Every Counter-Strike Major, From a $250,000 Start to the Biggest Year Yet
Twenty-four Majors, one four-time champion, a teenage MVP and an all-time viewing record in Cologne. The story of Valve's championships, from CS:GO's first in Sweden to CS2's first in Southeast Asia.
In November 2013, Valve gave a tournament in Jönköping, Sweden, a title it had never handed out before. DreamHack Winter became the first Valve-sponsored Major for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, with a prize pool of $250,000, part of it funded by players buying weapon skins in a brand-new update called Arms Deal. Swedish fans watched Fnatic beat their compatriots Ninjas in Pyjamas 2-1 in the final.
Thirteen years later, the Major is the most watched event in the game's history. On June 21, 2026, Team Falcons swept FURIA 3-0 at Cologne's LANXESS arena, and the final peaked at 2,751,121 concurrent viewers, an all-time Counter-Strike record. The year's second Major starts in Singapore on November 24. Here is how the championships got here.
The CS:GO years begin (2013-2016)
The early Majors belonged to Sweden. Ninjas in Pyjamas reached every one of the first five finals and won just one, at ESL One Cologne 2014. Fnatic won three: Jönköping 2013, Katowice 2015 and Cologne 2015. France got its first titles through Team LDLC.com (DreamHack Winter 2014) and Team EnVyUs (Cluj-Napoca 2015), and Poland's Virtus.pro won Katowice 2014 in front of a home crowd at the Spodek arena.
In February 2016, Valve raised every Major's prize pool to $1 million. The first event under the new rules, MLG Columbus 2016, was won by Brazil's Luminosity Gaming. The same core, now playing as SK Gaming, won ESL One Cologne 2016 months later. Its leader, Gabriel "FalleN" Toledo, is still competing a decade later.
Atlanta to Berlin: the Astralis era (2017-2019)
The Danish team Astralis won its first Major at ELEAGUE Atlanta 2017, beating Virtus.pro 2-1. Russia-based Gambit Esports answered at Kraków 2017, and North America finally got its title when Cloud9 beat FaZe Clan at the ELEAGUE Major in Boston 2018, a final that went to double overtime on its deciding map.
Then Astralis took over. It won London 2018, Katowice 2019 and Berlin 2019, the first team to win three Majors in a row and the first to win four in total. Its approach, built around set plays, tactical depth and a full support staff, changed how the best teams prepared.
The Majors were also never one company's event. Valve sponsors them and sets the rules, but the tournaments themselves have been run by a rotating cast of organisers: DreamHack, ESL, MLG, ELEAGUE, PGL, FACEIT, StarLadder, BLAST and Perfect World have all staged at least one. That is why each Major has its own name, its own city and often its own personality.
The pandemic then cancelled the Rio 2020 Major, which had been announced with a combined $2 million prize pool. There was no Major for two years.
The comeback years (2021-2023)
When the Major returned at PGL Stockholm 2021, Ukraine's Natus Vincere, led by Oleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev, beat G2 Esports 2-0. That final set a peak viewership record that stood for almost five years.
FaZe Clan, a multinational team built around Finn "karrigan" Andersen, won PGL Antwerp 2022. At Rio 2022, finally staged in Brazil, the winner was Outsiders, the Virtus.pro roster playing under a neutral name. In Paris 2023, the last CS:GO Major, France's Team Vitality swept GamerLegion 2-0 in the Accor Arena, the first Major title for the club and for Mathieu "ZywOo" Herbaut. The prize pool for that event was $1.25 million, the amount still used today.
Counter-Strike 2 takes the stage (2024-2025)
Na'Vi won the first CS2 Major in Copenhagen, beating FaZe 2-1. In December 2024, at Perfect World Shanghai, Team Spirit beat FaZe in another 2-1 final, and its 17-year-old star Danil "donk" Kryshkovets became the youngest Major champion and MVP ever. His 1.49 rating for the event was a Major record, and his four aces tied the record for a big event.
The money around the Majors kept flowing through the same channel it always had. Every Major sold digital stickers of the teams and players, and half of each sticker purchase went to the team or player on it, with the other half to Valve. That made simply qualifying for a Major valuable, even for teams that went home in the first stage, and it gave fans a direct way to back their favourites.
2025 belonged to Vitality. In the first half of the year alone, the French team won seven of eight events, completed the ESL Grand Slam at IEM Melbourne and ran its LAN winning streak to 30 matches. Its roster of apEX, ZywOo, flameZ, mezii and ropz won the BLAST.tv Austin Major over Mongolia's The MongolZ, then the StarLadder Budapest Major in December over FaZe, 3-1 in the first Major with a best-of-five final. ZywOo was MVP at both, giving him a record three Major MVPs. We profile him in our ZywOo story.
The format changed too. From 2025, Majors grew to 32 teams in three Swiss stages, and by the Budapest Major in December 2025 every invitation came from Valve's own ranking system rather than regional qualifiers. We explain how that works in our VRS explainer.
Cologne 2026: NiKo's moment
The first Major of 2026 ran from June 2 to 21. Stage 3 was played in Cologne's Palladium with best-of-three matches throughout, a first at that stage. The playoffs moved to the LANXESS arena, where Vitality's bid for a third Major in a row ended in a 2-1 quarterfinal loss to Falcons.
Falcons then beat Team Spirit 2-1 in the semifinal, with two maps going to overtime, and swept FURIA 3-0 on Mirage, Anubis and Inferno, each map ending 13-8. Ilya "m0NESY" Osipov was MVP. For Nikola "NiKo" Kovač, long called the best player never to win a Major, it was the first title. Our Cologne Major report has the full story.
By the numbers
- 24 Majors from Jönköping 2013 to Cologne 2026
- 4: titles for Astralis, the record, including three in a row in 2018-2019
- 3: titles each for Fnatic and Team Vitality
- $250,000: the first Major prize pool; $1.25 million: the pool today
- 2,751,121: peak viewers for the Cologne 2026 final, the Counter-Strike record
- 100 million+: hours watched at Cologne 2026, the first CS event past that mark
- 32: teams at every Major since 2025
What to watch next
The PGL Major Singapore runs from November 24 to December 13, the first CS2 Major in Southeast Asia, with the playoffs at the Singapore Indoor Stadium. Falcons defend their title, Vitality try to win back the crown, and Spirit and FURIA will want revenge for Cologne. We preview it in our Singapore Major guide.
Further out, the 2027 Majors are set for Buenos Aires from May 31 to June 20, the first Major in Argentina, and Shanghai from November 22 to December 12. If you are new to the game, Counter-Strike 2 is free to play on Steam, and the 2021 Stockholm final, the 2019 Berlin run of Astralis and the 2026 Cologne final make a fine three-film history of how the best teams have played.