Team Vitality open a Counter-Strike academy with the Project H five

Team Vitality, the club whose Counter-Strike 2 team sits first in HLTV's world ranking, now has a second team in the game. In a press release dated Wednesday, April 22, 2026, the club presented Vitality Academy: five players between 16 and 19 years old, a coach and a team manager. HLTV, a Counter-Strike news and statistics site, reported the announcement the same day.

An academy team is a development roster. It carries the club's name, plays in lower-level competitions and is meant to prepare young players for the top level, at the club that trains them or elsewhere. The release calls the academy the missing piece of the club's approach to the game, eight years after it entered it.

The five players are not strangers to each other. The club says they have been playing together for several months under a code name, Project H, and that the results were encouraging for a roster of this kind. The announcement turns that trial into a team with a name, a staff and a program.

Team Vitality press release of April 22, 2026; HLTV ranking dated April 20, 2026.

What Vitality announced on April 22

The release is short and built around one idea: training. Vitality describes itself as the most decorated club of the Counter-Strike scene and says it reached that position only eight years after joining the game. What it lacked, in its own account, was a structure to find young players, train them and accompany them toward the professional level. Vitality Academy is that structure.

The club states the aim in three verbs: identify young talents, train them and accompany them. The release speaks of turning prospects into accomplished professionals and of bringing out the next generation of champions. It presents the academy as a springboard to the elite and as a contribution to the growth of what it calls the Tier 2 ecosystem, the layer of teams and tournaments that sits under the biggest events. Preparation for professional conditions, it adds, includes the demands of the media.

Fabien "Neo" Devide, whom the release presents as President of Team Vitality, puts it in terms of investment. Creating a Counter-Strike academy, he says in the statement, means investing in the future of the club's ecosystem. He adds that esports needs solid training paths if it is to keep growing and structuring itself, and that Vitality wants both to perform today and to build tomorrow's champions, while helping the whole scene rise.

The release says nothing about money. It gives no budget, no contract length and no indication of where the team will be based.

The five players and the staff

Vitality's release lists each player with a nationality, an age and, for most of them, a role. Three roles appear. The in-game leader, often shortened to IGL, is the player who calls the team's tactics during a round. The AWPer is the team's sniper, named after the AWP, the game's main sniper rifle. A rifler plays with the standard assault rifles and makes up most of any lineup.

By the club's count, then, four of the five are under 18 and the oldest, the in-game leader, is 19. The release also notes that lucaZ comes from NAVI Junior, which HLTV's report describes as the academy of NAVI. It names no former team for the other four.

Two adults frame the group. Pablo "VdaK1NG" Escobar, whom HLTV lists as Spanish, is presented by the club as the team's coach and analyst, after a period supporting the first team. HLTV reports that he joined Vitality as a data analyst in September and was already coaching the five during the Project H period. The outlet also relays a message he posted on X, in which he said that keeping the head coach position had not been the original plan and that he was happy to take on the role.

The team manager is a familiar name at the club. Matthieu Péché is described in the release as a former canoeist and Olympic medalist, and as the manager of Vitality's main Counter-Strike team from 2018 to 2025. The person who looked after the first team through most of its existence is now in charge of the day-to-day life of its youngest players.

From Project H to Vitality Academy

The club did not sign five players and announce them the next morning. According to the release, the five come from different countries and have been playing together for several months under the code name Project H. Vitality gives no detail about how the five were selected.

HLTV fills in part of the record. The site reports that the team has already qualified for the Season 56 Finals of ESEA and that it beat Metizport in the qualifiers of CCT Contenders. Metizport stood 94th in HLTV's world ranking of April 20, 2026. HLTV's page showed no ranking number next to the academy.

That is the sum of what is public about the team's results so far: one qualification and one notable win, both under the old name. The club's release mentions no score and no tournament, and speaks only of very encouraging results for an academy lineup.

What the program includes

The release describes a program that goes beyond scheduled practice. Vitality lists five components: high-level coaching from a dedicated staff; access to the tools that belong to the organization; the first team's experience, passed on to the young players, and collective training with it; bootcamps, the periods when a team gathers in one place to practice together; and participation in LAN competitions, meaning events played in person rather than online.

That main team is made up of apEX, ZywOo, ropz, mezii and flameZ, the five players named in the club's most recent results release. The club's release of April 19 credits ZywOo with the most valuable player award of the team's latest tournament.

The club does not say which competitions the academy will enter, beyond the general mention of LAN events, and gives no date for a first match under the new name.

A club at the top of the game

The timing says something about where Vitality stands. Three days before the academy was presented, on April 19, the main team won IEM Rio 2026, beating Team Spirit 3-0 in the final. The club's own release on that result counts it as the fourth title of its 2026 season.

The same text says the win completed a second consecutive ESL Grand Slam, which the club says brings an additional US$1,000,000. Vitality lists IEM Dallas 2025, ESL Pro League 2025 and IEM Kraków 2026 as the earlier wins that counted toward it, and states that no roster in Counter-Strike history had taken two Grand Slams in a row before.

The Rio run was not flawless, by the club's account: a 2-1 defeat against G2 ended a series of 24 consecutive matches without losing a map. Vitality then beat NAVI 2-0 in the quarterfinal and FURIA 2-0 in the semifinal before the final.

So the academy arrives while the first team is winning, not as an answer to a crisis. HLTV's ranking of April 20 has Vitality first in the world.

The circuits open to a team like this

The win over Metizport came in the qualifiers of CCT Contenders, and that circuit shows what the Tier 2 ecosystem of the release looks like in practice. CCT, a tournament organizer, set out its 2026 European structure in February, as HLTV reported on February 13: 34 events across three circuits, with a progression system from the lowest to the highest.

Entry at the bottom is open. HLTV's report says the first four Contenders events of the year were filled entirely through two open qualifiers, tournaments any team may enter. From the fifth to the tenth, two teams come from open qualifiers and 14 are invited through the Valve Regional Standings, the ranking kept by the game's publisher.

The prize money at this level is modest next to the US$1,000,000 bonus the main team has just earned. What the ladder offers a development team is something else: regular official matches and a route upward that depends on results.

How another top club runs its academy

The team Vitality beat in the Rio final offers a point of comparison, because Team Spirit already runs an academy. HLTV, reporting on Spirit Academy's 2026 lineup on February 18, called it a well-respected talent factory.

The report shows how such a team lives. Spirit Academy started 2026 with a new five under coach S0tF1k, led in game by VILBy, who is 20; HLTV's profiles show the four other players as 16 or 17. The rebuild followed the departure of three players, who left the academy in 2025 for other teams. Two of them, both 18, were named by HLTV with their destinations: kyousuke, now at Falcons, and Alkaren, at HEROIC B. HLTV also recalls that donk, who is 19 and plays on Spirit's main team, was once the academy's leading player.

Two things follow from that example, and both are in HLTV's account. An academy's roster turns over quickly, because its best players leave. And they do not all leave for the first team of the club that trained them: of the three who left Spirit Academy in 2025, none went to Spirit's main roster.

Vitality's release takes no position on that point. It speaks of training complete players and of raising the level of the whole scene, and it stops there. The next public facts will be the team's first matches as Vitality Academy and the ESEA Season 56 Finals for which, HLTV reports, the five have already qualified.

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