For as long as esports has been around, people have been asking whether it will ever achieve gender parity. It’s the kind of question that has no easy answer. Hell, we’ve tried to answer it over and over again right here on this website, and have never come to a solid conclusion. The only thing we can say for sure is that it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the gender parity in esports looks very different now than it did a few years ago. In fact, it’s changing all the time.

Let’s address the obvious. For a long time, Team Liquid didn’t have any female pros at all. And even now, the athlete demographics within the organization are overwhelmingly male. This can be attributed to wider industry trends, where progress is slow-moving at the top levels, especially when it comes to games with long-established scenes. But women and people of marginalized genders have always been integral to the fabric of Team Liquid, both as talent and staff — and as of 2022, as competitors, too.

Since the genesis of its esports scene, Valorant has developed a reputation for being the game with the most robust women’s circuit out there. Valorant Game Changers operates around the world and has an international LAN at the end of the year, which is far more than other women’s tournaments have historically gotten. Since Valorant is a young game, it stands to reason that it also has a young playerbase, one that’s included young women and girls from the very beginning.

Team Liquid Brazil was formed in 2022 to compete in Game Changers Brazil. They quickly proved that they were the most dominant team of the region, going undefeated domestically and coming third in the Game Changers Championship. They attained much the same results in 2023, though this time, they lost in a tiebreaker final at the end-of-year LAN. It was only in 2024 that they began to falter against their biggest domestic rivals, MIBR.

So, Team Liquid Brazil was by far the best women’s team in their region for over two years. That’s all well and good for them, but what happens when we take away the qualifier? How do they stack up against the “regular” competition?

Such is the question that always gets asked when it comes to women’s tournaments. Many people have the incorrect belief that triumphing in the women’s circuit is the end goal for women’s teams, and that they expect winning a championship there to be treated with the same gravitas as winning a championship in a “normal” tournament. But the competitors themselves would be the first to tell you that that’s not true (read our previous article exploring the benefits and pitfalls of running inclusive tournaments here).

In 2024, Team Liquid Brazil became the first Game Changers team in any region to make it to the closed qualifiers for Valorant Challengers, which is the circuit one step down from the VCT. Had they succeeded in the closed qualifiers, they would have made it to the main tournament, and competed against all the best teams in Brazil. 

Unfortunately, this didn’t come to pass for them. Their run through qualifiers started out strong, but as soon as they lost a match and their momentum was killed, the team visibly lost confidence, leading to a shakiness that they never managed to recover from. It’s a tale as old as time: a young esports team finds out for the first time what it feels like to lose to themselves. It happens to every team at some point. It’s a stepping stone to becoming truly great.

That doesn’t stop losing from being a disappointment, though — especially when all eyes from around the world are on you. Once they heard the news, people who’d never watched a game of Game Changers Brazil were tuning in to see if Team Liquid Brazil could make history. Or, more accurately, if they could make even more history, after having already made history.

The pressure that comes with being the first to do something is something that every marginalized team and player has to carry with them constantly. For a moment there, it seemed like Team Liquid Brazil might actually become the first Game Changers team to make it to Challengers. But it wasn’t to be — for them, anyway. In 2025, a different team in a different region managed to take the next step that had eluded Team Liquid Brazil.

Shopify Rebellion Gold are widely regarded as the best Game Changers team in the world. They’re nigh untouchable domestically. They’ve won two consecutive Game Changers Championships. And now, they’re the first Game Changers team to ever qualify to Challengers, a feat they achieved in January 2025.

That’s not all they’ve done to break boundaries, though. Their powerhouse performance in 2024 was largely thanks to undisputed star player florescent, a young Duelist who dominated every single server she was in. Her performance didn’t go unnoticed, and soon after winning that championship, she became the first Game Changers player to be signed to a VCT team.

Team Liquid Brazil’s own history with Shopify Rebellion runs deep. They were, after all, the team to knock Team Liquid out of Game Changers Championship both in 2022 and 2023, with the latter being a 2-3 Grand Finals loss. It’s a strange position to be in, to know that whenever your rivals triumph, it’s good for everyone — and yet, it could have, and maybe should have, been you. Game Changers teams aren’t just competing to be the best in Game Changers. They’re also competing to be the best outside of Game Changers. They’re competing to show that the system works, that it produces teams that are capable of thriving outside the ecosystem that they were developed in. And, just like any esports team, they’re competing to win.

Observed in a vacuum, it can all seem very futile at times. Esports has been around for decades, and still, we seem so far away from an industry where the upper echelons are equally populated by people of all genders. But if you look at where we’re coming from, the progress in the Valorant Game Changers scene is occurring at a rate that would’ve been unthinkable just a few years ago. Team Liquid Brazil narrowly missed Challengers qualification in January 2024; it only took one year for another team to manage it. 

How many more years will it take for a Game Changers team to become a top 10 team in their region? To have a shot at qualifying for VCT? How long will it take for a former Game Changers player to win a VCT title? Hopefully, we won’t need to wait much longer to find out.