Editorial: Can ESL Pro League survive in a changing landscape?

ESL’s marquee Pro League is having an identity crisis as it tries to combine match overload with broadcast banter. Will it survive in the 2025 post-partnered league era?

Oh, dear. One can already hear the comments rolling in. The editorialist deigns to criticize others for their banter — hypocrite! Patience, reader. We are simply going to review whether the recently completed ESL Pro League (EPL) Season 19 format remains sustainable, especially since 2025 will usher in the beginning of the end for partnered leagues, and how EPL should navigate its mid-life crisis.

ESL Pro League Season 19 is shorter than last year’s Season 18, but still has the feeling of being intolerably long and wearing on the psyches of viewers, players, and casters. In fact, EPL Season 19 is only a week longer than the Katowice/Cologne circuits, and yet feels three times as long.

Why is that? The combination of a byzantine bracket system, weeklong spates of matches, and discordance between the A and B streams are slowly fraying nerves and disassembling the logical structure of the tournament. What can be done?

To hype or to chill, that is the question

The court of a king features all manner of characters in it: sedate counselor, irate warrior, and profligate jester. But notice that archetypes exist for a reason: every man has a role to play and none does it half-heartedly. By virtue of this analogy, every piece has its role to play in a circuit. EPL right now is half-prince, half-jester and the king is nowhere to be found.

ESL Pro League has been ESL’s flagship league going back to 2015 when it merged with ESEA to institute this new league. Starting with Season 1, EPL is replete with historical memories that live on in the halls of Counter-Strike: Cloud9’s tank top summer, as well as EPL Season 4 being the first time an NA team won an international event in the CS:GO era, and early glimmers of green-and-yellow Brazilian flair beginning with Season 3.

We enjoyed Pro League because it felt like a culmination of an entire, less engaging (and online) sporting season, a Counter-Strike NBA playoffs only featuring the best of the best.

By Season 3, EPL had moved out of ESL’s studios and into a stadium format. While not quite the continent-hopping muster of an American sports league, the trajectory was clear. EPL was going to be a crème de la crème league for CS:GO and would only feature the best teams with their A-game, essentially akin to a Major without Valve’s imprimatur.

Like many things in the CS scene, this upward trajectory was cloven asunder by the COVID-19 pandemic. Two seasons were canceled for offline play and moved entirely online. The COVID changes also struck right after the announcement of the "Louvre Agreement" and the concurrent partner league wars with other TOs, adding both fuel and cold water to that long-simmering fire.

By the time Season 15 returned to offline play, the league had swelled to 24 participants, as opposed to 16 before the pandemic. As the global economic environment turned increasingly competitive, both in terms of milking streaming hours for at-home viewers and for intra-league competition, ESL kept upping the ante by continuously upping the prize pool. Concurrently, this league eventually found a home in Malta and now has settled on the 32-team melee we know today.

But as a result of this constant ante-upping, in an ever-escalating spiral with BLAST and very briefly Flashpoint, ESL had not foreseen one consequence. It has become bloated, festering, sometimes uninteresting, and altogether unwieldy. Thus, we have arrived at our present day and EPL’s current identity crisis. Let’s cover several issues.

Format

Do you remember when you first became addicted to Counter-Strike and were then made privy to the existence of the esports circuit and professional scene? It was like a new alien world unfolding in front of you: the Jurassic-era ferns part way to a plain filled with wondrous and splendid titans competing.

People became so good in public servers that they eventually escaped those hellholes, congregated in online leagues, competed across various tiers, and broke through to a fully paid profession of fame and glory. This felt like a natural progression for such a pure competitive sport.

The early seasons of EPL encapsulated that feeling with their lower team counts, qualifying only the best-of-the-best. And although it seems archaic now, their single-elimination groups format (with best-of-one matches) followed by single-elimination playoffs avoided viewer fatigue. And this structure was certainly not as brutal as the brackets of the CPL days (pray we never see single-elimination, best-of-one brackets for internationally flying teams ever again).

Tournament formats have been one of the underlying philosophical wars in the CS community, which has never ended (Swiss? I’ll fight you, bruv). ESL did not help matters in early iterations of the EPL with their nightmarish round-robin format, which ended in situations like triple ties in the group stages.

But to their credit, the league kept innovating into later seasons, eventually evolving to a double-elimination group format, and even doing away with best-of-ones following initial matches.

The problem, however, is once again ESL’s upping of the ante. Team counts kept rising, qualifying structures became increasingly complex and convoluted, and average spectator expectations kept increasing as well. At some point, best-of-one became unpalatable, as did early elimination for teams that had traveled far and wide to compete.

Adding to this was the clear paradigm shift of transitioning to an all-LAN format, turning an ostensibly long campaign of online groups into a marshaling ground of teams meeting in one place for weeks on end. While this came with the wow factor of all-LAN groups, it also killed the magic of lower-tiered teams grinding their way into LAN playoffs.

So now we have lived through Season 19. 32 teams. Triple-elimination groups with all best-of-three matches. If you had asked this article writer his feelings on this format in his early 20s, he would have been ecstatic and likely endeavored to watch all of these matches.

Back then he was in the habit of heading to Hamilton Hall for a class on 17th-century English prosody, but secretly watching SLTV StarSeries IV matches on mirage_ce on his phone. But then he was too idealistic; he didn’t consider logistics, and he didn’t realize just how long these matches could drag on. The lifeblood of many passions is measured in their inherent stamina.

The current format, along with the ever-increasing competitor count, has turned the EPL into a three-week slog (even five weeks in earlier seasons). Games are relegated to dual streams, take place during hours of both the European and North American workdays (the prime viewership demographics), and wear on viewers' patience. So, whereas before, the drag was the EPL's long length, now the drag has become the double-stream match saturation. And the dual stream format continues into the playoffs.

The lesson here is that EPL remains a time sink that looks better on paper (e.g., boardroom meetings) but frays viewers’ nerves. There is no getting around this fact. There is simply too much Counter-Strike and, somewhere along the way, the magic and the weight of the matches is lost. MR12 does practically zero to fix this issue; the bloat remains, and it has become distended.

There are plenty of other little inefficiencies with the format, e.g. four-month-old seeding giving way to extremely schizophrenic groups, teams needing to win different amounts of matches to progress, and plenty of meaningless middle-bracket matches that would only be worth watching if they were up on CSGOLounge. The worst offender may just be the 16-team playoff progressive bracket instead of a proper RO16 bracket. But let’s segue into the downstream effects of this bloat.

Stream Duality

So many matches means lots and lots of coverage. Now, first and foremost, the B stream is a fantastic opportunity and leg-up for casters and analysts trying to make their way into a scene where the ladders have been drawn up above them and the portcullises sealed shut. This is by no means a knock on the individual members of the B stream, as they have surely been putting in long days and nights for the opportunity of a lifetime.

But the B stream was hamstrung by ESL before it could even flower. The rough delay of casting from bedrooms, the related effects of tech issues, and the lack of synchronicity between the casters created a listening experience that was jilted and awkward. Many complained online about the disparity in quality between the A and B streams.

It should be said that as this is ESL’s flagship league, they are not expected to showcase such disparities in the way they broadcast their matches. One suspects that the downstream effect (yet again) of so many teams and so many matches has led the broadcaster to try and save money on the second production, recouping some of the overhead cost in talent and production while also maximizing viewing hours.

Under this formula, the perceived drop in quality on the B stream becomes almost irrelevant to ESL, as they can remain lean in their spending and rack up viewing hours to gain back profit. It is worth noting here that Savvy Games Group (ESL FACEIT Group's parent company) is reportedly considering moving away from esports spending, and coin purses could be summarily snapping shut. As they say, money is the motive.

The A stream is also not spared from a drop in quality, but whereas ESL could afford to “amateurize” their second production with lesser-known talent and throw at them a gauntlet of, if we’re being frank, mostly boring games to cover between third and second-tier teams, they had to shield their premier talent from the chance of likewise boring games by giving them free rein in how they cast games.

This decision to unleash the casters and analysts has had interesting consequences. Let’s start with some positives: 1) The rare example of pros like Nicolai "⁠device⁠" Reedtz joining streams to provide their unique insights and 2) the overall skits and B-roll content. The latter have been incredible and a testament to the creative powerhouse that the casting talent and ESL have both become while also employing very creative sketch writers and production-oriented thinkers.

The issue is on the streams themselves. Day-upon-day of matches and blockbuster talent cooped up in Malta led to some truly deranged casts. On one hand, one can sympathize with A-list casters having to basically speedrun long, mostly uninteresting, and low-stakes games for weeks on end, but this formula is likely going to lead to burnout if it hasn’t already. On the other hand, there are only so many times I want to hear about creampies on a stream, even if via innuendo.

The problem with morphing the A stream casts into basically Joe Rogan-lite podcasts full of inane discussions is multifold. Firstly, it can be jarring for a new viewer tuning in, who is expecting to understand the stakes and the lore behind the current match at hand. Secondly, the casters often become wrapped up in their storylines that are completely irrelevant to the round being played at hand and often tend to miss great plays.

There's also the disconnect between casters fooling around and teams competing for glory (for example Andrey "⁠B1ad3⁠" Gorodenskiy mentioning live on stream following Natus Vincere ascending to the playoffs that casters are in a holiday mood while Natus Vincere are there to win), which makes the games even less entertaining to watch and have less weight.

A caster or analyst from the A stream is going to read this and feel they have come under attack. Well, not really. It was ESL’s decision to open up EPL to so many teams, as well as their admittedly noble but flawed decision to change the format to triple-elimination, which has caused massive bloat in match quality. Caster and analyst burnout are real; this has been well established throughout the history of CS:GO and spoken of in-depth by the likes of Matthew "⁠Sadokist⁠" Trivett.

Nobody is wishing these casters to subject themselves to suit-and-tie fake enthusiasm for weeks on end. Having fun is likely the only way they can stay sane, and some of the on-stream banter and most of the skits have been pure quality.

Yet, on a different token, the smaller teams that have made it to EPL may be playing the most important matches of their careers and deserve somewhat somber treatment rather than being subjected to a pure memecast that then lives on in VODs forever. So, whereas allowing casters to unwind is good, they will naturally discard serious casts from the lesser-tiered team matches and not take their games as seriously.

So what is the problem?

The problem is that EPL has an identity crisis. It is both too much and too little at once. It is the "alpha" male in the club flashing wealth to all and sundry and throwing cash on the floor; his spuriousness and insecurity are secretly visible to everyone. The stretching nature and endless feeling of matches is causing tedium across the board despite the over-the-top silliness of the casts. And at some point, the goofy bong-hit vibe becomes grating.

ESL want to recapture the magic of The Summit tournaments, i.e. a venue and format where players and casters could hang out and chill while providing genuine insight. But the problem is they are a corporation with corporate responsibilities and board room frigidity. It's like your dad trying to share current-day Twitch memes with you: far too uncanny valley.

Additionally, EPL is supposed to be ESL's flagship competitive league but is morphing into an influencer-culture-inspired and personality-driven content farm. With the level of focus waning and the level of content creation waxing, they may as well get in front of their own natural progression and hire two Just Chatting section streamers to cast games and have Nerf gun fights in between matches.

If you had told a random fan "32 teams, 3 weeks," no one could have come up with the current format except an upper-level executive looking to maximize the number of matches with bad teams, and minimize the number of matches with good teams. With 2025 looming and semi-partnered leagues likely soon dying, we can only celebrate the eventual deconstruction of the current state of the ESL Pro League.

That said, nobody wants the lazy fragility of a Valorant tournament circuit. Riot tournaments are where messy and beautiful humanity goes to get shot, thrown in an open pit, and then splashed with kerosene levels of infantile cringe and lit on fire to wails of uwu.

Give us stuff like the Lord of the Rings and Dune: Part Two skits, while also maximizing good match formatting/scheduling and professional, broadcast-level casting. While the quality of the matches themselves cannot be controlled, similar to in other sports, the other variables can be further finetuned.

This is not an indictment. Good games are a natural byproduct of Counter-Strike as a phenomenal game; they should in theory occur often and go down in history on a repeatable basis. And while partnered leagues may soon be a thing of the past, bloated tournaments could continue to haunt us — we need to strive to find a balance.

This solution should be something that works for viewers, talent, players, and TOs. It should not be one that prioritizes milking viewing hours for as long as possible at the expense of the game. It's clear after EPL Season 19 that their current identity is promising yet overwrought. Cast it back into the fire from whence it came; and let the ashes birth a new iteration strengthened by its glorious history.