Majors 2022–2026: international rosters and the CS2 transition

The international template

karrigan's FaZe project is the reference point for every mixed roster since: a Danish leader, a Norwegian veteran, a Canadian rifler, a Latvian and an Estonian, all playing in English. Once it won, the transfer market stopped treating nationality as a constraint, and by 2025 almost every top-five team was multinational.

Vitality show the same logic from the other direction. Their 2023 title still had a French core plus two Danes from the Astralis dynasty; by Austin 2025 the five around ZywOo were French, Israeli, British and Estonian.

The generation gap

The Shanghai 2024 champions are the clearest sign of the era's turnover. Team Spirit built around donk, a teenager who had never played CS:GO professionally at a high level, and sh1ro, a sniper from the online years. None of the five had a Major before that run.

Meanwhile Natus Vincere's Copenhagen win included none of the players from Stockholm except b1t — a three-year gap in which the entire roster around him was replaced.

What changed with CS2

• The engine change reset map knowledge and utility timings, which briefly flattened the skill gap and let newer rosters win faster.
• The map pool turned over more aggressively, so line-ups from 2023 onwards are associated with different maps than their predecessors.
• Ranking moved onto a points system tied to the BLAST and ESL circuits, making Major qualification more predictable and reducing the number of one-off underdog runs.

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