ESL Pro League Season 22 enters Playoffs: Who looks strong as Major approaches?
ESL Pro League Season 22 is entering its Playoff stage on Friday, with eight teams vying to capture a combined $250,000 for victory in Stockholm.
With the StarLadder Budapest Major 2025 only six weeks away, teams will be aiming to ramp up in form coming into the tournament.
Pro League represents one of the last chances to gain confidence and form before Counter-Strike 2’s biggest tournament of the season.
ESL Pro League Season 22 Quarter-Finals
Matches are set to begin 9:30 on October 10. The matches are as follows:
09:30: 3DMAX vs Falcons
12:00: Mouz vs Natus Vincere
14:30: Spirit vs FaZe
17:00: Furia vs Vitality
Falcons and Spirit come into the playoffs as the in-form teams, having progressed 3-0.
Spirit especially will feel good about their performance, having added Andrey ‘tN1R’ Tatarinovich so recently to the active roster.
The Belarussian has averaged 1.24 over the three series thus far, continuing the strong individual level he showed in Heroic despite not being centre-stage as the lead fragger anymore.
Falcons, however, faced the tougher road in defeating Astralis, NaVi, and Mouz who they may face again in the semi-finals of the playoffs if both teams win, as expected.
FaZe’s last hurrah with Havard ‘rain’ Nygaard after a decade in the team has, at the very least, delivered some classic FaZe moments as they recovered from having to forfeit their first match to G2.
rain, MVP of FaZe’s Antwerp Major victory, has been party to many special FaZe playoffs runs, but will Spirit be a bridge too far?
At the very least, the returning Russel ‘Twistzz’ Van Dulken has shown strong synergy with David ‘frozen’ Čerňanský, something that FaZe can look to moving forward.
Furia and NaVi round out of the playoffs, with the latter getting their first true positive results since IEM Cologne at the start of the season.
Two top ten wins against Aurora and The MongolZ might buoy the StarSeries champions, but they’re unlikely to go further.
Furia on the other hand need no more confidence after their Fissure Playground triumph. With more scrutiny surrounding the in-form team, can they keep that form up?
Big names miss out on Pro League playoffs
G2 are amongst the high-profile teams to miss out on playoffs, after defeat in their 2-2 matchup to 3DMAX.
The BLAST London winners went from 2-0 to 2-3 in defeats to tournament favourites Spirit and Vitality, before a disappointing loss to the French roster.
Astralis, The MongolZ, and Aurora all missed out on playoffs, with Astralis slumping to a 0-3 record at Pro League with stand-in Emil ‘Magisk’ Reif.
Aurora’s roster were runners-up of ESL Pro League Season 20, but had another uninspiring showing this time around.
Falling to FaZe, they held a narrow advantage at 10-8 on the favoured T-side of Dust 2 but one forcebuy seemingly broke Aurora’s composure, resulting in a 13-10 loss.
The MongolZ noted in post-match interviews that they had not practiced for the tournament, and it showed.
A slow start saw defeats to Hotu and Inner Circle to go 0-2, before eliminating in the 2-2 match at the hands of NaVi.
Fans have been unforgiving of The MongolZ excuses. With so little time left before the Major, fans were left wondering if The MongolZ have the right attitude if they want to truly be the best team in the world.
Why Pro League matters in 2025
Which Pro League is by no means the biggest event in the Counter-Strike Tier 1 calender, Pro League has traditionally been an extremely important event for organisations.
That importance stems from Pro League’s length combined with ESL’s ‘rev share’ model, which shares broadcast revenue with organisations.
In the VRS era, this organisational importance is solidified by the ‘Club Share’ element of Pro League’s prize money.
Club Share is special prize money, intended to support organisations. This is in contrast to Prize Money, now sometimes referred to as ‘Player Share,’ which is largely contractually given to players.
For ESL Pro League, the Club Share represents the majority of the total prize pool: $600,000 of the total $1,000,000 prize pool.
As a result, ESL Pro League remains an important event for Tier 1 organisations, looking to balance their books, even if it does not match the prestige of an IEM event.
Winning the event will also give teams a one-up on the pathway to winning the $1,000,000 ESL Grand Slam.
Only Spirit and Vitality have notches towards Season VI of the Grand Slam, so victory here could put either in a strong position going forward.
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