL S19. They also finished second in the CCT Season 1 Global Finals, and almost made the playoffs in Dallas.

The results don’t exactly tell the full story, though.

The full story is that it quickly became apparent that skullz wasn’t actually very good. At all. He could be forgiven for his CT sides, but he often ghosted T sides, making a sh-t tonne of mistakes as he did so.

To make matters worse, YEKINDAR didn’t recover his form following his IGL stint, and their actual IGL, cadiaN, struggled to adapt to AWPing in CS2, a huge hit to his game. The big kicker, though, was that he wasn’t having the same luck building a defined system with Liquid as he had with HEROIC.

Mostly because the egos on Liquid didn’t actually want to play the cadiaN way, but whatever.

In six short months, despite incredibly strong performances from two of its stars, one of the most highly anticipated rosters in CS completely capitulated, and somehow, it’s replacement would be even worse.

The second coming of terrifying IGLing

And so, cadiaN and skullz, alongside zews, were exorcised from the team.

Once again, Liquid were in the market for big changes, and once again, they’d make the mistake of letting their biggest star take up the IGL reins. In this case, it was Twistzz, who just like YEKINDAR before him, had shown some proficiency as a secondary caller.

Refer back to my previous comment about stars becoming IGLs.

With mithR - for some reason - coming in as coach, Liquid also signed jks, which was a strange concept given the fact NAF was already on the team and they had previously made this mistake with Rainwaker, and ultimate, a completely unknown sniper - “scouted” by Twistzz - whose signing Liquid are still paying the price for today.

Unsurprisingly, it was terrible.

Just like YEKINDAR, Twistzz may have been a good secondary caller, but a primary caller he was not. Although, like YEKINDAR, there is the argument that he didn’t exactly have the best pieces to work with.

YEKINDAR was left on an aggressive island in a system that left rolecels crying for their mothers, and although his performances in this time were largely unacceptable given his roles, it was easy to see while watching the games just how much that island made him struggle. No one else wanted to take a fight that might see them die.

Well, except ultimate, but that’s an issue in itself.

On the topic of ultimate, although people may have been impressed by the fact that he woke up during the overtime of his debut map against VP, I was not. It was clear then just how slow he was, how poor his positioning was, and how much of a mistake his signing would end up being.

jks, too, was out of place, but Liquid should have learned from Rainwaker and jks’ G2 benching to figure that one out.

Poor defeats were frequent, and the alarm bells should have been ringing when FaZe came back from 11-1 down to knock Liquid out of Cologne, but it’s become apparent in the 18 months since that Liquid management magically becomes deaf when the alarm sounds.

So the team trudged on. They trudged on despite all evidence suggesting they shouldn’t, that ultimate wasn’t cut out for tier one, that Twistzz wasn’t an IGL, and that there was a reason why NAF had cucked jks back in his 2018 Renegades stint. They trudged on, all the way to a quarter-final placing in the final event of the year, the Perfect World Shanghai Major.

But YEKINDAR was benched all the same.

That, btw, was not a defence of YEKINDAR. He was awful. But it wasn’t his fault. Not entirely. His time on Liquid doesn’t count, but you know that already.

The path to irrelevancy

With YEKINDAR gone, and with NertZ signed in his place, aggression for Liquid became a real problem, and the calling didn’t exactly improve with one less cook in the kitchen either. So, in April 2025, jks was also benched, and in came siuhy following his shocking removal from MOUZ just months before.

Once again, there was excitement for Team Liquid. But, as has been the story of Liquid for almost four years now, once again, they failed to live up to that expectation.

siuhy’s first few months on Liquid were spent without a coach, with analyst DeMars DeRover (TLDR still loves his name) filling the role until flashie arrived in July.

Despite that, it began promisingly, with the team reaching the quarters of IEM Chengdu in just their second event with the new captain. But that was as good as it got for a long time, and it wasn’t until a relatively weak FISSURE Playground 2, five months later, that Liquid finally made playoffs again.

They followed this up by announcing the departure of Twistzz, who went back to FaZe, and by signing EliGE from FaZe, marking the bald eagle’s return to the team just over two years after initially departing.

The team came third in their first event together, Birch Cup 2025, where they lost to 9INE, and third again at the CS Asia Championships, where they lost to 3DMAX. They then reached the quarters of another somewhat weak event, PGL Bucharest, losing to SAW, and ended their year at the StarLadder Budapest Major with a 0-3 exit from Stage 3.

Two things were clear. The first was that this team needed more time with EliGE. The second was that the time shouldn’t be shared with ultimate.

But, despite that being painfully obvious, Liquid failed to make a move, and now, after a miserable start to 2026, their chances of making the Major are so slim that they’re risking further embarrassment at events like the Roman Imperium Cup.

If only they didn’t skip PGL Cluj-Napoca.

Not that I think it would have gone well for them, it was just really silly to skip it considering the fact that they were already in a precarious position.

But that just is the story of Liquid, isn’t it? At the start of this article, I said we’d answer the question of how Liquid got here, and by now, that should be as obvious to you as it is to the world that broky is finished and MOUZ won’t ever win sh-t.

Mismanagement.

From the constant mis-profiling of signings, to allowing stars to IGL, and failure to sign new players when necessary, Liquid have not just been allowed to stagnant, they’ve been allowed to fall to a level they’ll actually struggle to recover from.

Seriously, who would sign for Liquid now? Maybe degster, who is trapped in the CS gulag, but is he exactly going to be a needle mover for them? Probably not. So instead, Liquid will be left with a squad that continues to trudge along, straight down the path to irrelevancy.

It’s a sad story, but it’s one we’ve seen far too many times at this point. Fnatic. NIP. Astralis. VP (twice). FaZe. Liquid aren’t the first, and they certainly won’t be the last. The only question that remains is how long they go before they decide to blow it all up and start again.

Hopefully when they do, they’ll finally have some smarter people in charge.