Even making it out of Stage 1 will be considered a decent result for the teams, so will the future be as bleak as the present?

Eight years ago, Cloud9 shocked the world by coming back from 15-11 down to win the ELEAGUE Boston Major against FaZe Clan. Eight years on, and NA’s greatest hope in the IEM Cologne Major is hard to pinpoint.

M80 have had some success internationally, and Liquid should be much better than they are, but NRG are hardly a threat, and none of these teams are expected to make much of a mark in Germany.

When you consider these teams highs, as well as the expectations placed on a team like Liquid, this lack of expectation is undeniably bleak, but can it get any better?

I don’t think so, and in fact, I’m not sure it ever will. There’s simply too much stacked against the region, so while an individual may win a Major like Twistzz did with FaZe, I’m willing to say that no majority-NA team will ever win a Major again.

A lack of talent

The most obvious issue NA is faced with is the lack of talent.

It’s not even like with Brazil, or perhaps Russia, where the talent that exists just can’t make its way onto a team together; there just isn’t the talent there to actually make a dent on the international stage.

Sure, you could make a more competitive team by forcing some of the members of the aforementioned team onto one Frankenstein roster, but add any of those combinations up in any way that you like - do you think they’d win anything?

Part of the problem is that there’s too much similarity between the biggest stars. malbsMd, EliGE, and Lake are all at their best when they’re the tip of the spear for a team, and although you can make one of them into a more supportive element, you’re still not going to get them all in or even optimal performance out of them.

And this is without mentioning Twistzz, too, who would probably also fit into a similar conversation when not IGLing bums like broky and jcobbb.

Or that Twistzzz seemingly has no interest in NA

Or that EliGE is past his best.

Or that there is no clear - sorry, oSee - AWPing option.

Or even an IGL when you consider that s1n is German, JT is South African, and siuhy is Polish.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Add in the fact that NAF is also far past his best, and it quickly becomes apparent that if you try to make any kind of majority, NA begins to become problematic. The stars of yesterday were not replaced by anyone worthy of being called a star, and those who have shown the potential to have failed to live up to the hype when elevated to the position of one.

The old guard failed you

One of the most important things for any domestic CS scene is that the older players stick around to help mentor the young guns who will replace them. This is something that, outside of nitr0 and stanislaw, hasn’t really happened in NA, and the entire region feels the impact of it.

NAF and EliGE have remained on Liquid the whole time, while tarik, skadoodle, and autimatic are all gone without a trace. Twistzz gets a pass through still being at a far higher level than the aforementioned names, but just look at Stewie, he preferred to gamble his friends’ money away rather than do anything helpful for NA.

These are players who should have been moving down the ladder and playing on much worse teams, but all instead preferred to retire and do other things, preventing them from passing on their wisdom to players who may have actually become stars if they had gained the top-tier knowledge these figures possess.

Instead, those players are effectively left to their own devices. Not just that, but they’re left to their own devices in a region where tactics are considered “try-hard”, where individualism over teamplay is preferred, and where game-losing mistakes are as frequent as donk solo-carrying Spirit to a map win.

The cultural differences

It’s a tired and often spoken-about point by now, but perhaps the most prevalent of all is that NA CS just doesn’t have the culture to produce top-level stars.

Or at least enough of them anyway.

If you’ve ever played in a high-ish elo NA pug, you’ll know what I mean. I’ve had the displeasure of doing so a couple of times, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. The differences to EU pugs of an equivalent elo are mind-blowing.

In one game, played on Dust2, I suggested we go long. I was told, “We don’t call strats here,” and then watched helplessly as my duo and I went out long while the rest of the team fanned out across the map to be picked off one by one by the happily obliging CTs.

This doesn’t happen in EU. If you call that “strat” in EU, you might get an opposing opinion from a teammate, but the team will ultimately agree on something, and it will be done. There’s a natural understanding of structure that comes from this, and also an eventual understanding of when things work and why they sometimes don’t, but that’s just not there anymore.

NA CS is also very content hungry. Look back at the golden days of Rank S streams, all of this and the golden generation that came from it was driven by content. Without it, the nation doesn’t actually attract the required number of players for there to actually be stars. You can’t have a golden generation without numbers, so instead you just end up with anomalies.

It’s all doomed

None of this is to say that NA can’t produce a star that could go on to win a Major, because of course they could. Had G2 made better decisions, malbsMd absolutely could have won one there. If Lake moves to a bigger team, he certainly could, too. Hell, even Twistzz could get another one, although that does feel unlikely.

The point is, though, that I don’t think an actual NA team ever will. Even if they were to import the best IGL and AWPer in the world, the remainder of the team just wouldn’t have the mentality or the skills to lift Counter-Strike’s biggest trophy, and given how great the Cloud9 win was, that’s a real shame.