How Brazil ran a CS2 event on an Aircraft Carrier

FERJEE, an acronym for the Rio de Janeiro State Federation of Electronic Sports, has successfully organized a Counter-Strike 2 LAN inside the NAM Atlântico, the Brazilian Navy's flagship Aircraft Carrier, last week.

The event, albeit small, made headlines worldwide because of its unusual setting and left many CS2 fans wondering how the tournament organizer would pull it off.

Thankfully, our sister website Dust2 Brasil covered the event on-site and got a hold of FERJEE's president, Cadu Albuquerque, to understand how the federation pitched the project to the Brazilian Navy and prepared the NAM Atlântico to welcome fans and provide the necessary structure for the teams.

When we learned that Rio Innovation Week (RIW) was negotiating with the Navy to have the warship here, we offered to run the tournament here. The Navy was unsure whether it would actually work here. There's all the militarism, which we know is an additional issue, with rules and everything.

Based on these rules, we had a very tough negotiation with them and reached a consensus to move from outside the RIW to inside the ship, and committed that we would bring an audience here and that it would be something different. We brought a lot of people, the event is beautiful, and we managed to deliver something cool.

The Navy allowed us to start setting things up on Saturday, with the event starting on Tuesday. It took three days to set everything up, and people barely slept. It's a complex process. We had to hoist some things because we know how complex it is to get things onto a ship. We had issues with the electricity and internet, but everything worked out in the end.

My team had to work hard to make this happen. Like any event, it was a lot of stress and pressure to deliver. On the day of the installation, we found out that we needed to change some things, so we had to redesign the project, remeasure, and that added costs. It was hard work, but we knew we could deliver a beautiful event like this.

To do all that, Mr. Albuquerque revealed that FERJEE spent over R$2 million (approximately $368,000) and didn't worry much about the costs.

For him, the event ran on the same standards as a European event usually does.

Circuito FERJEE 2025 ran for three days and saw Brazilian teams Imperial, ODDIK, Sharks, and RED Canids battle through a double-elimination best-of-three bracket.

Imperial were the highest-ranked team out of all four, and they were the better team throughout the event.

The team led by Vinicius "VINI" Figueiredo narrowly beat RED Canids on the opening round and then defeated ODDIK twice to claim the title and take $28,321 home.

Circuito FERJEE 2025 wasn't the biggest CS2 event of the year, but it was undoubtely one for the esports history books. Now that FERJEE has shown that it's possible to run a tournament on an aircraft carrier, we'll see if any other organizer does something similar.