Why FaZe Clan failed in 2025: CS2 roster analysis

In March 2023, FaZe finally captured the Grand Slam at Pro League Season 17, winning $1 million in the process and confirming their status as a historic roster. In April of 2025, FaZe Clan could only watch from home as Vitality epically took the Grand Slam at IEM Melbourne. 

While three of that famous FaZe lineup remain on the team, they could not conjure past glories in Australia, failing to even qualify for the playoffs of the event.

While Vitality winning the ESL Grand Slam felt inevitable, there was nothing inevitable about FaZe’s 2025. The signing of Complexity superstar Jon ‘EliGE’ Jablonowski, a former Grand Slam winner himself with Liquid, was widely celebrated amongst fans and the wider CS community as a potential pathway to return FaZe to their former glory.

In reality, FaZe looks to have regressed further from 2024, and worst of all, they don’t even look like FaZe. So, how did we get here?

FaZe’s struggles in the server cannot properly be understood without understanding the organizational disruption and mismanagement that laid the foundations of their current form. 

Put simply, FaZe have lost two superstar players on free transfers – Russel ‘Twistzz’ Van Dulken and Robin ‘ropz’ Kool – an unprecedented loss of talent in modern Counter-Strike.

In an interview with HLTV, Twistzz outlined the reason for his departure, citing FaZe’s lack of communication in opening renewal negotiations and the news that Gamesquare was acquiring FaZe as major reasons for leaving the organisation.

FaZe’s response to the loss of Twistzz was the signing of David ‘frozen’ Čerňanský. Statistically, he is a stand-out player with incredible experience considering his youth and a successful history of playing under Finn ‘karrigan’ Andersen in MOUZ (mousesports). Still, the move proved ill-judged from a roster-building perspective due to the tendencies of the existing roster.

Specifically, frozen’s in-game instincts closely overlapped with those of Robin ‘ropz’ Kool. As passive lurkers, the roster lacked balance — something Twistzz provided. The Canadian was capable of both playing slow, team-based CS and making explosive plays, like his famous Nuke silo-to-main push that helped FaZe win the Cologne 2022 title.

The result was an unbalanced roster that struggled to get the best out of its stars. Despite holding largely the same roles, ropz generally struggled to have his traditional impact in what was a year to forget. 

As ropz lifted the Grand Slam gold bar in Melbourne, boasting a 97-81 K/D in the final, there can be little doubt of the Estonian’s enduring magic on the server. Yet FaZe could rarely conjure it in 2024 and were subsequently deprived of it entirely as he left, on a free transfer at the end of the year.

In an interview with Dexerto, ropz emphasised that there was no animosity in his departure, and that staying at FaZe was an option until the 11th hour. He said:

“Obviously, with my contract running out with FaZe, it was the perfect culmination where I could pick a team that I really wanted to start a new chapter and kind of move on from FaZe. There’s nothing that really went on behind the scenes in FaZe in terms of, like, we didn’t have any problems or anything like that.”

Yet the fact remains that no other roster has lost the level of talent that FaZe has lost for free in the increasingly professionalised and calculated world of esports. Faced with a similar dilemma, G2 chose to trade Ilya ‘m0NESY’ Osipov, with 6 months left on his contract.

The Russian AWPing superstar reportedly left for a seven-figure sum, rumoured to be $2-2.5 million, according to Team Spirit scout and self-described Counter-Strike “insider” Aleksey ‘OverDrive’ Biryukov.

Instead, FaZe got nothing from the loss of two of Counter-Strike’s greatest talents and strengthened their rivals in the process.

2024 changed Counter-Strike. Specifically, one Russian teenager did – Danil ‘donk’ Kryshkovets. Gone were the days of sending in a sacrificial first man to be traded, the gold standard was now that your opener was expected to get a kill and take space. In 2024, Spirit won a staggering 75% of rounds where donk took the opening kill, doing so in the majority of his opening attempts.

While donk’s statistics are unprecedented, the core philosophy of the success has been spread amongst the CS community, with players like Dorian ‘xertioN’ Berman or Shahar ‘flameZ’ Shushan sharing the same burden of making space and having an impact in doing so.

It was then that FaZe fans welcomed EliGE with open arms. Seemingly a perfect tonic to the roster’s previous passivity, EliGE carried Complexity’s 2024 on his shoulders, entering 27.5% of the time with a 54% success rate.

For FaZe fans, the signing seemed a match made in heaven. The reality has turned out to be more lukewarm.

At best, FaZe’s T-sides were explosive and often chaotic. FaZe’s T-sides carried with them a definitive swagger and confidence, which has only briefly emerged in a series or two this year against 3DMax in Melbourne and Bucharest. Now, FaZe’s T-sides look devoid of any notable characteristics. They are mundane, run-of-the-mill.

While EliGE is a tonic to mid-rounds, which ground to a halt under the weight of passively minded players, his relative lack of confidence in a FaZe jersey, especially against top opposition, leaves FaZe with a flavourless feeling. Averaging a 1.22 HLTV rating in 2024, EliGE has averaged only 1.13 in FaZe’scolourss.

That is not to put undue blame on EliGE’s shoulders, as each piece of FaZe seems to lack chemistry with the others at the moment. To put it simply, EliGE has not solved FaZe’s mid-round problem, which has existed since Twistzz’s departure, long before he joined.

While EliGE theoretically fit FaZe’s T-side, EliGE’s roles clearly conflicted with other players on the CT side, most commonly with Håvard ‘rain’ Nygaard. Rain has sacrificed his traditional positions on Inferno, Dust2, and Nuke, where his mastery of outside has made him a textbook example of how to play the spot. 

The Norwegian is also anchoring the opposite bombsite on Anubis in 2025, meaning he has maintained few of his spots from last year and is filling in yet another role vacated by ropz.

As a veteran of the game, the Norwegian has proven a versatile piece in FaZe’s success, but relegating a player who is exceptional in certain spots to places on the map where he is simply average means you are losing out on the best of rain. 

The result is a CT-sided rating drop from 1.04 in 2024 to 0.98 so far in 2025. The disparity raises questions about whether FaZe is maximising its overall potential or whether rain should fill these positions in the future. 

The natural solution seems to be moving frozen into anchor positions, exploiting the similarities between him and ropz to make him a specialist anchor-lurker. Frozen played many of Rain’s current roles in MOUZ. However, that solution deprives frozen of impactful positions where he is delivering individually, which may be why that option has been forgone up until now.

In 2025, Dan ‘apEX’ Madesclaire is averaging a 1.03 HLTV rating. Karrigan is averaging 0.89. While the rating is roughly in line with his performances during FaZe’s successful years, the Dane has suffered from a CT-side collapse in 2025, regressing from a 0.93 average to 0.89. He notably underperforms Inferno and Anubis, where his CT rating is amongst the lowest in pro-CS.

Can an elite team succeed with a player averaging a 0.89 rating? In today’s game, where in-game leaders (IGLs) often take on star roles in key map positions, can their tactical expertise offset their weaker individual performance? Teams like Vitality, Falcons, and MOUZ have made bold moves, such as benching Kamil ‘siuhy’ Szkaradek to let Ludwig ‘Brollan’ Brolin take over calling duties, raising questions about balancing leadership and firepower.

On the CT-sides of Ancient and Anubis, karrigan plays B Cave and Connector, respectively, positions which determine whether Ts get access to vital real-estate of the map. Having an exploitable player on an individual level in these spots makes life difficult.

Yet, veteran Counter-Strike fans will know that this conversation has been held many times. Karrigan’s individual level has been questioned at some stage in every roster he has been part of. It is a lazy point to look at an IGL’s stats and apportion blame simply on fragging ability. 

Historically, karrigan has performed individually better when the team is performing as a well-oiled machine. Having the mental space to focus on his crosshair led to his 1.01 HLTV rating at the Antwerp major, where he delivered significant impact. 

If FaZe can solve some of the deeper flaws within their approach, we may see that karrigan’s rating recovers to a serviceable level. Whether that can be achieved playing in his current roles, on some sites playing with a rain who is out of position, seems unlikely.

While FaZe as an organisation might be keeping an eye on star-IGL MOUZ’s experiment, it is difficult to imagine a FaZe without karrigan.

While Helvijs ‘broky’ Saukants has never been the top-rated AWPer in the world, he has always seemed to be the perfect fit for FaZe. The x-factor in the team that defines unpredictability. Now, in a more predictable roster, that x-factor is looking more like unwelcome chaos.

The most concerning aspect of broky’s performance is not so much his average rating, but his play severely failing the eye test due to a mix of counterproductive plays trying to force moments and missing the easy shots. Most notably, broky struggled significantly in two apocalyptic series against The MongolZ at IEM Melbourne and Falcons at PGL Bucharest where he averaged 0.70 ratings.

As if to encapsulate the perplexing mind of broky, FaZe’s elimination at IEM Melbourne came at the hands of Erik ‘ztr’ Gustafsson 1v3, in which frozen was wielding the AWP with broky right beside him, ultimately failing to hold the angle with an MP9.

It is a sign of the changing nature of the team that multiple social media posts this week linked to Mr. Reliable himself, Nicolai ‘device’ Reedtz. It is perhaps a sign of distaste for broky’s latent inconsistency that FaZe fans are calling for Counter-Strike’s most consistent AWPing presence.

FaZe fans are questioning how long their current form can go on without a change, and whether that change will come before the BLAST Austin Major. Despite a tepid year, FaZe conjured their usual magic at both of 2024’s majors, making the Grand Finals of Copenhagen and Shanghai, yet there is no sign of lightning striking again in Austin.

With Vitality setting a new standard for excellence in Counter-Strike, FaZe fans can only look back at when they were at those lofty heights from an increasingly distant position. For FaZe, change must come quickly, or they will slip further down the precipice.

At the very least, FaZe’s roster needs to wake up to the fact that they cannot continue their patterns of forcing players into uncomfortable positions that do not naturally fit their playstyle. 

The imbalance of the roster that has existed since Twistzz’s departure is yet to be properly rectified. Whether that can be done through positional changes, a coaching change, or new personnel remains to be seen.