Falcons take the top of HLTV's world ranking from Vitality

Team Falcons are the first-ranked Counter-Strike 2 team in the world on the list most of the scene follows from week to week. HLTV, the reference site for the game, published its world ranking of Monday, June 29, 2026 with Falcons in first place on 883 points. Team Vitality, first on each of the three previous Mondays, are second with 823.

The change comes eight days after Falcons won the IEM Cologne Major, and not on the first list published after it. On June 22, the morning after the final, Vitality were still in front, 941 points to 859. One week later the order has turned around: Falcons gained 24 points, Vitality lost 118, and a deficit of 82 became a lead of 60.

Four Mondays, from fourth to first

HLTV describes its list as a weekly ranking of the 30 best teams, based on their recent performance. The latest four are dated on consecutive Mondays and each stays on its own dated page, so the path of a team can be followed week by week. For Falcons, the last four lists tell the whole story of the Major.

On June 8, six days into the tournament, Falcons were fourth with 509 points, behind Vitality on 991, Natus Vincere on 712 and Spirit on 544. On June 15, the day the last of the three opening stages ended, they were still fourth, with 489. Vitality had 949. The gap between the two teams stood at 460 points.

The jump came with the playoffs. Between June 15 and June 22 Falcons gained 370 points, the largest rise of any team in the top ten over those seven days, and moved from fourth to second. Vitality lost eight points in the same week and kept first place. The last step, from second to first, is the one recorded on June 29.

Over the three weeks the two curves moved in opposite directions. Falcons added 374 points to their total of June 8. Vitality gave up 168 of theirs, 118 of them in the final week.

What Falcons did in Cologne

The Majors are the championship tournaments of Counter-Strike 2, the game published by Valve. The Cologne edition, organized by ESL, ran from June 2 to June 21 with 32 teams and a prize pool of US$1.25 million. Falcons entered it in Stage 3, the last of the three opening stages, and came through with three series wins and one defeat, a 0-2 loss to BetBoom on June 12.

The playoffs gave them the hardest route available. HLTV noted on June 15 that Vitality, Spirit and Falcons, then first, third and fourth in its ranking, had all landed on the same side of the bracket. Falcons met Vitality in the quarter-final on June 19 and won 2-1, in a best-of-three, a series won by the first team to take two maps. They took Anubis, lost Inferno and closed the series on Dust2, HLTV reported. The next day they beat Spirit 2-1 in the semi-final.

The final, on June 21, was the one series of their tournament they won without losing a map. Falcons beat FURIA 3-0 in a best-of-five, winning Mirage, Anubis and Inferno by the same score of 13-8, and m0NESY was named the most valuable player of the event. It was the first Major title for the organization. HLTV wrote after the quarter-final that the club's best result at a Major until then had been a quarter-final, at the Budapest Major.

"I'm super proud of the boys," NiKo said after the quarter-final, in words printed by HLTV.

The five listed under the team's name in the ranking of June 29 are the five of the final: karrigan, NiKo, TeSeS, m0NESY and kyousuke. karrigan, the in-game leader, the player who calls the team's tactics during a match, has been with them for a little over two months. Falcons signed him from FaZe on April 20 and moved kyxsan to the bench, HLTV reported at the time.

Vitality: second after a quarter-final exit

Vitality's season has been that of a leader. They won PGL Cluj-Napoca on February 22 with a 3-0 win over PARIVISION, and they arrived in Cologne as the reigning Major champions, trying to win a third Major in a row, in HLTV's description. On June 15 they were first in the ranking with close to twice the points of Falcons.

The quarter-final ended that run, and it confirmed a pattern between the two teams. HLTV counted the series of June 19 as Falcons' fourth win in a row over Vitality, who have not beaten them since Season 22 of the ESL Pro League. The meeting before Cologne had been in the group stage of IEM Rio, in April.

The ranking did not react at once. Vitality's total barely moved in the week of the playoffs, from 949 to 941, and the team stayed first on June 22 even though it had gone out in the quarter-finals. The drop came a week later. With 823 points Vitality remain well clear of third place: Spirit, the beaten semi-finalists, have 716. The five listed for Vitality are apEX, ropz, ZywOo, flameZ and mezii.

The rest of the top ten after the Major

Behind the first two, the order of the top ten did not change between June 22 and June 29. The points did.

The list has the shape of the tournament. Seven of the eight teams that reached the Major playoffs are in the first eight places, and the eighth, BetBoom, is tenth. The four semi-finalists, Falcons, Spirit, FURIA and Aurora, hold first, third, fourth and sixth. FURIA, the beaten finalists, were fifth with 397 points on June 15 and have 659 two weeks later.

Three teams made their way into the top ten through Cologne. G2 were twelfth on June 15, 9z fifteenth and BetBoom fourteenth, and all three reached the quarter-finals. The teams they replaced went the other way: Legacy, sixth on June 15 with 338 points, are eleventh with 281, The MongolZ went from ninth to twelfth, and GamerLegion from tenth to fourteenth.

Natus Vincere are the largest faller near the top. Second on June 8 with 712 points and second again on June 15, they lost their last match of Stage 3 to G2 and did not reach the playoffs. They were fifth on June 22 and are fifth again on June 29, with 541 points, 72 fewer than a week before.

The table also shows how the field is layered. The first four teams all have more than 650 points. Natus Vincere and Aurora sit alone on the next two steps. Then, from seventh to tenth, four teams stand within eight points of each other, from G2 on 297 to BetBoom on 289, and each of them has about a third of the leader's total.

Further down, the week after the Major brought more movement. PARIVISION, eleventh on June 15 and seventeenth on June 22, are twentieth with 129 points. FaZe, eighteenth on both earlier lists, are twenty-first with 111, level on points with MIBR. In the same week magic, Monte and paiN each moved up two places, to seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth.

A ranking that carries no invitations

First place in this list is a matter of standing, and it has no formal effect on the calendar. Counter-Strike has two rankings, and they do different jobs.

The two can disagree widely. In Valve's standings of April 6, the update that fixed the 32 invitations to the Cologne Major, Vitality were first with 2063 points and Falcons sixth with 1769, level on points with MOUZ, according to the table HLTV published that day. Four teams stood between the future champions and first place.

Valve explains in its public repository that its model ranks teams on the prize money they have earned, on the prize money and the number of beaten teams of the opponents they have defeated, and on head-to-head results. HLTV's list is its own, with its own points, and the two scales cannot be compared: 883 points on one are not 1769 on the other.

What the ranking leads into

The next Major is already on the calendar, and it will be decided by Valve's list, not HLTV's. PGL, the organizer of the Singapore Major, has set the cut-off for its invitations at the Valve standings of November 2, HLTV reported on April 9. The tournament runs from November 24 to December 13, again with 32 teams and US$1.25 million.

Cologne has already shaped that event too. HLTV calculated on June 16, from the results in Germany and unless the rules change, that Europe would receive 18 of the 32 invitations to Singapore, the Americas nine and Asia five.

For Falcons the list of June 29 closes a month that began in fourth place. HLTV's news of the week that followed the final included several roster moves: G2 benched SunPayus and signed r1nkle, FaZe benched broky, PARIVISION had changed two players during the Major.

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