We all remember the good ol' Clanbase Eurocup where the finest teams in Europe played their way into the glory which they received by winning this. Well as almost all of the top teams quited Eurocup (for known reasons I might add) in Europe there were no big competitions for clans except the LAN leagues as The CPL, Clickarena, ESWC and so on. After some time, the well known German e.sports league, the European Sports League has announced their ESL CSCL - Counterstrike Champions League. Some of you might ask, why are they making a new league while they have The Counterstrike Challenge?! The CSC exist from januarya this year, and they are heading for a 3rd season, the finals of the 2nd season will be played on June 2nd, between Ocrana.ATI and z0lad. As the officials say, their aim is to bring the best of the best each season, something like the football Champions League, and get big money, big events and so on with the word "Big". We can just hope that the former glory of CS will return with some of the next events, hopefully the "old" CS will last untill the 2.0 version comes out.

The Statement:

Along side the W3CL and UTCL leagues we are happy to announce the third ESL Champions League, the ESL CSCL. We trust in the success of our previous leagues, but look forward to a partnership with the former "CounterStrike Challenge (CSC)", which was previously hosted by clanbase.
The Counter Strike challenge will be concluding on Wednesday the 2nd of June 2004 with the finals between OCRANA.ATI and z0lad, it was initially founded back in January of this year with the aim of introducing a successor to the former Eurocup. The main idea of this event was to establish a pan-European Tournament mainly played on the Internet excluding the large hi-profile LAN Events.

A Great interest and a large demand for a pan-European league became apparent when a large number of European teams registered for the competition, many of those being large well-known and successful teams.

The new Season being hosted by ESL will still be managed by Proca and Nils and will begin at the start of July. The official IRC Channel for the ESL CounterStrike Championsleague is #esl.cscl (Quakenet). Details regarding contestants and procedures involved will be announced within the forthcoming weeks.