Nouns selected to be Team USA for IESF 2024
Dust2.us has confirmed that the United States Esports Federation (USEF) has selected Nouns to represent Team USA for IESF 2024 and its qualifiers. While the decision has yet to be announced anywhere publicly by the federation, Nouns are among eight teams from North America set to battle for one of two spots in the main event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The teams from North America and South America were originally set to compete in a LAN event in Rio de Janeiro, however the LAN event was shelved and replaced by online qualifiers following multiple delays and poor planning by Record Entretenimento and the Confederação Brasileira de Desportos Eletrônicos (CBDEL), according to IESF.
The UESF's decision to select Nouns to represent Team USA will hopefully see the United States send a truly competitive team to IESF after two years of questionable team selections has seen the United States bomb out of IESF.
For IESF 2023 in Iași, Romania the USEF selected Spencer "Pugg" Moore's Detonate to represent Team USA after Evil Geniuses pulled out, with the squad exiting the event with a 1-4 record, only beating Team Algeria in the process. However, this was a sharp improvement over Team USA in 2022, when the UESF sent an ESEA Open team to Nusa Dua, Indonesia where the squad was predictably crushed by the other teams in attendance, with Team USA most embarrassingly being smashed by Hong Kong before facing a close loss to Namibia to exit the event 0-3.
For this year, with Nouns in a strong position to top the North American qualifier and make their way to the main event, America may be able to do some damage at the $240,000 Saudi event. However, it must also be noted that this is the third year in a row that the USEF has failed to run a qualifier to select Team USA, something that Team Colombia, Team Canada, and even Team Panama were seemingly able to accomplish with little difficulty.
Overall, the USEF has continued to operate in an opaque fashion, with its unelected body seemingly having few ties to the endemic Counter-Strike scene in North America.
The IESF World Esports Championship 2024: North American Qualifier is set to start on July 25th.
