FURIA moves its women's team from Counter-Strike to Valorant

Six years, several South American titles and one ESL Impact trophy: that is the record FURIA's women's team leaves behind in Counter-Strike. The Brazilian organization announced that FURIA fe, as the team is known, will make a complete transition to Valorant, HLTV reported on August 17, 2026.

HLTV's report carries no reason from the organization and no detail of its plans in the new game. The timing still says a lot about the ground the team was standing on. The circuit that structured women's Counter-Strike for four years, ESL Impact, has been on indefinite hold since the end of 2025, and FURIA is the latest in a line of organizations to step away since then.

Nine days earlier, HLTV had reported the same move by one of the scene's best players, who said why in public.

HLTV, August 17, 2026, for FURIA fe; HLTV, November 28, 2025, for the ESL Impact figures.

What FURIA announced

The announcement concerns one team and one game. FURIA fe, the women's Counter-Strike side of the organization, stops competing in Counter-Strike and moves to Valorant, the tactical shooter published by Riot Games.

HLTV describes the change as a complete transition. Its report does not say which Valorant competitions FURIA intends to enter, or when.

It also does not say that the five players of the Counter-Strike roster will make up the new team. HLTV lists them at the foot of its article, without a team.

No reason from the organization appears in the report. What HLTV offers is the context: after the ESL Impact circuit was paused, several organizations parted ways with their women's lineups.

Six years and one Impact trophy

FURIA fe spent six years under the organization's colors, HLTV writes, and won several titles in South America along the way.

On the international stage its story was one of near misses, then a win. The team finished runner-up at three ESL Impact League Finals, the in-person event that closed each season of the circuit, before lifting the trophy in Season 7.

That title still counted when the 2025 honors were handed out. At the HLTV Awards, published on January 10, 2026, FURIA fe placed third for Women's Team of the Year, behind BIG EQUIPA and MIBR fe. Its player bizinha finished third for Women's Player of the Year.

The roster HLTV listed in that January article is the same five names it gives now.

Four Brazilians and one Argentine, then, aged 24 to 30. In late November 2025, when HLTV surveyed the scene, it still called them the reigning Impact champions. The eighth season had yet to be decided.

The circuit that stopped

ESL Impact was the backbone of women's Counter-Strike. The tournament organizer ESL launched it in early 2022 as part of an initiative called GG For All.

It ran for eight seasons, with standalone tournaments in Valencia in 2022 and Katowice in 2023. Across its seasons, standalone in-person events and one-off online cash cups, it paid out more than US$1.5 million in prize money, according to HLTV's report of November 28, 2025.

The circuit had already narrowed before it stopped. The number of in-person events fell from three a year to two, alongside two seasons a year. From Season 6, the Asia-Pacific region had no slot of its own, and the eight places at the finals went to Europe, North America and South America. In December 2024, ESL confirmed it would keep to those three regions.

The league carried a US$300,000 annual prize pool, HLTV wrote, and US$700,000 in club incentives, money for organizations that was introduced in 2025.

ESL announced the suspension on October 3, 2025, HLTV reported, and explained that the circuit's economic model was not sustainable. The Season 8 Finals in Stockholm closed the year, and BIG EQUIPA won the season by beating MIBR fe in the final. After that, the league went on indefinite hold.

The narrowing had a cost of its own, which HLTV documented through one team. HSG fe, from Asia, moved to Europe to play Season 6 after reaching the semi-finals of the Season 5 Finals. It finished 7th-8th in the European league and disbanded a few months into 2025. One of its former players, gfi, estimated that the team's management had spent about US$70,000 on three months in Europe.

The league also served as a training ground beyond the players. HLTV named three coaches who moved on to other jobs after working with women's teams, and an Australian commentator, LucyLuce, whose breakthrough came through Impact in 2022. One of those coaches, flashie, who coached the team now called FlyQuest RED from 2020 to 2023, said the league had been a large part of that development.

A year of exits

What followed, as HLTV's reports of the past nine months tell it, is a sequence. FURIA's announcement is its most recent step.

The first signs came within weeks of ESL's decision. Four Magic released its team on a Monday, HLTV reported on November 28, 2025, one day after that team had won the SuperCopa Feminina, a tournament in which FURIA fe also played. Imperial's chief executive said at the time that his organization would keep backing the Imperial Valkyries, winners of the HLTV women's team award in each of the three previous years. By May 2026, HLTV counted both NIP Impact and the Valkyries among the exits of the start of the year. NIP Impact had reached the semi-finals at two of the last three Impact Finals that its player aiM attended, and HLTV reported in January that a new team, Pigeons, included the core of the former Valkyries squad.

BIG held on longer. In January 2026 the German organization signed two players for BIG EQUIPA, and Roman Reinhardt, whom HLTV identifies as BIG's CGO, said that BIG would continue for as long as it could do so responsibly. He called on the large tournament organizers to step up. "One thing is clear: without teams, there is no scene," he said.

On May 1, BIG paused the project for the foreseeable future. The JB Pro League Female Season 1 was the only women's event the team attended in 2026. Its team manager wrote on X, as HLTV reported, that the players had waited and hoped for five months for tournaments that had been promised, playing men's tournaments in the meantime, and that the pause would let them find different sponsors for their streams.

ASTRA, the in-game leader who led that team to the Season 8 title, wrote on X that she was leaving Counter-Strike for Valorant, HLTV reported on August 8. She pointed to the state of women's Counter-Strike and to the lack of tournaments ahead, said she missed practice and competition, and said she was putting her focus into a growing scene.

What was left to play for

The hold did not empty the calendar entirely. When it reported on the suspension in November 2025, HLTV listed the projects meant to fill part of the gap.

FERJEE, the organizer of the Brazilian tournament Rainhas do Clutch, planned an international version called Clutch Queens in Rio de Janeiro in the first half of 2026, with nearly US$65,000 in prize money and club share. Its president said then that he could not confirm a second global event for the year.

VANTA and JB added a women-only tournament to the JB Pro League, with a US$25,000 prize pool. HLTV reported in January that it would start on February 9, 2026.

The Female Pro League had just finished its first edition with in-person finals in Kazakhstan. ELITE FE, a series of cups that counts Team Vitality among its backers, was running too.

There were efforts to keep organizations talking to one another as well. FlyQuest, which fields the women's team FlyQuest RED, pledged its support for that project on the day ESL announced the suspension. missharvey, speaking for the organization, said it hoped to work with FURIA, MIBR, BIG, Ninjas in Pyjamas and Imperial.

Set against Impact's US$300,000 annual prize pool and the US$700,000 in club incentives introduced in 2025, the amounts announced for the replacements were smaller. HLTV described the result from a team's side in May: a lack of European women's events so far in the year, and a single one attended by the winners of Season 8.

Where the move leads

Valorant has a circuit called Game Changers, run by the publisher. Riot Games described the end of its 2026 season in an article of July 22.

The Americas hold a Last Chance Qualifier on October 14 and 15 at the Riot Games Arena in São Paulo. It brings together three teams, one each from Brazil, North America and Latin America, the second seeds of their regional circuits. They play a round-robin on the first day, and the top two meet in a best-of-five final on the second. The winner earns a place at the Game Changers Championship, which Riot calls the most important Game Changers event of the year. The 2026 edition starts on October 22, also in São Paulo.

That is what the Game Changers calendar holds in Brazil this fall: a qualifier and a championship, both with dates and a city. HLTV's report does not say where in that structure FURIA will start.

For Counter-Strike, the count is simpler. Of the three teams on the podium of the 2025 women's team award, BIG EQUIPA is paused and FURIA fe is leaving the game.

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