I was watching some of the articles for 2025's HLTV top 20 so far, and this got me thinking; does any other esports have a third party organization be so fundamental to their game?
Sometimes I completely forget that this is a third party site that has absolutely no direct affiliations with Valve, tournament organizers or even the teams (ik recently they do but that's from the pedigree they've built up over the years). Whenever we talk about ratings, player rankings, MVPs, or even team rankings, we're usually referring to the arbitrary opinions of a random website. Yet we hold their opinions to extremely high regards because of how consistent they've been for over 2 decades now. It's even hard to think where CS would be without them. The amount of raw stats that they've kept across multiple decades and game versions is the main reason why the history of CS is so well preserved, and also why old players that most of us haven't even seen play are still held to such high regards.
I know Liquipedia is a thing, but that site is a little more broad with their game selection. I also understand that these kinds of sites aren't as influential as they once were, since esports has grown to such proportions where TOs and Developers usually handle these stats, news, and rankings by themselves without the need of a middle man.