Team Liquid Look to go International

Photo via Twitter/ @TeamLiquidCS (Getty Images)

Team Liquid lost their former in-game leader (IGL) to retirement when Nick “n1tro” Cannella decided to step away from professional Counter-Strike (CS) after the Blast Spring Finals.

In a surprising move, Liquid are deciding to move towards a more international team by trying to sign Aleks “Rainwalker” Petrov. From reports by HLTV and Dust2.us, it seems that the two parties are close to sealing the deal on the signing.

In those same reports, it came out that Liquid was looking to move on from Jonathan “EliGE” Jablonowski. EliGE holds the record for most time on one roster being on Team Liquid for over 3,000 days at the time of writing this article. The move would send EliGE to Evil Genuises, but at this time it seems that the talks between the two teams have stalled out.

Liquid has been one of the last majority tier-one North American CS since Cloud9 made the move from NA to international. Now with recent reports coming out it seems that Liquid have decided to make the same move as Cloud9 did.

The move makes sense however when you take into consideration the expenses of running a professional Esports team on top of the travel expenses. A majority of Counter-Strike majors take place in Europe so moving your team to be international cuts down travel expenses tremendously.

If Team Liquid do decide to go towards a more international approach it would make Complexity the last majority NA tier-one team in the top 30 of the HLTV world ranking.