Evil Geniuses reportedly ditching NA ‘talent pipeline’ in favor of international signings

Evil Geniuses CS:GO roster could be swaying away from their North American core and their North American talent pipeline, according to multiple reports.

The North American organization is reportedly in talks with Monte’s Mohammad “BOROS” Malhas, according to a shared report by HLTV and 1pv.fr from June 17. On that same day, CIS leaker OverDrive reported EG is in talks with FORZE’s Aleksandr “zorte” Zagodyrenko, who has been recently transfer-listed.

Both reports have come out after it was reported on June 16 that the organization is also eyeing French rifler Audric “JACKZ” Jug. If all three transfers come to fruition, it would mean EG would become a European team, and not a North American one. This would also somewhat cease their efforts to create NA “talent pipeline,” which is how their manager GamerDoc labeled the team in January 2023 after beating Heroic.

In June last year, EG announced a Blueprint Project, which saw the org create a 15-man CS:GO roster for the current year. Since then, however,all of them failed to achieve any success, with two of them, EG Black and EG White merging into one on March 20.

Despite this, on March 20 the organization claimed it will continue to develop North American talent. “EG will still be the only North American CS:GO organization to be fielding both a main and academy roster, as our commitment to investing in and developing a pipeline of North American talent has not changed since the start of Blueprint,” the announcement back then read.

All in all, though, none of these three reports could come true in the nearby future, and EG could remain an NA team, even though the squad already has two players from the European region in their lineup—Sanzhar “neaLan” Iskhakov and Ismail “refresh” Ali. Besides, it hasn’t been specified which players would the reported three signings eventually replace in EG, so refresh and neaLan could bite the bullet.

If EG don’t keep three NA players, they won’t be allowed to compete in NA’s RMRs for the upcoming Counter-Strike 2 Majors.