From 87 national squads to 24: the Esports Nations Cup field in CS2

Two weeks of qualifiers have turned a sign-up page into a field. HLTV, the news site that follows Counter-Strike, published on Monday, July 20, 2026 the list of the 24 national teams that have qualified for the Counter-Strike 2 tournament of the Esports Nations Cup, the competition between countries that the Esports Foundation is organizing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The tournament is scheduled from November 10 to 15, with a prize pool of US$1,320,000.

The list goes from the United Kingdom to Mexico and from Morocco to Mongolia. It was produced entirely by qualifiers: no nation was invited, and every one of the 24 had to win a national qualifier and then survive a regional one.

HLTV, July 17 and July 20, 2026.

The 24 nations on the list

Eight of the qualified teams are European: the United Kingdom, France, Denmark, Germany, Romania, Lithuania, Poland and Bulgaria. Six come from the Americas: Brazil, Argentina and Chile in the south, the United States, Canada and Mexico in the north. Kazakhstan, Turkey and Uzbekistan follow in HLTV's list, then four Asian teams, China, Mongolia, Indonesia and Vietnam. South Africa and Morocco represent Africa, and Australia is the only team from Oceania.

Those counts match the share-out the organizer fixed when it announced the tournament on February 8. HLTV reported it then: four places each for Western Europe and Eastern Europe, three each for North America, South America and the region formed by the Middle East and Central Asia, two each for South and East Asia and for Southeast Asia, and one each for North Africa, for the rest of Africa and for Oceania. That adds up to 24.

HLTV named the route of one team in particular: the United Kingdom came through the Western Europe qualifier.

Nine qualifiers that never started

The plan announced in February was built on 96 national qualifiers, one per country or territory. HLTV reported on June 20 that the Esports Foundation had opened registration, and that it presented the operation as the largest open qualifier in the history of Counter-Strike. An open qualifier is a tournament anyone may enter, here on one condition: every player of a team holds the citizenship of the country it plays for. Teams signed up on FACEIT, an online platform where Counter-Strike players compete outside tournaments.

The scale expected was large. In its release of February 8, the organizer said it counted on more than 15,000 players, in more than 3,000 teams. Each national qualifier accepted the 32 best registered rosters, or 64 in certain countries. To order them, the organizer used the June edition of the Valve Regional Standings, the ranking of clubs kept by Valve, the publisher of the game; countries without ranked players were ordered on the combined FACEIT score of the players registered.

That ordering rests on a tool created for the event, the CS2 National Team Ranking. As HLTV explained in February, the points a club holds in Valve's standings are shared equally among its players, and a nation's score is the sum of its five best players, counted on June 1, 2026. The ranking decided which countries received a national qualifier and how teams were placed in the brackets.

The national qualifiers were played from July 6 to 16. When they ended, HLTV counted 87 national teams, not 96.

The cancellations changed the arithmetic in three regions. North America had eight national qualifiers planned and three places in Riyadh; with two cancelled, six teams played for those three places. Oceania was left with two teams for one place instead of four. Sub-Saharan Africa, where eight qualifiers were planned, had three teams for its single place.

The regional qualifiers followed at once, from July 17 to 19, in ten regions. They were double-elimination brackets, in which a team is out after its second defeat. On July 20, the field was complete.

Squads built around club cores

A national team in this tournament comes out of an open qualifier: players form a squad, register it for the qualifier of their country and carry the flag from there. The organizer set one limit: for clubs that appear in Valve's standings, no more than three players of the same club in one national squad.

Several of the qualified teams used that limit to the full. HLTV's two reports describe squads made of a club's core of two or three players, completed by compatriots from other clubs or by players without a club.

The German team is the clearest case of two clubs sharing a flag. It joins s1n and slaxz-, who play for M80, to tabseN of BIG, with a coach, Swani, who is a former captain of G2, according to HLTV. The British squad includes volt, who holds both British and Romanian citizenship and chose the British qualifier. In South America, HLTV reported before the regional stage that Argentina was entered with three players of BESTIA and Brazil with three of ODDIK, the maximum allowed from one club, and that the United States squad contained three members of Voca.

Turkey's team received help from Fabre, a former coach of Aurora, the club whose all-Turkish line-up reached the final of the 2025 Esports World Cup. Kazakhstan is coached by AdreN, who won a Major, the name given to the championships sponsored by Valve, as a player.

Entries that stopped at the regional stage

Winning a national qualifier was only half of the road, and several squads that HLTV had singled out on July 17 are not among the 24.

Ukraine entered the regional stage with the core of fnatic, three players, completed by two compatriots. Sweden's national qualifier was won by a squad that beat the club Johnny Speeds in its final. Kosovo's team included several former members of Bad News Eagles. Guatemala had malbsMd in its squad, and Belgium shared with France the four qualified players of the club GenOne, two for each country. None of these five nations appears on the list of July 20, although France does.

The European regions were the most crowded. Western Europe and Eastern Europe each started with 16 national teams for four places, so three teams in four went out there in three days.

What the teams play for

The prize pool of US$1,320,000 is the figure HLTV has given for the Counter-Strike 2 tournament since February. It sits inside the financial model the organizer presented on January 30, as Sheep Esports reported then: US$45 million for the whole Esports Nations Cup, of which US$20 million in prize money for players and coaches across 16 games, US$20 million for national delegations and US$5 million for clubs. In that model a world champion receives US$50,000 per player, a silver medalist US$30,000 and a bronze medalist US$15,000, in every game.

Clubs have two reasons to let their players go. The first is money: a club is paid the equivalent of 40 percent of what its players win when they finish in the top 16 of their game, according to the same report. The second is ranking points. A club that releases a core of three players can earn points in the Valve Regional Standings through the tournament, which is classified as a Tier 2 event played on LAN, that is, with all teams in the same hall, HLTV wrote on June 20.

Counter-Strike 2 is one of 16 games of an event planned from November 2 to 29. Other fields were being filled during the same weeks: the Valorant qualifiers sent 14 nations through at the end of June, Sheep Esports reported on June 28, beside 16 invited on the event's ranking.

What comes next

The format in Riyadh has been known since February. The 24 teams are placed in four groups of six, and each plays the five others of its group once, in matches decided on a single map, the arena on which one game of Counter-Strike is played. The top four of each group go into a single-elimination bracket of 16, played as best-of-three series, won by the first team to take two maps. The final is a best-of-five. According to the organizer's February release, the seeding of the tournament will be based on the October edition of Valve's standings.

The city is the one announced at the start. The foundation's club competition, the Esports World Cup, was moved from Riyadh to Paris on May 20, with its games and formats kept; the Esports Nations Cup remains planned in Riyadh, and HLTV's report of July 20 places the Counter-Strike 2 tournament there.

The tournament is scheduled from November 10 to 15, a little under four months after the last qualifier.

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