North American teams in talks over European trip for end-of-season tournaments

A plan is in motion to have teams from the two regions face off in the final stretch of this turbulent year.

A group of North America-based teams could soon move to Europe to finish out the 2020 season in the Old Continent, HLTV.org has learned. This would allow all the best teams in the two regions to compete against each other for the first time since IEM Katowice after the coronavirus pandemic upended the esports calendar and forced almost every major competition to be split into regional divisions.

Discussions are still ongoing between the multiple parties involved, but the plan is for the teams to travel to Europe after IEM New York, which will be held between October 6 and 18 in North America. This would make the BLAST Premier Fall Series the first of a number of tournaments to feature clashes between teams from the two regions. Most of the tournaments in which these North America-based teams will compete will still be held online, but the European sojourn will also facilitate a potential end-of-the-year trip to Cologne for the IEM Global Challenge, the $500,000 LAN tournament that ESL plans to host in December in the German city.

According to sources, BLAST has been one of the driving forces behind these discussions as it hopes to bring its four North America-based teams — Liquid, Evil Geniuses, 100 Thieves and MIBR — over to Europe for the entire Fall season and combine the two BLAST Premier regions into one.

Other tournament organisers are still working out details about what will happen with their regionalised competitions in light of this development. After IEM New York — which is a Regional Major Ranking (RMR) tournament in North America and in the CIS —, and BLAST Premier Fall, IEM Beijing-Haidan and DreamHack Masters Winter are the next events in the calendar that are supposed to feature regional divisions, a solution that was devised during the pandemic to help players avoid travel and to reduce latency issues.

In the next few weeks, more details will come out about which teams will be travelling to Europe and how the tournament landscape will be reshaped, but Counter-Strike fans all over the world will certainly start giggling with delight at the prospect of seeing North American and European teams cross paths once more.