Founding by Jan 'Eugene' Winter in 2013

Lore & Background

In the early 2010s, European competitive gaming was a patchwork of small teams, community tournaments, and a handful of well-funded Scandinavian and French outfits. Jan Winter saw a gap: a German-based organisation with the discipline of a traditional sports club but the agility of a gaming-native brand. In 2013 he registered G2 Esports and began assembling rosters, securing sponsorships, and building the operational backbone that would let a mid-sized European team compete on the same stage as the continent's giants.

The name 'G2' was chosen to be short, punchy, and screen-friendly — a two-letter mark that would read clearly on a broadcast overlay, a jersey, or a loading screen. Winter's own involvement as a player under the tag 'Eugene' gave the organisation a founder's authenticity that resonated with the community; fans could see the person behind the logo was still inside the game.

The founding era's lasting legacy is structural as much as competitive. G2 set a template for how a European esports club could run multiple divisions under one roof, share analysts and support staff, and present a unified brand at international events. Every subsequent roster, every major appearance, every rivalry with Fnatic, Team Vitality, or the Scandinavian CS teams flows from the decisions made in that first year in Berlin.

In Their Own Story

The office was small — a converted room above a Berlin café, the kind of space that smelled of cold coffee and overheating graphics cards. Eugene sat at the back, headset on, watching his newly signed League of Legends mid laner run through a practice queue for the fourth time that evening. The whiteboard on the wall read 'G2 – Season 1' in his handwriting, the letters slightly crooked. Outside, the November rain tapped against the glass. He pulled off his headset, rubbed his eyes, and said to the room: 'Right. Tomorrow we start like we mean it.' Nobody in that room knew yet that the crooked letters on the whiteboard would, in a few years, be stitched onto jerseys in arenas of twenty thousand. But the rain kept falling, the PCs kept humming, and the first season was, at last, about to begin.

Reader's Guide

The Founding Era (2013)

The period is defined by a single question: can a brand-new German organisation survive in Europe's crowded esports market? Jan 'Eugene' Winter's answer was to build broadly — fielding teams in League of Legends and Counter-Strike almost simultaneously, hiring analysts and coaches who had previously worked only for single-game squads, and insisting on a shared identity across every division.

What made this distinct from the era before it was the sheer ambition of the structure. Most European teams in 2012–2013 were single-title outfits, often run by a group of friends who happened to be good at one game. G2, by contrast, operated like a sports club: one management, one brand, multiple rosters. The League of Legends squad entered the EU LCS circuit, while the Counter-Strike team began grinding through the European qualifier ladder. Neither division was immediately dominant, but both were present, both wore the same crest, and both reported to the same Berlin office.

The turning point that ended the pure 'founding' phase was the organisation's first sustained competitive success in a major title — the moment G2 stopped being a startup and started being a name opponents had to prepare for. From that point forward, the narrative shifted from survival to expectation, and the founding era closed its chapter.

Did You Know?

• Jan Winter is still publicly associated with the organisation under his original gamertag 'Eugene,' a nod to the player-first culture that defined the founding years.
• G2 was one of the first European organisations to run a League of Legends and a Counter-Strike roster under a single management structure, a model that later became standard across the EU.
• The 'G2' name was deliberately chosen for its brevity on broadcast overlays and jersey prints, a design decision that has made it one of the most instantly recognisable marks in European esports.
• The founding team operated out of Berlin, placing G2 in the heart of Germany's gaming community and giving the organisation a strong domestic fan base from day one.