Zews Leaves Team Liquid

After benching cadiaN, Team Liquid lost their coach zews as well. It looks like the organization intends to make massive changes in an attempt to improve its CS2 results.

Both zews and cadiaN were key members of the team and much of the strategy was decided by them. Whoever will be signed to replace these two giants will need to rebuild almost from scratch. In the short term, this pretty much means that Liquid will not achieve anything spectacular. At best, they can hope to win an S-tier trophy in 2025.

Zews’ Impact

Excited to be back home!

Lets’go liquid! 👊🏻👊🏻👊🏻 pic.twitter.com/raRhTmQDSx

— Wilton Prado ‘zews’ (@zews) December 5, 2023

Zews joined Liquid at the end of 2023 and only spent six months coaching the team. Prior to taking this position, he served as coach for other North American and South American organizations, such as MIBR, Evil Geniuses, and Fluxo.

In 2024, his coaching skills took Liquid from around rank 25 to rank 11 globally. This improvement would have been enough for many other teams, but Liquid’s ambitions were far greater. They wanted to win trophies again and unfortunately, they kept getting eliminated in the playoffs.

Another big issue is that they missed the Copenhagen Major, which was a hugely important target. At IEM Chengdu, they finished 5^th – 6^th. At ESL Pro League S19, they were 5^th – 8^th. At IEM Dallas, they were 7^th – 8^th.

What’s Next

At the moment, nobody knows what’s next for Liquid, zews, and cadiaN. Almost for certain, zews will go back to Brazil and start coaching one of the big orgs there. For cadiaN, it looks like he’ll be back in Europe pretty soon. But who will take him? Astralis? G2 Esports? HEROIC?…

The options aren’t that many, especially if he wants to achieve great results. One org that could be interested in him is Team Falcons. Snappi has not delivered the results that were expected of him. As the team’s IGL, he’ll need to improve dramatically or risk being replaced.

For cadiaN, who is himself a very solid IGL, playing alongside two other Danes and having zonic as a coach would probably be a lot of fun.

Liquid’s options are also limited. However, with nitr0 coming back to CS2, there’s a good chance that he will assume the IGL position and make another attempt at winning trophies. His Valorant career was brief and relatively modest. At almost 29 years old, this could be his last opportunity to achieve something spectacular and win a Major.

Header: Team Liquid