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As Vitality lifted the trophy in the Spodek Arena, the confetti continued to fall far after the last round of IEM Katowice 2025. Similarly, as the first prestige event of the 2025 Counter-Strike calendar, the ramifications of IEM Katowice will continue to be felt long into the season.
Every year, Katowice is the event where new rosters no longer have excuses, they have to show up when it matters most. That pattern held true as Vitality’s roster delivered despite a roster change. But overall, the event raised more fascinating questions than definitive answers, like ‘What happened to Spirit in the final?’, ‘Can NaVi overcome their demons?’, and ‘Could this even be the last IEM Katowice?’
mezii triumph provides much-needed respite for UK Counter-Strike
William ‘mezii’ Merriman lived up to his nickname at IEM Katowice. He is certainly the undisputed king of UK Counter-Strike right now. As mezii was passed the famous Katowice trophy and lifted it aloft, one couldn’t help but think this was a victory that UK CS desperately needed.
With Into The Breach collapsing, UKIC champions Verdant dropping their roster, and mezii’s old team Endpoint entering a CS hiatus, UK CS is arguably facing its darkest days in a while. Thankfully mezii was there at the Spodek to represent the UK at its nadir, with ESL even playing a video in the arena featuring the British player eating beans on toast.
Vitality’s victory showed that there is still hope that if you are good enough you can get to the very top of tier one CS and win CS’s biggest prizes even if you are a “British player, oh my God,” as Dan ‘apEX’ Madesclaire so eloquently put it.
The ropz effect
Vitality’s IEM Katowice victory comes just a bit over a month after the addition of Robin ‘ropz’ Kool. While the Vitality roster undoubtedly always had the individual quality to win Counter-Strike’s best competitions, not many expected them to look this good this early.
With 2024 playoff perennials, G2, Faze and Liquid going through the motions of embedding their new players into the roster, Vitality have been markedly free of the growing pains that characterise positional changes.
Vitality had never stepped foot in the Spodek before their semi-final against The Mongolz, whereas ropz had lifted the famous Katowice trophy in 2022 with Faze. Their success at the first time of asking in Katowice’s famous arena is emblematic of the change that Mr Kool had brought to the roster.
mezii himself has been one of the greatest benefactors of ropz’s inclusion, which has allowed him to play more rotation positions on some maps, and act more proactively on T-sides. In our interview with mezii after Vitality’s victory at IEM Katowice 2025, mezii outlined ropz’s effect on the roster’s motivation:
“As soon as ropz joined the team we definitely saw the switch in terms of not just the atmosphere in the team or how we were playing,” mezii said. “What he brings is he’s a real hard-working player inside the game. He’s constantly looking for new things and how to evolve and so on. I think that kind of spreads throughout the team.”
With ropz’s help, apEX completed his career set of Counter-Strike’s most prestigious trophies having won IEM Cologne last year, as well as the two major titles in Paris and Cluj-Napoca.
Spirit give away runners-up medals to fans
On the other side of the server, Spirit could not get online in the server. For two and a half maps, they looked completely offline before fighting back from 11-4 down on mirage to level the map, eventually falling to a 11-13 scoreline.
Prior to the Grand Final, the question was whether anyone could stop Danil ‘donk’ Kryshkovets‘s march to successive Katowice titles and MVPs. Vitality answered that in an emphatic fashion, with the Russian prodigy having little impact in the series.
Spirit were left scratching their heads after the defeat, with donk unsure of the reason why they didn’t play to their potential during Spirit’s post-match interview on ESL’s broadcast: “Bad communication, bad decisions, bad aim. Bad everything. They were just better… I don’t know to be honest. We will search for the reasons why it happened and fix them.”
After the final, multiple posts on social media revealed that Spirit players had given away their losers’ medals, with donk, Myroslav ‘zont1x’ Plakhotia and Spirit coach Sergey ‘Hally’ Shavaev all reportedly giving their medals away to fans.
For Spirit in 2025, the mentality is clearly ‘all or nothing.’
NaVi defeat their demons but do not conquer them
While Spirit may have nightmares about Vitality, NaVi will be facing the same tortured sleeps over Spirit. Having only defeated Spirit once in 2024, NaVi’s hard-fought group stage victory over Spirit seemed like a vanquishing of the demons, a breaking of chains.
In the semi-finals, Spirit proved that NaVi had won the battle but not the war in a comprehensive 2-0 on-stage victory that reinforced NaVi’s worst fears. NaVi’s defeat sparked some criticism over the performance of AWPer, Ihor ‘w0nderful’ Zhdanov as NaVi struggled to get their full five activated on the server.
After their exit from the tournament, ENUK asked NaVi’s performance coach, Urszula ‘Xirreth’ Klimczak, how they would recover from the defeat.
“We just need to see what was happening in the game,” she said. “Probably, we need to look into Mirage. Why there was a slow start and if there was anything else we need to do. But I think overall if you look at the fact that it’s just the beginning of the year and we’ve had, since the beginning, every tournament, very tough opponents – we always have Spirit – I think we should be proud and we should look into the positives, like what was good and what could we do even better.”
NaVi will have plenty of time to anti-strat Spirit as they will not play again until March, in Pro League Season 21 where they are the defending champions.
GamerLegion narrowly miss playoffs and fall afoul of VRS
Ashley ‘ash’ Battye’s stock could scarcely be higher. Having rebuilt the GamerLegion roster several times over, the UK coach has garnered praise for consistently being able to make varying rosters, with vastly differently qualities work.
IEM Katowice 2025 was, once again, a broadly successful tournament with GamerLegion integrating their new members Fredrik ‘REZ’ Sterner and Oldřich ‘PR’ Nový. In an IEM Katowice 2025 interview with ENUK, GamerLegion ash praised veteran player REZ for keeping the roster calm and emotionally regulated, while sharing his excitement at PR’s playstyle and potential.
“For me, it’s super exciting having a guy that’s this talented,” ash said. “I just love just watching his demos sometimes on YouTube. I’ll just randomly search him and watch it, and it’s exciting because it’s the way he plays the game is really, really nice.”
ash also expressed disappointment at the nature of the loss to Spirit on nuke, throwing away several advantage rounds. However, the fact that GamerLegion were competitive with one of the best teams in the world, and were merely one map away from playoffs at the Spodek Arena, is a positive sign for a roster built on a relatively modest budget.
GamerLegion’s biggest disappointment at IEM Katowice arguably came outside of the server, as peculiarities in Valve’s Regional Standings meant that GamerLegion missed out on qualifying directly to Blast Lisbon as one of the top 12 VRS teams.
As the rankings snapshot was updated mid-tournament, GamerLegion’s winnings at Katowice were not counted towards their VRS standings – meanwhile Furia’s winnings were counted as they had been eliminated from the tournament. GamerLegion went on to be eliminated from the Blast Rising closed qualifier by Parivision, despite appealing to Valve for clarity on the issue.
With the top 10 European rosters qualifying directly to the Blast Austin Major, GamerLegion will be bitterly disappointed at missing out on the opportunity to earn more VRS points at the event. Despite that disappointment, they remain in a strong position to qualify for the fifth consecutive major under ash’s stewardship.
Competitive groups give way to one-sided playoff matches
The IEM Katowice 2025 group stage was full of bitterly contested dogfights. Group A especially was a bloodbath with teams fighting tooth and nail in successive three-map affairs. FaZe played three separate three-map matches against BIG, Vitality and G2 before falling to Eternal Fire, with G2 also eliminating their former rifler Nikola ‘NiKo’ Kovač in three maps.
By contrast, the Katowice playoffs were completely one-sided with very few maps even being close, with only three maps in the bracket resulting in both teams getting to double-digits. It is somewhat of a repeated pattern in the Spodek. Incredibly, only three maps have been won by the losing team in the IEM Katowice playoffs since 2022.
Despite being a 3-0 stomping, Vitality’s Grand Final victory broke the record for the most viewership for a non-major Counter-Strike event.
Is this goodbye?
As unfathomable as it seems, could this be the last ESL Katowice event for the foreseeable future? ESL’s event calendar for 2026 does not specify that the event will take place in Katowice, rather it only states that an event with the same format will take place at the same time of year in Poland – not specifying the city.
On February 11th 2025, PGL announced PGL Krakow 2027, and event set to mark the 10-year anniversary of the PGL Krakow Major. Shockingly, the event’s arena booking was cancelled mere hours after the announcement, owing to a clashing event.
PGL provided the following quote from Tauron Arena representatives: “I saw your announcement and at the same time we’ve received confirmation from the Municipality of Kraków that Krakow will be a host city and co-organizer of cyclical event which will take place in January for the next three years (Jan 2026, Jan 2027 and Jan 2028). I am very sorry to inform you that we have to cancel your reservation for January 18–25, 2027 (Main Arena) and January 12–20, 2027 (Small Arena).”
In response to PGL’s statement on the matter, local official Łukasz Sęk, claimed that “The organiser (PGL) announced the date of the event without having signed a reservation agreement with Tauron Arena.”
The combination of ESL’s vague communications and PGL’s news have led some to speculate that Krakow will host ESL’s “Pro Tour Winter Championship” starting next year, taking the place of IEM Katowice. The speculation also comes as ESL has removed StarCraft II from IEM for the first time in the event’s history.
We asked ESL for clarification on their commitment to Katowice. ESL provided the following statement:
“At this time, further details regarding the 2026 ESL Pro Tour are yet to be announced. We remain committed to delivering premier esports events and will provide additional updates in the near future.”
ESL statement sent to Esports News UK
Certainly, if it is ‘goodbye for now’ we can only be thankful for all the amazing IEM Katowice moments the Spodek has given us Counter-Strike fans over the years.
We look forward to seeing the Spodek again, hopefully soon.
Darragh Harbinson is a freelance writer specialising in Counter-Strike. He has written for Esports News UK as well as the likes of UKCSGO, Dexerto and Rush B Media.
