The final two teams to be invited to one of the year’s biggest events have been announced.
FaZe Clan and Danish soccer club FC Copenhagen’s esports venture, North, will be attending IEM Katowice’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive finals from Mar. 1-5, ESL announced today. The teams, which showed impressive form towards the end of 2016 at multiple international LAN events, will be competing against some of the best teams in the world.
The two teams are also the last to receive invitations to the event, as four teams will be added after a series of online qualifiers. In total, three more European teams will be attending IEM Katowice, as well as one North American team. With an already-stacked ensemble of teams ready to attend, such as Brazil’s SK Gaming, Polish hometown heroes Virtus Pro, and Denmark’s top team Astralis, the four teams that will be advancing through the online qualifiers will be making an already-competitive event all the more fierce.
In October 2016, the current North roster, which was signed to Dignitas at the time, took home the $500,000 EPICENTER event in Moscow. Aside from being one of the biggest events of the year, it had all the top teams in the world in attendance. Since then, however, North has struggled to live up to the expectations placed upon them, and have recently fallen short at nearly all events they have attended since.
The opposite can be said about FaZe, since the team picked up former Astralis in-game leader Finn “Karrigan” Andersen. Since Karrigan’s arrival, FaZe have had their best results since the team’s inception, and have looked stronger at each event they have attended.
Taking place roughly one month after the ELEAGUE Major, which begins on Jan. 22, IEM Katowice will likely be the debut tournament of several new rosters—so make sure to keep an eye on what could be one of the biggest CS:GO events of the year.
