Opinion: Vitality are the best team in the world. Again.

Gun to your head, who is the best team in the world right now?

If the Major was on tomorrow, who would you pick to win it?

I’m aware those are sort of two different questions. You could think Falcons are not the best team in the world, but you’d back karrigan under the bright lights. That’s fine. I get that.

But I’m struggling to look past Vitality right now for both questions, after their win at StarLadder StarSeries Fall. Is that crazy? I don’t think so - there’s a lot of historical precedent for them being near unbeatable with this roster, and that win was somewhat ominous.

You can point to the loss to Aurora, but that they quickly learnt and battered them in the rematch proved to me at least that the magic isn’t gone just yet - and when the competition is a flailing FURIA, a woefully inconsistent Falcons and a Team Spirit who still have big issues with getting production from ⅗ members on the team, I’d back the horse who has proven a winner time and time again.

ZywOo might be slightly worse than donk, but his supporting cast is just far superior. donk being on such a dysfunctional team is good for Counter-Strike in that if he had teammates as good as ZywOo has, it would be a very uninteresting list of tournament winners every year. The only thing that stops donk is the situation he is in, and that ZywOo has broken out of. They used to make him play with RpK and ALEX. Now he gets ropz and apEX.

When donk has a poor game, he loses. When ZywOo has a poor game, ropz, mezii or flameZ pick up the slack. It’s that that makes Vitality scary. They can win without their superstar, or at least buy enough time for him to wake up. When he’s on it, you cannot win.

We’ve hardly seen Vitality with their full line-up, so it’s easy to forget how good they are. Yes, their second half of the year has been heavily disrupted by fatherhood, but the events that have been disrupted have been relatively inconsequential. There’s no real point trying your best in this season beyond the Major and maybe a couple of others, and Vitality realised that nine or so months ago.

You can use that as an asterisk over Vitality, but I’m not sure that any team is unquestionably top tier right now. FURIA have more question marks than the Riddler’s hat. Falcons outside of the Major have struggled to utilise their pieces well (this is largely a karrigan thing, it seems) and Spirit are only ever the best team in the world when the other top teams aren’t firing on all cylinders.

That seems harsh, but as soon as Vitality clicked last time, Spirit fell away hard. They’re too reliant on two players that a team with three or four genuinely world class players can easily overpower them, even if donk is superhuman. Spirit have only dominated the second half of the year because it doesn’t really matter enough for karrigan to care and Vitality have been off child-rearing.

And MOUZ couldn’t win a big game if they were playing Tottenham Hotspur in it.

My argument for Vitality being the best team in the world is two-fold, but the main point is that nobody else is better. Every top team has significant flaws, but Vitality’s flaw is simply that they haven’t had their full five for a bit. They got them back and immediately won the next event.

One could easily argue in a big event Falcons similarly have no such big flaws, but we only have tournament’s worth of data that suggests this team can be the best in the world. What if the Major was a fluke?

I don’t believe it was, but there’s far more to suggest the greatest team of all time can be great again than a team with one tournament win. Even if you believe Falcons are the most likely team to win the next Major, you probably wouldn’t call them the best team in the world without raising some serious eyebrows.

The other part of the argument is the obvious one - Vitality are still good. Really, really good. Man for man there’s still nobody better. You might, like Spirit, have a player better than ZywOo, but you don’t have three riflers as good as their core. Falcons might have m0NESY, kyousuke and NiKo to go toe-to-toe with the big three. You could even argue TeSeS and mezii are similar levels; and even then, apEX is a better fragger than karrigan.

That one is a toss-up, though. ZywOo just about beats m0NESY, kyousuke edges out flameZ and ropz and NiKo… you can decide on that one. I’m not having that debate here.

But it’s more than just the man-for-man bit. They’re tactically and in terms of teamplay as good as anyone. Spirit can’t live with them in a macro sense, MOUZ can’t live with them individually, Falcons can but only when karrigan is astrally projecting and FURIA can’t live with themselves, quite frankly.

Their tactical depth and solid protocols are what have made them able to dominate while other top teams can win here and there but never for a long period. They’re no flash in the pan, and it’s much easier to believe that Vitality can re-find that level than someone else find it for the first time.

Vitality are the best team in the world right now, and should be favourites for any event.