Falcons win the IEM Cologne Major, NiKo's first on his 17th attempt

Three maps, three times the same score. Falcons beat FURIA 13-8 on Mirage, 13-8 on Anubis and 13-8 on Inferno on Sunday, June 21, 2026, to win the grand final of the IEM Cologne Major, HLTV reported that evening. Neither team had won a Major before. For Falcons it is a first title at this level, and for NiKo it comes on his 17th attempt, by HLTV's count.

A Major is one of the championship tournaments of Counter-Strike 2 sponsored by Valve, the publisher of the game. This one, organized by ESL, ran from June 2 to June 21 with a prize pool of US$1.25 million, and its last rounds were played in the LANXESS arena in Cologne. The final was a best-of-five, a series won by the first team to take three maps, a map being one full game played to 13 rounds. Falcons needed the minimum.

A final without a fourth map

The first map set the tone. On Mirage, FURIA lost the first eight rounds and managed to plant the bomb only once in that spell, according to HLTV's report. The Brazilian team won the last four rounds of the half, and later a streak of three, but Falcons reached 13 first.

Anubis was the map where the final could have turned. Falcons opened it with four rounds in a row, the first of them a pistol round in which m0NESY took four kills. FURIA then controlled the rest of the half. After the teams switched sides, Falcons, now attacking, won eight of the next nine rounds, a run in which kyousuke and m0NESY had 22 kills between them. HLTV rated m0NESY at 1.80 across those first two maps.

On Inferno the lead passed to the two other scorers of the team. NiKo and kyousuke combined for 33 kills on the third map and Falcons closed the series at 13-8 once more. Over the three maps they won 39 rounds and FURIA 24.

NiKo spoke after the match, as the crowd chanted his nickname, HLTV wrote. "I cannot explain how happy and relieved I am right now," he said, in words printed by HLTV.

Three players carried the scoreboard

HLTV measures a player's performance with a rating in which 1.00 is roughly an average showing. In the final, three Falcons players finished far above that mark and two well under it.

NiKo finished with 52 kills for 32 deaths, kyousuke with 55 for 43 and m0NESY with 46 for 35. On the other side only one player ended above 1.00: molodoy, at 1.26, with 51 kills for 41 deaths. KSCERATO finished at 0.90, FalleN and YEKINDAR at 0.89 and yuurih at 0.85.

The gap inside the Falcons five is not new to this tournament. karrigan, whom HLTV calls the team's captain, rated 0.74 in the semi-final as well, and 0.66 in the quarter-final. He joined on April 20, two months before the final, when Falcons signed him from FaZe and moved kyxsan to the bench. He said after the match that he had won a Major once before. "I'm so proud of the boys," he said after the final.

The road Falcons took

Falcons did not have an easy draw at any point. The invitation list HLTV published in April listed them in Stage 3, the last of the three stages before the playoffs, with seven other teams: Vitality, PARIVISION, FURIA, Natus Vincere, Aurora, MOUZ and The MongolZ. ESL played that stage in best-of-three series only, from June 11 to June 15, after announcing in February that it would drop best-of-one matches from it and add a day.

Every series Falcons won before the final went to a third map. The final is the only one of the seven they won without losing a map, and the defeat to BetBoom on June 12 the only one in which they did not win one.

The quality of the opposition is what HLTV underlines. In its article on the tournament's most valuable player, the site wrote that Falcons beat the teams ranked first, second, third and fifth in the world on the way to the title. In the ranking of June 15, Vitality were first, Spirit third, Falcons fourth and FURIA fifth; Natus Vincere were second in the same ranking, shown in HLTV's report of their defeat to G2 on June 15. karrigan put it in his own terms after the final, calling it the hardest route he has had to a Major title.

Vitality and Spirit beaten on the way

The quarter-final of Friday, June 19 removed the title holders. Vitality were the reigning Major champions and were chasing a third Major in a row, HLTV wrote. Falcons won Anubis and Dust2 and lost Inferno. They opened Anubis with five rounds in a row, the first on four kills by kyousuke, before Vitality answered with six; on Dust2 they led 11-6 and held off a late comeback. kyousuke was the best player of the series with a 1.41 rating, and Vitality's ZywOo finished at 1.16. It was the fourth win in a row for Falcons over Vitality, whose last success against them dated from ESL Pro League Season 22.

That result was already the best in the organization's history at a Major. Falcons had gone out in the quarter-finals of the StarLadder Budapest Major.

The semi-final against Spirit, on June 20, was closer still. Falcons took their own pick, Anubis, 16-14 in overtime, the extra rounds played when a map is tied at 12. Spirit answered on Mirage, their own pick, 13-8: the half ended 6-6, Falcons won the pistol round that followed, and Spirit then took seven rounds in a row. The deciding map, Dust2, also went to overtime, and Falcons won it 16-12 with four rounds in a row at the end. Spirit had led it 7-5 at the half. Spirit had come through Stage 2 and Stage 3 without losing a series.

HLTV counted what the final meant for each of the five. It was the first Major grand final for m0NESY and kyousuke, the second for TeSeS, the third for NiKo and the sixth for karrigan.

FURIA's first Major final

After the semi-final, HLTV counted five wins in a row for the team in Cologne. In the quarter-final of June 18 they lost the first map to 9z, 13-8 on Dust2, then won Mirage 13-9 and Overpass 13-6. In the semi-final of June 20 they beat Aurora in two maps, 13-9 on Dust2 and 13-4 on Nuke, with yuurih rated 1.68.

That semi-final put FURIA in a Major final for the first time. Their best result until then was a semi-final at the Major held in Rio in 2022, according to HLTV, and they had lost in the quarter-finals of the two Majors of 2025, to paiN in Austin and to Natus Vincere in Budapest. FalleN was playing for the third Major trophy of his career.

An MVP award and a record audience

HLTV gave its award for the most valuable player, or MVP, of the Major to m0NESY, in an article published the same evening. The choice was narrow. NiKo, kyousuke and m0NESY had comparable numbers in the maps Falcons won and the same count of map awards, seven each, the site wrote. It settled the question with the overall rating, 1.25 for m0NESY, and added that a weaker third map in the final had kept the contest open until the end.

The medal is the seventh of his career. HLTV also recalled what preceded it: m0NESY had lost eight grand finals in a row before this one, and had not been named most valuable player of a winning team for nearly 18 months.

The peak of the final was not the only figure. The same report gives the Major an average of 627,863 viewers and 100,301,009 hours watched, both described as records for a Counter-Strike event, again from Esports Charts.

Two matches before the final passed two million concurrent viewers: the quarter-final between Spirit and G2 on June 19, and the semi-final between Spirit and Falcons the next day. No match other than a grand final had crossed that mark before in Counter-Strike, HLTV wrote. The quarter-final had peaked at 2,044,763, the site reported on the day it was played.

What follows the Major

The next Major on the calendar is the PGL Singapore Major, and its outline already depends on Cologne. HLTV calculated on June 16 that, on the strength of the results in Germany and unless the rules change, Europe would receive 18 of the 32 invitations, the Americas nine and Asia five. The site's count gave Asia no place in Stage 3, lost when 9z beat The MongolZ. Spirit's magixx was already looking that way after the semi-final, giving Singapore as the place of the next meeting.

Falcons leave Cologne with the title, the most valuable player of the tournament and wins over the three teams ranked above them. FURIA leave with the best Major in their history.

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