It looks like Grubby has struck again for WC3. After weeks of doubt, speculation and rumour, the Dutchman and his posse have made one of the most unpredictable moves in the history of esports.

Joining a new team was no surprise, but joining an American one? Who honestly saw that coming? Now EG has two of Europe’s finest WC3 players under its tag, and a third who has always showed promise, if not consistency.

But the really interesting part of EG’s new squad is much broader topic than just the usual “team x picks up player y” stories. This is about bridging the transatlantic chasm that opened up in recent years. This is EG’s attempt at bringing its “brand” to an international audience – something that even the legendary fr0d has been unable to do thus far.

What Alex Garfield’s team could easily have done is picked up the likes of Axslav and Strifeco, and a few hundred Americans might have cared. A few Europeans who like to see unusual strategies might have gotten excited too, at least until the team started losing in WC3L and NGL-one. Instead they have taken onboard the biggest name in WC3 and possibly in all of esports.

Ironically, there probably still won’t be many Americans that care. But Europeans will, and perhaps more importantly, so will Asians. We’ve all seen the videos of Grubby in China. What this does is put the name of EG in the heads of anyone who cares about WC3. People who previously thought of EG as “some CS team” will now think of them as the predecessor to one of WC3’s most successful teams.

Now where this gets really intriguing is when you factor-in the possibilities of Starcraft 2. With a SC team recently taken onboard, EG seems to headed down the RTS road. Are Grubby, Happy and Ciara merely a signpost on the way to SC2 or are they a genuine point of interest in their own right? Grubby has stated in the past that he preferred Starcraft to Warcraft.

The new squad could either be WC3’s last stand or a new lease of life for a game that looked to be under threat. Team EG could be the game’s saviour or merely its final happy memory. On that, only time will tell.

But what of this re-uniting of America and Europe? If Extreme Masters is anything to go by it will certainly take something outside of CS for Europeans to start paying attention to America again. Gravitas, x3o and EG all tanked hard, winning just two games between them. In the pre-CGS days that would have been hilarious to most Europeans, but now it’s so expected that it barely warrants a raised eyelid.

I actually expected the EG announcement to be a new WoW team. There is a bit of common ground for Yanks and Euros, albeit somewhat uneven. But as I’ve said before, American players get the fame while Europeans get the prize money. Picking up another American WoW team would have made little impact on the scene, unless they stole a squad from someone like SK, perhaps. Picking up a European or Asian team might have merited a little more interest but WoW is very much a self-sufficient game. WoW fans would have cared, but nobody else would. Some people would actually like EG less for picking up another arena team.

So Warcraft III, despite being a second tier game at best in America, seems like a pretty smart decision. If you know anything about esports, you know Grubby. It’s as simple as that. To break into some disgusting marketing language for a moment, you can’t really get better brand awareness than him. Oh, and let’s not forget the distinct possibility of prize money coming in with such a talented roster.

While Europe may still be a fair distance from caring about American esports again, it will certainly care about Team EG. This could be the first and most significant step on the road to recovery for an entire continent.

The world's first weekly esports column, The Zechs Files, returns to your monitors next Tuesday.