
The second group stage of ESL Pro League Season 21 is heating up, in no small part thanks to Eternal Fire vs Team Liquid.
ESL Pro League Season 21 has brought together many of the best Counter-Strike teams in the world, but the CS Swiss format shows no mercy. High-end and otherwise popular teams quickly found themselves facing off. No matter how many tournament wins they have or how popular they are, though, three losses means elimination.
Team Liquid and Eternal Fire both have one loss on the board. That’s set to change, though.
Eternal Fire and Team Liquid will face off in the second round of ESL Pro League Season 21’s second group stage in a best-of-three match. Both teams have a 1-1 record. They need to get three wins to advance to the season’s playoffs, but three losses will eliminate them from the event.
Top Turkish team Eternal Fire hasn’t been burning up the opposition, but it has posted consistently strong results to this point in 2025.
The team qualified for BLAST Bounty Spring 2025 and took second place in the event. Eternal Fire then stayed active in February, making the playoffs in both IEM Katowice 2025 and PGL Cluj-Napoca. The team hasn’t won an especially big tournament since CCT Season 1 Global Finals in May 2024, but the team has consistently posted good results. Here is Eternal Fire’s roster at ESL Pro League Season 21:
Over the last six months, Eternal Fire has been very strong on Anubis and Nuke with a 14-6 and 11-4 record, respectively, over the last six months. It actively avoids playing on Ancient and has roughly even records across Dust 2, Mirage, and Train.
Team Liquid is still at it, posting strong results against teams from the Americas while looking shaky in interregional competition. “Shaky” doesn’t mean bad though, because they’ve been able to beat the likes of MOUZ and even Team Spirit. The team lost to Team Falcons in its first match of EPL S21 but rebounded against Furia.
Team Liquid will field this roster in ESL Pro League Season 21:
Over the last six months, Team Liquid has been very strong on Anubis and has an 80% winrate on the map. It’s solid on Ancient, but is approximately 50-50 across most other maps. The big exception is Dust 2, where Team Liquid has a rough 3-9 record over the last six months.
Team Liquid and Eternal Fire have faced off three times in history, with Eternal Fire winning every time. Don’t read too much into that, though. Those matches came between September 2022 and May 2024, so it’s been a while since they’ve faced off. Team Liquid has also made multiple roster changes since then, so this is effectively a fresh matchup.
A moneyline bet on Eternal Fire stands at 1.78 while Team Liquid is pegged at 2.01. This means that Eternal Fire is a slight favorite to win. That’s somewhat strange, as Eternal Fire is generally ranked as markedly better than Liquid.
Eternal Fire will likely beat Team Liquid at ESL Pro League Season 21. This isn’t a slam dunk by any means, as Team Liquid has shown it can take on elite competition, even with plentiful region-based razzing. Eternal Fire is the favorite for a reason though, and has a good matchup based on either team’s preferred maps.
Think you know who will win? Place your bets here!
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