How the trial by fire of Imperial Valkyries became some of Counter-Strike’s most popular 2025 esports content
Imperial Valkyries, the female squad of the well-known Brazilian organization, has been recently competing in top-tier events hosted by BLAST, PGL, and ESL. While they have not emerged from these events victorious, Imperial Valkyries’ games have reached higher viewership than matches featuring FaZe Clan, Team Vitality, and many other top teams. The team has set new heights for female esports in Counter-Strike and are trailblazers for female competition at top-tier events.
The female team’s recent invites to tier-one events is a by-product of the Valve Rankings, which the Counter-Strike developers now enforce as the official system for deciding invites to large tournaments. The ranking highly values prize money earned: optimal for Imperial Valkyries who have earned over $100,000 in prizes at female events. Thanks to this, the team ranks ahead of Imperial Esports in Valve’s rankings, meaning the organization’s female squad must receive a tournament invite ahead of their male counterparts.
In Valve’s own words, “Counter-Strike is at its best when teams compete on a level playing field”, and these changes have given Imperial Valkyries the opportunity to prove their mettle against the world’s top Counter-Strike teams in front of hundreds of thousands of fans. Counter-Strike enthusiasts around the globe have been avidly following Imperial Valkyries’ matches, leading to the highest viewership a female Counter-Strike squad has ever seen.
Imperial Valkyries broke out into the top-tier of Counter-Strike at the BLAST Premier Bounty Season 1 2025 Closed Qualifier. Under the event’s unique format, the team was able to choose their opponents, and they picked Major champions and massively popular team NAVI. Featuring the Ukrainian organization, the match was guaranteed to reach high viewership, and ultimately, almost half-a-million concurrent viewers tuned in to Imperial Valkyries’ tier-one debut.
Not only did this game solidify them as the most popular female Counter-Strike team ever, but they still currently rank as one of the top ten most popular CS2 teams of 2025, so far. At both the BLAST Premier Bounty Season 1 2025 and IEM Katowice 2025, Imperial Valkyries’ games were more popular than all other early stage matches. In fact, at BLAST’s Bounty, their game against NAVI was the fifth-most-popular game of the event overall.
While the team was defeated by NAVI 2-0 at BLAST’s event, they managed to win 15 rounds across the series, and put up a stronger performance than many would have imagined. NAVI player Justinas “jL” Lekavičius took to X after the match to sing the team’s praises, saying they “made us sweat”. In a reply, he further elaborated that if Imperial Valkyrie can continue to collect experience at top events, they could potentially become a threatening contender.
If you still have doubts about IMPERIAL FE not belonging to the scene, you're just a hater.
— NAVI jL (@jLcsgo_) January 16, 2025
They made us sweat, they shoot very strong.
Put some respect on their name, they made it here fair and square, give them a couple of years, more experience and they'll be a threat ?
While jL was happy to applaud the team’s efforts, others have taken issue with the system leading to Imperial Valkyries being invited to top events. Duncan "Thorin" Shields, a sometimes controversial yet undoubtedly influential figure in the Counter-Strike scene, expressed in a thread of X posts that accumulating prize money in female circuits should not lead to direct invites to top-tier events. He added that female teams could be invited through their own specific slot instead.
No matter which side of the debate you fall on, the media coverage of Imperial Valkyries has been torrential: discussions of Valve’s new ranking system have been centered around the female squad, and naturally, the first female Counter-Strike team to take to the tier-one stage warrants coverage. Quantifying hype and discussion is difficult, but by collating Twitch Chat data, we can compare the relative popularity of Imperial Valkyries to other CS2 teams.
Throughout 2025 so far, Imperial Valkyries have been mentioned almost 27,500 times in the Twitch Chats of channels broadcasting Counter-Strike. The team was comparably popular to compatriot Brazilian organization MIBR, and even received far more mentions than higher-ranked teams such as MOUZ and 3DMAX.
FURIA were noticeably more popular than the leading female team, however, they did receive roughly 20% of their total mentions on the date of their match against Imperial Valkyries at IEM Katowice 2025. This game fell just short of 400,000 peak concurrent viewers, outperforming the next-most-popular Play-In match by over 150,000 viewers.
While Imperial Valkyries have enjoyed massive viewership for their first few games in tier-one, this is waning slightly. At the ongoing PGL Cluj-Napoca 2025, Imperial Valkyrie’s day one match against Eternal Fire received over 205K Peak Viewers, ranking outside the event's top five matches. Although it wasn’t the groundbreaking viewership such as that observed at BLAST’s inaugural Bounty tournament, it was still more popular than over 20 other Play-In matches at PGL’s first event of 2025.
Unfortunately for the female team and Counter-Strike viewership, their performances at these recent tier-one events have seen them slip down the rankings slightly. They may be able to compete at the European Qualifier for the BLAST.tv Austin Major 2025, but they are unlikely to receive a direct invite to another tier-one event until after the Major.
Critically, the ESL Impact League Season 7 will take place this May, with $50,000 on offer for first place. The core of Imperial Valkyries has claimed every single seasonal ESL Impact championship since its inception, and the prize money from this event could boost them up the rankings to qualify for the opening stages of tournaments such as IEM Cologne 2025 and the BLAST Premier Bounty Season 2 2025. While both of these events will likely be highly popular in their own right, an invitation for Imperial Valkyries would give them a boost.
Imperial Valkyries’ stint in tier-one Counter-Strike has shown that the gap between female Counter-Strike professionals and top-tier teams is smaller than some may expect. Their attendance at these events has often been the major talking point of the early stages, and their presence has not only helped boost viewership for Counter-Strike events, but also given fans an electrifying storyline to follow. When the squad is able to topple a top team at one of these tournaments, this could bring in the first-ever 500,000+ concurrent viewership for a match featuring a female Counter-Strike team.
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