ESEA backtracks on decision to wait for CS2; announces Season 46

ESEA announced yesterday on Twitter that the ESL Challenger League and the lower divisions of ESEA leagues are going to start during August, meaning that they will be played on CS:GO, unless Valve decides to release CS2 in the next two weeks.

This announcement comes a month and a half after a leaked conversation between an ESEA admin and an Advanced division player was shared, where the admin revealed Season 46 would not start until the release of the new title. That Tweet was posted five days after the initial ESEA blog post which announced Season 46.

Registrations for the new season of the different ESEA divisions have started yesterday and will close on the 10th of August, with the games starting on the 14th of the same month. This will be the first season where the ESEA leagues will be hosted by the FACEIT platform, thanks to the merger between ESL and FACEIT that happened in January 2022.

On the ESEA page on the FACEIT website, it's already possible to see which teams are enrolled in which divisions, but there's still plenty of doubt regarding the participants for the ESL Challenger League Season 46 spots, as Strife has disbanded, MIBR will be leaving NA, paiN are still deciding where to go, and the former ATK squad has split up.