Astralis appoint NEO head coach and add a performance coach

The coach's seat at Astralis stayed empty for a month. On Thursday, July 16, 2026, the Danish organization filled it twice over: it announced Filip "NEO" Kubski as head coach of its Counter-Strike team and Urszula "Xirreth" Klimczak as performance coach, in a statement on its own site that HLTV, the reference news site for the game, reported the same afternoon.

Both come from outside the club and outside the country. Astralis presents NEO, a 39-year-old Pole, as the first head coach it has ever hired from beyond Denmark. He takes over a team that became international in January, reached a final in April and has been falling in the ranking since.

Two hires, two jobs

The announcement covers two different posts. The head coach prepares the team's tactics, studies opponents with the staff and stands behind the players during matches. That is NEO's job, and it is the one Casper "ruggah" Due held until Astralis parted ways with him on June 15.

The second post did not appear in HLTV's description of the staff in June. A performance coach does not work on tactics. Astralis describes Xirreth's field as the part of winning that does not show on the scoreboard, and gives her earlier titles as a guide: she spent more than two years at Natus Vincere as performance coach for its Counter-Strike and Valorant teams, the club wrote, and before that more than a year at ENCE, first as performance coach and then as head of player development. HLTV adds an earlier spell at CLG.

Neither the club's statement nor HLTV's report gives the length of the contracts. Neither mentions Max "MiGHTYMAX" Heath, the assistant coach HLTV listed with the team in June.

What Astralis says it is buying

The club's chief executive, Jonas Gundersen, framed the two hires as one decision about the long term. "To me, this is an investment in the future," he said in the statement.

Gundersen is a former professional player himself, and Astralis's statement recalls that he rebuilt the operations of Ninjas in Pyjamas before new owners took over the Danish club with him as chief executive. He called NEO one of the most iconic players the game has had, and Xirreth one of the most respected performance coaches in esports.

His argument is about culture more than tactics. Lasting success, he said, needs a culture rooted across the whole organization, and he expects the two coaches to help build one of the most stable performance cultures in the scene over time. He wants Astralis to be an organization that trusts its process over quick results. He also described the Counter-Strike he hopes to see: explosive, competitive, and played by people who are emotionally committed to the club and proud of it.

That fits what Gundersen has said since the winter. The current owners acquired Astralis last year, and in January he explained that they wanted a team built for the long term that could still get results quickly. In December he had set a limit to the change of direction, saying Astralis would stay Danish at its core. The players still meet that description, with three Danes in the five. The head coach's seat no longer does.

What NEO said he will do first

NEO's own remarks in the statement are modest about the timetable. He said the Astralis name is still a strong one, and that competing as an international team is hard but interesting, given results he called promising. Bringing the club back to its former level will be difficult, he added, and earning the respect of opponents is a good first step.

He set one target. "Reaching the playoffs every time we go to a tournament would be great," he said.

He does not plan to change everything at once. He said he will first learn how the team is organized, and that he has already seen areas he wants to revisit, without naming them. He also gave Xirreth's arrival as one of his reasons for accepting: working beside an experienced performance coach, he said, would help his own growth in a job he has held at one club before this one.

The record he brings from FaZe

That one club was FaZe, and the record is that of a team that reached finals often. NEO became its head coach in July 2023, in his first coaching role, and stayed nearly three years. HLTV names IEM Sydney 2023 and IEM Chengdu 2024 among the trophies won under him, and recalls that he took FaZe to the final of three Majors, the championship tournaments of Counter-Strike 2: Copenhagen, Shanghai and Budapest. Astralis's statement adds his past as a player, including a Major title with Virtus.pro in 2014.

The end was less happy. FaZe parted ways with him on March 16, 2026, after a start to the year in which the team won three series and lost nine and went out in the group stage of every tournament it entered, HLTV reported at the time. FaZe then failed to qualify for the IEM Cologne Major. On July 13 it was ranked 17th in the world by HLTV, one place above Astralis.

The two clubs handled the gap differently. FaZe put its analyst in charge on an interim basis the day NEO left and named a head coach, Niclas "enkay J" Krumhorn, a month later, on April 16. Astralis also took a month, from June 15 to July 16, and HLTV's reports name no interim head coach in between.

The two new colleagues have been on opposite sides of the same final. HLTV notes that Xirreth was part of Natus Vincere's staff when that team won the Copenhagen Major, the tournament at which NEO's FaZe finished runner-up.

From tenth to eighteenth

The team they inherit is not the one that began the spring.

HLTV ranked Astralis 10th on April 6, 12th on June 8 and 18th on July 13: eight places lost in a little over three months. The defeats in Cologne came against 9z, TYLOO and paiN, and the last of them, on June 8, ended the tournament at the same stage as the Major before it. On July 13 those three opponents were ranked sixth, 19th and 20th: one well above Astralis, two just below.

The five players are the same as in June: Rasmus "HooXi" Nielsen, Love "phzy" Smidebrant, Jakob "jabbi" Nygaard, Victor "Staehr" Staehr and Gytis "ryu" Glušauskas. HLTV's report on the appointment prints their recent form, measured by its rating, the single figure the site computes for each player from his statistics.

Two things stand out against the same table a month earlier. The sample has halved, from 38 maps each on June 15 to 19 now: PGL Bucharest, played from April 4 to 11, ended more than three months before July 16. And three of the five sit lower: jabbi was at 1.12 and is at 1.03, phzy has gone from 1.03 to 0.89, and ryu from 0.97 to 0.93. Staehr, at 1.15 after 1.17, remains the team's best performer by a clear margin, and HooXi, the in-game leader who calls the tactics during rounds, is close to where he was, at 0.88 after 0.86.

The problem named in June

NEO said he would not yet name what he wants to revisit. The team's weak point was described in public a month ago.

When ruggah left, HLTV wrote that the first task of his successor would be to get game plans carried out on the server. One figure stood behind that judgment: in Stage 2 of the Major, Astralis won 17 per cent of its rounds on the T side, the attacking half of a Counter-Strike map. HooXi told the site after the elimination that the players agree on the right choices when they talk rounds through afterward, and do not make them in the moment.

Astralis's statement does not link the two hires to that problem. Its chief executive spoke of a stable performance culture, and its new head coach of an environment the players enjoy and of gaps in the team that a coach has to fill.

A first match on July 21

The new staff starts with an online stage. HLTV gives BLAST Bounty Season 2 as the team's first event under NEO: 32 teams enter, and eight of them reach the finals, played on LAN, with the teams gathered in one venue. Those finals begin on July 30 in Malta, the site reported on July 17.

The format has a twist. The field is split into 16 seeded teams and 16 lower seeds, and the lower seeds choose their opponents in a draft held live. That draft took place on July 17, the day after the appointment. Astralis's opening match is against Nemesis, ranked 32nd by HLTV, on July 21, the first day of the online stage.

A place among the eight in Malta would be a first answer to the target NEO set on his first day. He has five days between his unveiling and that match, with a team he said he would begin by getting to know.

The .esports registry publishes Esports Observer, so the whole scene can read its news for free.