2 massive names are missing from IEM Sydney’s stacked CS:GO lineup

ESL announced the IEM Sydney 2023 lineup, and, it turns out, two big teams are missing from the roster.

A bunch of massive teams in CS:GO have been directly invited either to the event or its closed qualifications, like BLAST.tv Paris Major winners Team Vitality, or IEM Cologne 2023 conquerors, G2 Esports. Yet, the tournament is missing Heroic and Astralis, arguably two of the best teams in the world.

Both Danish teams are currently high in HLTV and ESL’s ranking, underlining their prowess in the current CS:GO esports scene. Heroic are currently ranked first in both rankings, while Astralis are holding sixth and eighth place in HLTV and ESL’s leaderboard, respectively. On top of that, both squads reached Cologne’s playoffs last week.

While the Australian community will surely miss seeing both of these CS:GO giants on Sydney’s scene, it’s far from surprising. The biggest teams in the scene sometimes decline invites to tournaments outside of Europe due to packed schedules, burnout, and so on. We don’t know for a fact Heroic and Astralis were invited to Sydney in the first place, but we refuse to believe otherwise.

Still, hometown fans will have individuals to cheer for since Australian Greyhound have been invited to the main event. Fnatic and G2 also have players from the land down under, dexter and jks.

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ESL also revealed the list of teams invited to closed qualifiers. Europe’s bracket is already stacked with squads like 9INE and Ninjas and Pyjamas. The qualifiers will take place by the end of August, while the event itself is scheduled to begin on Oct. 16.