ESL is closing National Championships: Why and what is next?

The ESL National Championships are closing. HLTV spoke to an ESL director to find out why the decision was made and several representatives from the affected countries about its impact.

On Friday, ESL FACEIT Group announced that it is discontinuing the long-standing National Championship tournament series.

The competitions in Benelux, France, Spain, and Turkey have been shut down effective immediately, and the Oceania, Brazil, Germany, Poland, and UK & Ireland counterparts will run for a final season this year.

This will come as a significant blow to many of these countries and its best teams as well as the grassroots scene below. Twice a year these were some of the biggest competitions to play on a national level for the past decade and beyond, and provided local teams a path to bigger tournaments like ESL Pro League.

Some of the opportunities to advance through the ranks will remain, some will be replaced, but others will not, and it will be up to third parties to fill that gap.

ESL: "National-based competition isn't compatible with where esports has grown"

Explaining the decision in an exclusive interview, ESL FACEIT Group's Senior Director for CS:GO Shaun Clark told HLTV that national competitions have become "incompatible" with the rest of the ESL Pro Tour in large part due to the developing trend of teams expanding internationally and no longer fitting the national eligibility.

Counter-Strike has been moving in this direction more and more in recent years, as evidenced by the fact that only half of the current top-20 teams boast a core of three players hailing from the same country — the requirement to field a team in ESL's national tournaments. Mixed teams such as Endpoint, Epsilon, Sprout, PENTA, and EC Brugge even used temporary lineups for the National Championships because they didn't meet eligibility rules in the past, only to revert back to their multi-national cores once the tournament was over.

"National-based competition helped lay the foundation of esports as we know it today. Our belief is, though, that esport is a borderless sport where national-based competition isn't quite compatible with where it has grown," Clark explained. "It does work in some cases, you can build an ecosystem that is concentrated on national competition, but you really need to be all-in with that."

"I don't think we were giving enough attention to these tournaments because they were incompatible and less in our focus," he admitted.

The company seems to recognize the value of grassroots competitions in fostering new talent, but it no longer wishes to spread its resources among many individual scenes.

"We do genuinely believe those tournaments fuel the tier one, so we invest in running the ESL Challenger tournaments and ESL Challenger League, the ESEA divisions, national tournaments until now, and all of our qualifiers, because we want to see these players foster and grow within the system. But it's a lot of work for us, so we need to try to give opportunities to a lot more players in a much more efficient way. One European competition serves 50 countries, rather than trying to install 50 national competitions to do the same thing."

However, National Championships have been a key component of domestic competition in these nine countries for years and didn't just exist to feed players further up the chain. In many cases they served their individual scenes on their own and their removal will leave a gaping hole.

Unless that space is filled, the local team organizations' interest in continuing to invest in the scene will start to fade in the less developed domestic scenes, players won't have as much to strive for in their country, and opportunities will go away for people behind the scenes helping organize and cover these events as well.

A big blow to the national scenes

Peter Thompson, co-owner of 10-time ESL Premiership-winning organization Endpoint, outlined the importance the series had to their region. "Losing the ESL Premiership is a huge loss to UK CS. It offered a really great path to pro from grassroots within your country to pro on a global stage, while often giving LAN experience to new players. It is also a huge loss for organisations, Endpoint realistically wouldn’t be where we are today without the ESL Premiership to help us grow that base and identity within the UK and Ireland," he told HLTV.

Australian commentator Jordan "⁠Elfishguy⁠" Mays, who has been involved in all 16 seasons of the Australia & New Zealand Champs, believes this will cause even more damage in an already struggling domestic scene in Oceania. "Anyone involved would tell you that ANZ Champs was the pinnacle of Counter-Strike in our region. Any up-and-coming player always had the goal of competing in and performing well in that league. There have been plenty of other minor tournaments and leagues in ANZ, but nothing came close to the prestige and continuity of ANZ Champs."

"If it turns out that ANZ Champs is not being replaced by anything, then I think we'll see huge ramifications for the health of ANZ CS, which has already been on life support this year. One of the biggest complaints this year has been that there are not enough officials to play domestically."

Perhaps no one is a bigger proponent of the National Championships than Movistar Riders. A year and a half ago the Spaniards won the local Masters tournament and qualified from the following Conference stage to ESL Pro League Season 15, where they sent shockwaves through the community with a 5-0 group stage run to the quarter-finals. The boost in the rankings allowed them to qualify for IEM Cologne four months later and make it to the semi-finals there, their biggest achievement to date.

mopoz did not mince his words when talking about the importance of the Spanish Masters, what it means to him to see it go away, and what impact it will have on up-and-coming players. "From my point of view, we're blatantly fucked," the 27-year-old said in a comment to HLTV. "Back in the days we had around 2-3 different leagues here in Spain, and with time it became only ESL. Now we have none, so I don't even know which path the players have to follow."

"Of course they'll be playing ESEA Leagues, but where are they going to get the hunger to continue growing? Every single player started dreaming of becoming the best in his country and, afterward, the best in the world. Now they have to jump steps to reach the maximum level, and that's not good."

Meanwhile in Germany, this is news that has been a long time coming and to some degree it is welcome, as much as it can be for a 20-year tournament series to suddenly get pulled.

"The way the ESL Meisterschaft has been going in recent years, it no longer had any added value and has slowly died before itself. Sometimes an end with horror is better than a horror without end," BIG's Chief Gaming Officer, Roman Reinhardt, says. "I think it's a chance to revolutionize the national tournament system. I know many are looking into it and only one has to say 'I'll do it'. I am optimistic."

"The viewing experience and playing experience just got worse for everyone. The numbers were dropping, the viewership, the quality of the cast was not the best," former BIG co-founder Christian Lenz adds. "There was a lot of input from teams and players with requests and wishes, and the league operators, Freaks4U, were totally immune to feedback. Everyone hopes a new operator will step in, listen to the feedback of the community and just make it better."

ESL counts on third-party organizers and plans a Challenger League expansion to help fill the gaps

Just like Reinhardt and Lenz hope for others in Germany to step up to the plate, ESL is now counting on third parties to help them fill the gap. The company is in the process of coming up with an affiliate program that would allow other organizers to provide similar opportunities as the National Championships had and tie into the ESL Pro Tour just the same. This is a strategy that BLAST, ESL's biggest competitor, has successfully employed by partnering with local organizers to feed teams into the Showdown part of the circuit.

"We would like help from other organizers to do the things we might not be able to do so well anymore. We might not have the resources or capability to run an individual country's competition well, but we're still able to indirectly support local tournaments without having to bear the responsibility [to organize them] ourselves," Clark shared.

ESL doesn't have a full-fledged plan of how to execute the idea yet, but it has already previously outsourced hosting some of the National Championships to other organizers, and the director says recent conversations behind the scenes have been promising. "The one thing local tournament organizers have been failing on is the ability to attract the top teams of that country, because the top teams are either occupied with a regional/global competition or playing another local competition mainly to get back into the global circuit.

"Based on conversations I've had, I think if we were to offer them an ability to connect into that global ecosystem, they'll be able to attract the right teams and therefore have a more attractive offering themselves, which then helps them commercialize it, run it, figure out the resources to do it," Clark concluded.

He also shared that ESL is looking into expanding the Challenger League from the current three regions — Europe, North America, and Asia — to four or five, adding one or both of Oceania, where the league ran until it was merged with the ANZ Champs in 2022, and South America.

For now, though, it is just a lot of hopes and wishes. What is known for sure is that many doors are closing and it remains to be seen if they will open again.