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GUIDES
Simple Radar
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Expensive Major tickets, and a generational talent is now available once again.
EWC 2026 is about to get underway, beginning with the biggest and most stacked Open Qualifier we’ve ever seen.
Perfecto is also free from contract jail, whilst Argentines better expect to spend some serious cash on Major tickets. No one is defending them, though, so we’ll do it.
Turns out, pretty much everyone.
This weekend marks the Last Chance Qualifier for the Esports World Cup, a rare case of an open qualifier with 64 teams being held on LAN in Paris. A logistical nightmare, we’re sure, but if XSE Pro League taught us one thing, it’s that poor planning is very entertaining.
Over three days of LAN play, 64 teams will be whittled down to just four that get to proceed to the main Esports World Cup event, and it looks like it’s going to be a doozy of a weekend.
The sheer size of it makes it hard for us to go through the team list - much less the group fixtures - but rest assured, your favourite team should at least make it through to the single-elimination bracket.
Except if your favourite team is BC.Game or SAW.
Most groups have been filled by two teams with an active VRS rank and two unranked squads, which makes it easy to call how the group should go. The two teams above, however, are not ranked yet, and thus haven’t been given the same high seed as teams like Liquid, HEROIC, or OG.
This means in their groups there are three teams that, reasonably, should make it out. But only two can go through.
SAW will have to battle past one of DENDELE - Sharks, if you forgot about their rebrand - or Danish upshoots EAC, while s1mple and co. have to deal with tier two warriors BASEMENT BOYS or 1win. Yes, we know you haven’t heard of either team, but trust us when we say this might be tricky.
Regardless of how the group stage goes, the action will come to a head on Sunday when the surviving 32 teams get squeezed through a single-elimination bracket until four remain. If you think this sounds like an inefficient method to select the four best teams, you’d be right, but at least it’s not the 2024 format.
Yuck.
Let’s play a little game.
If you had to guess, how old do you think Perfecto is?
Somewhere around 30, getting close to unc status? Yeah… wrong.
He’s just 26 years old.
Maybe you guessed it right, but doesn’t it feel like he’s a lot closer to retirement than the middle of his career?
Seems like that’s what happens when you spend what feels like an eternity trapped in contract jail. Going through it once is bad enough, but twice? That’s almost impressive.
But fear not, statsmeister. Your boy has escaped once again and is finally a free agent - or, to use a more accurate term, unemployed. Beats being stuck on VP, if you ask us.
And while there are plenty of question marks around his current form - and rightfully so - we’re still talking about a Major champion and the 2022 Anchor of the Year. That’s usually the kind of resume that gets you calls, even if they’re not the ones you’d like.
The real question is whether Perfecto is willing to grind his way back up the ladder or if he’s holding out for a spot on a tier 1 roster - something that’s probably not on the cards anytime soon.
At first glance, BetBoom seems like the most logical destination, potentially replacing S1ren. But knowing how things go around these parts, we’re already bracing ourselves for the inevitable BC.Game announcement any day now.
This week on Overtime on Inferno, Sam and Quacke spend half an hour theorising about where jL could be heading, only to find out mid-recording that he’s off to Vitality as a stand-in.
Other than that hilarious moment though, there’s plenty of analysis surrounding the recent BLAST Bounty. With the most important of that analysis being that Spirit MUST kick Hally at all costs.
The ticket prices for the FIReLEAGUE Major are out, and they actually look decently priced.
Well, just as long as you’re not Argentinean, then the premium tickets are likely to be around 40% of your monthly wage.
“Why should I care?” We hear you ask, and that’s kinda the problem. You might remember that we once wrote a deep dive about the uproar regarding the IEM Cologne Major ticket prices, where the premium tickets came in at a whopping 800 Euros.
“So these tickets are quite cheap by comparison then?” Maybe, but that’s not the full story, is it?
The important thing to remember about a European Major is that Europeans generally earn more money than Argentines. Where the premium seating might cost an Argentine 41% of the average monthly wage in Buenos Aires, it’s just 17% for a German.
With that said, and with the fact that the largest percentage of people at events tends to be those travelling domestically, you start to realise the tickets are quite expensive.
So, where’s the uproar?
The uproar for Cologne was so intense that we felt a need to write an article about it, so where is it for this one?
Does the CS community simply not care about local fans actually being able to go to the first Major hosted in their country? Were they just trying to secure brownie points by standing against the evil Saudi owned ESL?
It’s probably both, but that doesn’t make either one okay.
Perhaps, instead of just trying to secure those brownie points, they could just actually have real morals and principles.
But that’s quite a lot to ask for, isn’t it?
