When FUT announced their new CS2 team on May 26, their quintet was sort of obfuscated by the fact that the legendary Adil “ScreaM” Benrlitom returned to Counter-Strike. ScreaM will be FUT’s CS2 content creator and sixth player after spending the past four years playing VALORANT for big teams such as Team Liquid and Karmine Corp.
While he’s just a backup for Audric “JACKZ” Jug, Kévin “misutaaa” Rabier, Etienne “drac” Salaün, Etienne “drac” Salaün, and his younger brother Nabil “Nivera” Benrlitom for now, ScreaM revealed that he plans to fully return to competition.
“My goal is to fully comeback to competitive CS once I familiarize with the game and feel ready,” ScreaM wrote on X.
Even though ScreaM will forever be known as the “headshot machine” and his impact in the early years of CS:GO, it’s highly unlikely that he’ll ever play CS2 at the top level. Here’s why.
Why ScreaM’s plans for Counter-Strike don’t look feasible
ScreaM struggled at the end of his days in VALORANT. Credit: Colin Young-Wolff | © Riot Games
There are many reasons to doubt ScreaM. One, for instance, is that ScreaM was a mere role player at the end of his CS:GO days. His way of playing the game, the famous one-taps, was good for getting highlights on more casual games, but almost irreplicable against tier-one or even a lot of tier-two pros.
Teams stopped seeing ScreaM as a star player who takes over games, and related him to play more supportive roles, which ended up hurting his numbers even further.
In 2019, the final year of his career as a CS:GO pro, ScreaM averaged a 1.05 HLTV rating. While this number isn’t necessarily bad, his performance notably dipped below the 1.0 mark against top 30, top 20, and top 10 teams.
ScreaM did enjoy a strong start in the first years of VALORANT, when the players were still trying to crack the meta, and the scene was full of former Counter-Strike pros. However, the Belgian didn’t play as well in 2023 after taking over the in-game leadership of Karmine Corp, and stopped playing at the top level at the end of that year.
Even though ScreaM didn’t accomplish as much as other CS:GO players from his generation, the “headshot machine” likely still has hope because he knows how mechanically gifted he is.
We’ve seen great players such as Nicolai “device” Reedtz and Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev come back after long breaks and still put up numbers, but they were far more consistent than ScreaM ever was.
Regardless of how this pans out, it’ll be a fun ride to follow ScreaM, even if he fails to make it to the top level again.
Feature image credit: Helena Kristiansson | © ESL