Is the Falcons Project Already a Failure in Professional Counter-Strike?
The Falcons organization did a massive spending spree towards the end of the 2023 season picking up three out of the five active players on ENCE at the time in Marco “Snappi” Pfeiffer, Pavle “Maden” Bošković and Álvaro “SunPayus” Garcia. The final piece to this team would be Emil “Magisk” Reif rounding out the five man roster with Falcons choosing to stick with the Jordanian rifler Mohammad “BOROS” Malhas as their fifth. The roster was rounded out by arguably the best coach is Counter-Strike history Danny “zonic” Sørensen who previously coached Vitality and Astralis.
The roster has made multiple moves in the past few months mostly surrounding their fifth spot on the roster. For a roster that is costing the organization millions to keep these high tier players on contract the question becomes if the Falcons super team has been a success or massive failure. The best way to come to a conclusion is to go over the events they have participated in from the beginning and go over their placement and performance in each of them to see if they have lived up to the hype.
The roster would make its official debut at the BLAST Premier Spring Groups 2024 where they would place in 12th place and only get a series win over OG with their first event ending in disappointment. From getting absolutely destroyed by Astralis to having a competitive series against Vitality the roster showed us the vision that the Falcons organization had in them. This performance from the roster can be chalked up to the team still being new and not fully fleshing out the different playstyles of the different players on the roster. Now obviously three of the five on the roster had already been playing together for nearly an entire year at that point, but the addition of Magisk and BOROS could have thrown a wrench into a multitude of things that the previous three were accustomed to.
The team would bounce back in their next showing at IEM Katowice 2024. They would start out by getting swept by Eternal Fire but would bounce back and run through the lower bracket beating teams like future major winners Natus Vincere, Rebels and Complexity. The team would then advance to their first main stage appearance since their formation. They defeated their old team in ENCE in the quarter finals, but that is where their run would end with them finishing third in the event. The Falcons were just unfortunate to run into a Team Spirit that was having their breakout party at Katowice. It was not a very close game with Spirit’s Danil “donk” Kryshkovets dominating the entire event. This was a great sign for fans of the team as it was a great step in the right direction of their hopes of becoming the best team in the world.
However, that would all come crashing down in their next events. The Falcons have not participated in many events since Katowice with them only being in three official events since Katowice. The next event would be one that sparked lots of debate over the team with that event being the PGL CS2 Major Copenhagen RMR. Falcons would go an abysmal 1-3 and be eliminated from Major qualification with only one win against 3DMax in the event. It was not a good sign for the team that nearly won one of the largest yearly events in professional Counter-Strike. This is where rifts in the team would start to form without fans realizing it until later.
After the RMR, the Falcons would release a documentary about the behind the scenes of the team and parts of it were from their time at the RMR and after being eliminated from the RMR. In the documentary, after they were eliminated it was shown that the team was extremely upset at BOROS the Jordanian rifler for changing his mouse during the tournament and trying to use new settings. BOROS had been benched following the RMR and this gave a glimpse to fans about why he was benched. BOROS did not have a terrible event, in fact he only had two or three maps where he severely underperformed and finished on the bottom of the team. BOROS was put into a tough situation, the Falcons are a Saudi Arabian owned organization and they wanted to keep at least one Arabic player on the roster in support of the region. BOROS is only 19 years old and was on a team that had just brought on four veteran players who had been playing tier one level pro Counter-Strike for years. After backlash from the community about BOROS treatment in the documentary the Falcons would take out massive parts of the confrontation which was four minutes long in the original upload.
This would start the search for a new fifth member of the Falcons super team and would change both times in their next two showings.
The Falcons would next appear at the BLAST Spring Showdown 2024 with Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev as their fifth player on a one month rental contract from Natus Vincere. This event was just terrible and it was clear that the RMR was still on the minds of the four core players. The Falcons would get eliminated immediately by the Swedish team Metizport which is a team made up of part-time professional players that Falcons was predicted to stomp on their way to a convincing event win. This would quickly end s1mple’s time with the organization with an ugly one series that we were able to see from the Ukrainian on a different team than Natus Vincere.
This brings us to the present day and the Falcons competing in the ESL Pro League Season 19 in Malta currently. There is just one problem, and that is that they are already eliminated from Pro League in the Group Stage. Before the event, Falcons would add another highly accomplished pro player in Peter “dupreeh” Rasmussen as their new permanent fifth member of the team.
The Falcons would only win one total series in this event when they barely squeaked out a series win against TYLOO. They were destroyed by BetBoom, and beaten by TheMongolz and G2 to be completely eliminated out of pro league. The addition of dupreeh was a boost in their performance with dupreeh being on the top of the leaderboard nearly every game and having the highest average rating for the team through the tournament. The team looked flustered and had multiple instances of poor communication and team play that would result in ugly plays and the team losing rounds where they would have man advantage and site control. Snappi was by far the worst performer in the group with him only being able to get a one average rating or better in only one of their series they played. The flaws of this team have continuously become more and more apparent the more events they play and disappoint at with them hoping dupreeh can pull this team out of the deep end of despair.
This Falcons team needs to do a lot to change the perspective that the community holds onto them, and they can do it at their next event at BetBoom Dacha Belgrade 2024. The event is sporting some of the best teams in the world both established and the up and coming, and will be a good opportunity for this Falcons team to get a much need confidence boost with multiple wins.
So is this Falcons team officially a failure? It is hard to say at this point, but on their current trajectory it is not looking good the team is still fairly new with the countless additions to the fifth spot but it seems like they have found their ideal five man roster so now it is only a matter of time if they can flip the public opinion on them or not.
