Meanwhile, every other region struggles to find competent in-game leaders for their teams, the Danish scene is prospering with top-tier leaders. Although Danish teams have been struggling in 2018, there is no questioning the impact their leadership has brought to the scene. Let’s take a moment to appreciate some of the greatest minds to ever come across Counter-Strike.

In CS:GO, FeTiSh was never a fantastic tactician and shouldn’t be hailed as such, however, the approach his team took to replace him was something every team should do. Instead of abandoning tactical style of CS and going for the modern-day approach in which you load up the roster with five star players, they decided to replace FeTiSh with karrigan, who ended up becoming one of the greatest leaders to ever play CS:GO.

At first, the team looked great with karrigan and it looked like he was a great fit. However, karrigan was eventually cut from the team as they stopped getting good results in tournaments. After being cut from Astralis he got picked up by FaZe, and within a month of joining karrigan managed to take them to a great run of top placings and effectively making them a legit contender in each tournament they attended. FaZe’s great run of form ended when they bombed out of the major in Krakow in the last place. Shockingly, the team right away decided to make a radical roster change by kicking out allu and KioShiMa, and by bringing in olofmeister and GuardiaN. This somewhat irrational-looking move would end up getting them many deep finishes and tournament wins.

When karrigan was out of the door, Astralis in their predicament turned to gla1ve, who lead them against karrigan’s FaZe lineup in a legendary rivalry during which Astralis managed to gather three significant tournament wins, including the first major to ever be won by a Danish team in CS:GO history. Even though Astralis fell off a bit in January of 2018, one still can’t look down on gla1ve and his excellence in the field of in-game leading.

Both karrigan and gla1ve have recently been in the conversation when talking about the best in-game leaders, which usually ends up leaving another good leader, MSL, in their shadow. Unlike karrigan’s and gla1ve’s teams MSL has never lead a team which was a clear-cut the best team in the world, but he has also had much less talent to work with. That being said, he has played a vital role in developing some of the best Danish players today, such as k0nfig and Magisk. Unfortunately for him, the best players he’s had have left him to play in bigger teams after being established as good players under his system. He will likely never be as highly respected as the likes of FalleN and gla1ve but in my opinion, the scene needs more leaders like MSL, who teach and mentor the young talents to make sure they are ready to get picked up by the best teams in the world.

Even outside the elite tier of Counter-Strike, we have the likes of Snappi, who seem like decent tacticians but due to lack of talent to work with, won’t be able to make noise excluding a couple of upsets over some good teams.

Denmark is currently the strongest region in Counter-Strike and if the past greats like France and Sweden want to catch up, they need to invest in their leaders.