Former North IGL retires from CS:GO after a decade of competition

One of the most well-known players of the CS:GO era, Mathias “MSL” Lauridsen, announced his retirement on Sept. 21.

MSL hasn’t shed any details regarding his future plans, though, he hasn’t disregarded a potential return in the future. “I might be back at some point,” he wrote in his Instagram post.

In the post, MSL thanked all of his former teammates, coaches, management, and everyone who had helped him fulfill his dreams of making a living out of a hobby. The Dane also underlined it would be an obvious choice for him to pursue a career in coaching now that he’s retired, but he feels “something else is calling,” although he didn’t share what that could be.

During his career, MSL represented a bunch of European teams, most notably North, OpTic Gaming, Rogue, Dignitas, and Copenhagen Wolves. In the past years he struggled to break out of tier two CS:GO, but in 2016 and 2017, he managed to lead North, Dignitas, and OpTic to a few trophies.

Most notably, MSL secured a few pivotal victories when playing under North’s banner, including a few DreamHacks, like Open Valencia 2018 and Open Montreal 2017. In these tournaments, MSL beat the giants of the CS:GO scene back at the time, including Astralis, FaZe Clan, and Virtus Pro.

Despite not having a Major trophy under his belt, MSL has been widely recognized by the community as one of the stand-out Danish players in CS:GO‘s history, which is coming to an end. He was regarded as one of the better in-game leaders in the scene, though rarely managed to keep any team at the top of CS:GO for long, other than North in 2017.

All in all, MSL’s career has been nothing short of admirable, especially when looking at the length of it. “Very few people make it as long in esports as he did,” one of the top comments on Reddit reads, and we couldn’t agree more.