FaZe name Neityu as stand-in for three events after karrigan exit

When FaZe play Natus Vincere on April 29 in their opening match of BLAST Rivals in Fort Worth, the fifth player on their side will be a 20-year-old Frenchman who has been on another club's bench since March 11. FaZe announced on April 23, 2026, that Neityu will stand in for the team at its next three tournaments, HLTV, the reference news site for Counter-Strike, reported that day.

The three events are BLAST Rivals Season 1, IEM Atlanta and Stake Ranked Episode 2. Neityu fills the place left by karrigan, whose departure FaZe confirmed three days earlier. He arrives from the bench of ENCE, the Finnish club that stopped its whole international lineup in March, and he finds at FaZe the coach he had there.

The wording of the announcement matters. Neityu is a stand-in, a player brought in for a limited run of matches, and FaZe has said nothing beyond the three events.

What FaZe announced on April 23

HLTV gives the lineup FaZe will use at the three tournaments: frozen, broky, jcobbb, Twistzz and Neityu, with enkay J as head coach. Four of the five were already in the team. The fifth takes the only empty seat.

The change also makes the lineup younger. In the player data HLTV prints with its report, karrigan is 36 and Neityu 20. The four who stay are between 22 and 26: jcobbb is 22, frozen 23, broky 25 and Twistzz 26.

Neityu is a rifler, a player who uses the standard rifles and not the AWP, the game's sniper rifle. According to HLTV he spent almost 18 months with ENCE and averaged a 1.06 rating there, after coming up from MOUZ NXT, the academy team of the German club MOUZ. A rating is the single figure HLTV computes for every professional player from his statistics.

The announcement confirmed what had been reported in the press a few days before. It does not turn the arrangement into a transfer. HLTV still lists Neityu as a benched ENCE player, and neither club has published the terms under which he plays for FaZe.

One question is left open by the change. karrigan was more than a fifth player: he was the one his teammates trusted to lead them, in his own words. HLTV mentions a press report on who is expected to take over the calling during the stand-in period, and adds that it remains unclear whether that solution would continue afterward. FaZe has confirmed the five names, not their roles.

The place karrigan left

FaZe confirmed karrigan's departure on April 20, HLTV reported. It closed a second spell of five years: he had rejoined the team in February 2021, after a first period from 2016 to 2019 and two years at MOUZ.

HLTV's account of that second spell lists eight notable LAN titles, a LAN being a tournament played in a venue rather than online. Among them are the Antwerp Major in 2022 and the Intel Grand Slam Season 4 in 2023. The last was IEM Chengdu in 2024. The team also reached Major finals in Copenhagen, Shanghai and Budapest under his lead.

The end was not a surprise. In an interview given at PGL Bucharest, reported by HLTV, karrigan had judged the team's performances not good enough and raised the possibility of stepping down himself. He said goodbye on X in a post quoted by HLTV: "It's always been a privilege to wear this jersey, with it comes the fantastic organization and its players."

Falcons confirmed his signing the same day. Two days later, when the organizer ESL published the rosters of the IEM Cologne Major, karrigan appeared on Falcons' list as the registered substitute who will play the tournament from the start, according to HLTV, alongside NiKo, TeSeS, m0NESY and kyousuke. Falcons were fourth in HLTV's ranking of April 20.

For FaZe the timing left little room. The departure became official nine days before the first match of BLAST Rivals.

A first season without a Major

The stand-in arrives in a team that is having its hardest year. A Major is one of the championships sponsored by Valve, the game's publisher, and the most valued title in Counter-Strike. FaZe had played 16 of them in a row since entering the game in 2016, HLTV wrote on April 16. That run is over: the team did not earn an invitation to the IEM Cologne Major, which begins on June 2.

HLTV dated the moment to April 5, when a loss at a tournament in Belgrade ended FaZe's chances on the last weekend before the invitations were fixed. The next day the team was eliminated from PGL Bucharest in last place.

The site's explanation, in its report on karrigan's departure, goes back further. FaZe struggled after ropz left for Vitality on a free transfer, made no roster change during the off-season, and met the same problems when the new season began.

The staff changed first. FaZe dismissed its coach NEO in March and named enkay J as head coach on April 16. Four days later the in-game leader was gone. In HLTV's world ranking FaZe stood 14th on April 13 and 17th on April 20.

From ENCE's bench to FaZe, with his coach

Neityu's route to FaZe starts with a decision that had nothing to do with him. On March 11, ENCE moved its five players and its coach to the bench and said it would rebuild around Finnish talent. In its statement the club explained that competing at the highest international level had become increasingly difficult for organizations of its kind. All six were made available for transfer. At that date HLTV credited Neityu with a 1.08 rating over 49 maps, the second-best figure of the five players behind podi.

ENCE has moved on in the meantime. On April 1, HLTV reported that the club had promoted its academy squad as an interim main roster, the development team it had kept running through the transition. In its report of April 23, HLTV describes Neityu as benched since March 11.

The coach on that bench was enkay J. HLTV recalls that he had led ENCE since September 2024 and won Elisa Masters Espoo 2024 with the team, after working as an analyst for MOUZ, Envy and G2 and coaching ALTERNATE aTTaX, Sprout, BIG and Entropiq. FaZe hired him five weeks after the benching. One week after that, the first player added under him is one he coached until March.

So the pair that left ENCE's active roster together meets again in a team ranked far higher. On April 20, HLTV ranked FaZe 17th and ENCE 125th. On March 9, two days before the benching, ENCE had been 67th.

For Neityu it is also a change of level. HLTV describes his time at ENCE as a move up to tier two, the level just under the leading teams. His first opponent with FaZe, Natus Vincere, is ranked second in the world.

How the new five compare on recent form

HLTV printed the rating of each player over the previous three months next to its report. The figures are not strictly comparable, since Neityu's come from 36 maps played with ENCE before the benching and those of the four FaZe players from 53 maps each. They still show where he would sit in the group.

The comparison with karrigan has to be read with care. An in-game leader, the player who calls the team's tactics during a match, is not judged on his own statistics alone. What the chart does show is that FaZe replaces its caller with a rifler whose recent numbers sit beside those of Twistzz, which makes the open question of who leads all the more practical.

Three events, starting on April 29

The stand-in period has a calendar. HLTV gave the dates of the first two tournaments in its reports of April 16 and April 20, and both are played in the United States.

IEM Atlanta comes with rules of its own. ESL, its organizer, published the invited teams on February 9, drawn from the Valve Regional Standings of February 2, the ranking Valve computes from results, and FaZe appears among the main event teams. The same text sets April 27 as the date for main event rosters and says teams must keep a majority of the roster they had on the invitation date in order to compete in May. Four of FaZe's five players for Atlanta were in the lineup before karrigan left.

The main event is played in two groups of eight under a double-elimination format, in which a team is out after its second loss. The top three of each group advance to the playoffs. Thirteen places went to invited teams and three were left to closed qualifiers, two for a global bracket and one for the Americas.

Atlanta ends on May 17, sixteen days before the Major opens in Cologne without FaZe. For a team outside the season's main tournament, the three events with Neityu are the next chances to play on a stage, and the first matches of the squad enkay J has started to shape. What happens to the fifth seat after Stake Ranked Episode 2 is a decision FaZe has not announced.

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