MAD Lions Close Down CS:GO Team

MAD Lions announced it is closing down its Counter-Strike: Global Offensive division on Tuesday, April 19. The news came just three months after the organization acquired two new players.

MAD Lions announced the organization is closing its CS:GO division on Tuesday. Moreover, MAD Lions revealed that the team is putting its entire lineup up for transfer.

This is one of the biggest news in the CS:GO scene of 2022, as we witness MAD Lions step away from the game in which the Spanish esports organization was involved since it was formed in 2017. And since then, MAD Lions have come a long way.

Initially, the organization was represented by local teams, but following the acquisition by OverActive Media and merger with Splyce in 2019, MAD Lions finally reached outside of Iberia and into the European scene.

Unfortunately, despite the heavy investments, MAD Lions struggled to reach any kind of notable success, ushering in the disbandment of the CS:GO division.

“Today we close a chapter of MAD Lions. After a long time competing, we say goodbye to our CS:GO division, as well as our current roster,” read the announcement.

“We’ve put our players on the transfer list and will work with them to find new homes.”

The announcement comes just a month after MAD Lions announced Volodymyr “Woro2k” Veletniuk and Justinas “jL” Lekavicius as the newest additions to the CS:GO roster. However, considering MAD Lions’ lack of any notable success in the CS:GO world for the last 12 months, the decision, while a shocking one, makes a lot of sense.

MAD Lions first appeared in the CS:GO esports scene in 2017 with a roster that competed mostly in lesser Spanish tournaments. The team continued competing in regional events for nearly two years before the acquisition by OverActive Media in 2019.

This marked a huge move for MAD Lions as an esports organization, particularly for its CS:GO roster, which started competing in bigger European events. And even though MAD Lions never established themselves as one of the best teams in the region, they have achieved plenty.

MAD Lions’ most successful period came early into 2020 when the team placed top-four at DreamHack Open Leipzig 2020 and ICE Challenge 2020. Yet their most notable accomplishment came in April when MAD Lions won Flashpoint Season 1.

Unfortunately, success was hard to come by for the rest of the year, as MAD Lions struggled to emulate their achievement in bigger events. Their only two notable accomplishments by the end of 2020 included two silver medals from Eden Arena: Malta Vibes and Nine to Five #5.

The Danish roster continued with poor showings into 2021, which eventually led MAD Lions to start fresh with a new international roster. The new-look MAD Lions aimed to develop younger talent, but the project did not work out.

The idea of developing younger talent saw players come and go nearly on a monthly basis, and without any stability, results were nowhere to be found. MAD Lions eventually stabilized with the addition of Viktor “sdy” Orudzhev and Michał “MICHU” Müller at the start of 2022, but that didn’t last.

Even though MAD Lions CS:GO roster seemed to have found some traction of late, the organization decided to pull the plug on the division.

The decision follows the reports of MAD Lions struggling financially due to the heavy investments into its CS:GO team that did not net the expected results.

It’s currently unclear what will happen with the former MAD Lions roster or whether the organization will ever return back to the CS:GO scene.

However, while we might need to wait for a bit longer to get an answer to the latter question, we should know the future of the former players in the coming weeks.