Mitch_I have been informed that the Monthly Final this weekend will likely be the last as there hasn't been enough interest within the community.
Teams who have played in the Monthly Challenge have been invited, please check your emails to find details regarding it.
Unfortunately, due to the lack of support/space for another league in the EU community, ESL will likely be forced to close off the game.
I wouldn't say lack of support, there was almost no point to play these cups. If these cups were in evening (and maybe different days), more teams/mixes would probably join because they were going to play anyway around that time.
My only experience is that for one cup, we only played 4 games from 4pm until 8.30pm. So waiting time was around 2 hours, and in the end the best thing you could get is ESL premium. Pretty sure that almost nobody is playing to get esl premium.
Several people helped (in ESL discord) to come up with other ideas to get more teams involved. One of the ideas was to give out medals to all the participants. This is probably one of the easiest ideas to implement, and it will give players a reason to play at 4pm on a Sunday and potentially wait a long time between games. However, you/ESL said: "We didn't want to just give medals out like crazy, we wanted to make sure that the medal was kept moderately rare and had to be challenging to get it, hence why it's the monthly challenge!"
So ESL made the decision to keep the medal rare over keeping the cups alive. Imo that's just ESL not willing to invest in TF2, not a lack of support in the EU community.