MOUZ defeated Eternal Fire 2–0 in the BLAST Open Lisbon 2025 semifinals and advanced to the title match against Vitality. After the victory, kyotostxr spoke with Ludvig Brollan Brolin about taking over as in-game leader, the price of the team’s success, facing the strongest sides in the world, and the state of FACEIT in CS2.
Congratulations on the win! How would you rate the game? Did everything go according to plan?
Yeah, I think it was a really good game overall.
— Brollan
We had a good game plan coming into the match, and everything went very smoothly.
It went very well overall. It was a comfortable win, if I may say so.
Your statistics have dropped quite a bit since you took over the in-game leader role, but the team’s results have remained strong and continued to improve. What is the hardest part of staying in form as an IGL, and do you care about your personal numbers?
When I moved into the IGL role, I knew that my statistics would drop.
— Brollan
But it is not something I think about that much. Of course, I would rather win.
At the same time, everyone wants to have good statistics.
But as a leader, I have to sacrifice many things, and that is part of the job.
Maybe I have dropped a little individually, but I am trying to improve it day by day.
At the moment, I put more time into tactical work than individual things, and I am trying to find a better balance between them.
Some people are calling your current success a honeymoon period and saying that you do not have much experience as an IGL yet. How do you plan to prove them wrong?
I guess we just have to win more.
— Brollan
A honeymoon period is always a thing to some extent, but I do not really believe in it that much.
We just try to improve as a team, as always, and win more games and more rounds.
At some point, we are going to have a bad tournament. I do not know when, but it is going to happen sometimes.
Still, I feel that we are improving day by day, and it is really good that we continue getting better at what we do.
Which team is tougher to play against right now, Spirit or Vitality? Results do not always reflect how a match feels inside the game.
I think Vitality are probably the strongest team at the moment.
— Brollan
Spirit are also a really good team, of course.
But Vitality are in really strong individual form right now, and I think they have won around 14 best-of-three series in a row.
Every one of their players is individually insane, and sometimes they play a very annoying style of Counter-Strike.
Spirit are also very good, and some of their players, such as donk, can take over a game.
But at the moment, I think Vitality are just a little better.
I have noticed that you like playing FACEIT in your free time. In your opinion, has the experience become better or worse in CS2? Some professionals say they are matched with weak players even at high ELO now.
I do not really remember the CS:GO days that well anymore, but I think things were quite different back then.
— Brollan
The overall level on FACEIT in CS:GO was much higher.
Now you cannot really expect everyone in the game to be at a genuinely good level.
When I enter a FACEIT match now, my mentality is that people are going to make mistakes.
That also happened in CS:GO, of course, but it is what it is, and I do not try to reflect on it too much.
Overall, I would say the level on FACEIT is pretty low in CS2 compared with CS:GO.
Do you or the team set specific goals? How important are they to you?
Of course, we try to set goals for each tournament.
— Brollan
But we did not really have a normal start to the season with Spinx, because at the first tournament we immediately had to win.
Our main goal is simply to improve day by day and get as much better as we can.
It is difficult to put it more precisely: we just want to keep improving all the time.
We have been doing a great job so far, and we are going to try to keep doing it.
