How to make a crappy CS:GO team in seven easy steps

Hey future GMs, here’s a bunch of handy tips to run your org out of the esport in no time! Follow these easy steps and your team will be pristine meme potential before you know it. There is no such thing as bad publicity and any buyout can be justified – as long as wins on the server are optional, you’ll be the best in the business before you know it!

Don’t clear out the deadwood

An easy way to capsize your team before even getting started is to acquiesce to the big names of the squad you were meant to rejuvenate. Veterancy and other intangible (meaning nonexistent) skills are supposedly really rather valuable, which is why the squad had to be rebuilt from the ground up in the first place, of course. Why not keep the players who were the main architects of the downfall to begin with? No doubt they will find a new lease of life under your expert guidance.

Grab a mediocre IGL

Much like how a good goalkeeper is the bedrock of a championship-winning side in football, a quality in-game leader can transform even four duds into a semi-competitive outfit. This is why you should never get one with real pedigree, focusing on fragging output instead. Who needs strats if you can shoot them in the head instead? You may think “just click on heads 4Head” is a mere Twitch meme but many top CS:GO teams reached the summit without any dedicated tactics [citation needed].

Cut a player after just a few tournaments

For some reason, your early results are below par, and the fans are getting restless on social media. Well, time to move fast and break things – if it worked for Zuckerberg, surely it’ll be just fine for you to follow the same approach. No doubt a roster change will solve all your problems. A team that hasn’t gelled in a month never will.

Make sure to focus on support players when identifying who to cut. If they were good enough to play for your tip-top squad, they’d frag out a lot more often, right? Since the problem is caused by the difference in the supply and demand of headshots, Economics 101 implies that now is the time to go all-in for a very specific kind of player.

Overpay for a washed-up former star

Though the current elite players will have no interest in your hodgepodge project, legends of the past may very well be. You can convince yourself that they will return to top form under your astute leadership while they can feel happy feelings as they cash your humongous checks. A perfect arrangement for everyone!

Scour the HLTV top 20 from 2017 or before for some promising picks for this slot: names like oskar, fer, AdreN and Snax come to mind. Make sure you listen to the input of those washed-up players you left in the squad at the beginning: they will no doubt point out the worst of the bunch, quite possibly one of their former teammates looking for a last big paycheck.

Sign him on a long contract with exorbitant wages and you’re ready to progress to the next stage!

Realize you have a coach and you might want to check how he’s doing

Oh yes, that guy left over from the previous regime wearing the team colors but not actually playing? He’s called “the coach”. You might want to check whether he offers any useful input. Most likely not, or you would have noticed his presence long ago. Good news: firing him to bring in a streamer or an analyst instead to paper over the cracks and generate another round of press coverage for your side!

Bring in a pug star with no adult skills

By the time you realize a coach could help you even if they don’t use exploits, your team finished last at three successive events in embarrassing fashion. Since the third loss came against an open qualifier team, no one would fault you for taking your frustration out on your squad. Use this moment as a flash of inspiration: maybe fresh young blood is exactly what you need.

Now’s the time for the Hail Mary play, if only because the org will no longer let you spend the same sort of lavish sums which got you into this mess in the first place. (Their loss, really: now you could really capitalize on your new-found experience!) Take a look at the FACEIT and ESEA leaderboards and find the most promising youngster you can think of. If their username has 1337 in it, you’ve got a star on your hands. The younger they are, the better for you as it makes it all the likelier that you can rinse them with a development contract (lol).

By the way, this is the time to say goodbye to one of the veteran players. Obviously, you can’t kick the recently signed washed-up former star yet, so it has to be one of those left behind from your original squad (non-)construction. Since it’s clear at this point that you have little to no expertise about the game, you need different criteria: terminate the one who farts louder and more often. This will clearly improve team morale.

Stop making roster changes until your org eventually leaves CS:GO

This is it, the end of the line. Having wasted tons of resources and exhausted all fan goodwill, there’s neither the money nor the interest left to rejuvenate the floundering lineup after another round of defeats. Good job all around! Now you can sit back and relax as the zombie squad stumbles from embarrassing defeat to embarrassing defeat until the direct invites run out, at which point you won’t even have to bother with travel expenses anymore as the team won’t make it past the online qualifiers anyway.

It’s not long left now until the whole project is chucked into the bin by your higher-ups. Of course, the ultimate measurement of your performance is whether your showing can convince the org to abandon CS altogether for VALORANT or some other greener pasture: after all, can you really call yourself a bad GM if you haven’t burned it all down on the way out?