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Rebuilding Fnatic, Part 1: The Offseason Breakup
How Fnatic nearly lost its entire LoL roster and rallied to get back to the top of EU LCS.
Fnatic has a team meeting at Gamescom.
© Riot Esports
"Next year" was the annual rallying cry for Fnatic's League of Legends team. With one of the most stable and accomplished lineups in League of Legends and a string of European titles to their credit, Fnatic always gave fans hope for the future.
That all changed at the end of 2014, as Fnatic completely imploded in the wake of a lackluster showing at Worlds. With less than two months until the 2015 LCS season began, Fnatic was down to a single player from their starting lineup and no clear prospects for rebuilding.
Disaster loomed for Fnatic. The conventional wisdom is that LCS teams need lots of time and training to compete and perform at a high level. Fnatic had none of the key ingredients for success in 2015. Yet, four weeks into the season, they enjoy a 6-2 record and are near the front of the European pack.
The story of how Fnatic went from disaster and back to frontrunner status is something Red Bull eSports will explore for the next few weeks. It involves everything from talent scouting to Byzantine immigration laws to mysterious, team-saving benefactors in the heart of Seoul. Through a mix of skill and good fortune, Fnatic forged a winning team out of a disparate group of players from around the world.
Lauri "Cyanide" Happonen stressed at Worlds.
© Riot Esports
We gotta get out of this place
Fnatic's 2014 season ended in disappointment, especially when compared to 2013, where they'd come within a few good plays of making it to the global final. The Fnatic of 2014 was supposed to be even better thanks to their super-weapon: AD Carry Martin "Rekkles" Larsson. Yet the team fizzled-out in the group stage in Singapore, finishing 2-4 for a swift elimination.
Even so, Fnatic League of Legends manager Oliver Steer thought they were in a good place at the end of the year. The team (minus Rekkles and support player Bora "YellOwStaR" Kim) went on holiday together after Worlds, and the future still seemed bright. People were still talking about next year, and Steer had no inkling there were problems.
But almost the moment the team's vacation ended, all hell broke loose.
"Rekkles came to me after the split, after Worlds, and said he wanted major roster chamges," Steer said. "He said if I didn't makes changes, he would quit. He would leave the team. Even though his contract still had another year remaining," Steer said.
At first, it seemed like a manageable problem. In 2013, Johannes "puszu" Uibos had basically served as a caretaker AD Carry while Fnatic waited for Rekkles to meet the LCS age requirement, and Fnatic had gotten to the semifinals at Worlds. Losing Rekkles was a blow, given his incredible talent at the position, but Fnatic were a great team, not a one-man show.
But Larsson had sent the snowball rolling down the mountain. Even as Steer and Fnatic were preparing to replace Rekkles, longtime team captain Enrique "xPeke" Cedeño Martínez announced that he, too, wanted to leave and start over with a team of his own.
"Then I was in shock. Like, 'What are you doing? Why would you leave us?' Et cetera," said Steer.
Fnatic tried to negotiate with xPeke, but he was adamant that he wanted to strike out on his own. Now the writing was on the wall: an era was ending. Jungler Lauri "Cyanide" Happonen announced that he wanted to retire, and that he was through with LoL for the time being.
A disenchanted Martin "Rekkles" Larsson at EU LCS
© Riot Esports
Collapse
What Rekkles — and the Fnatic organization, to a lesser extent — had originally wanted was a star lineup. People who would clearly augment Rekkles and YellOwStaR by playing at or above their level, and who could give Fnatic a leg-up going into the 2015 season.
With Rekkles gone, and xPeke and Cyanide exiting soon after, Steer not only needed to replace one of the best carries in League, but also the rest of the lineup. Steer felt like the smart move was to go for younger, up-and-coming players and recruit for the future. But throughout much of the autumn, he tried to deliver what his Fnatic bosses wanted: big, established names to replace the big names who had just left.
But the problem, Steer quickly discovered, is that the circumstances were all wrong for Fnatic to try and get those players. There were elite Korean players, who were being offered ridiculous sums to play in the Chinese League of Legends scene, offers that Fnatic couldn't really compete with. Or there were Korean players who just weren't feasible, either because they were already under contract or the language barrier was too severe.
Then there were players who were in the same boat as Rekkles: top talents (amateur and professional) who had their pick of good contracts, who had already made a lot of money playing League, and now wanted to play for a championship contender. With Fnatic hemorrhaging players and word of their troubles reaching the media, they did not seem like a good bet for anyone looking for a major title. Even when Fnatic was willing to pay slightly more than market rate, the turmoil in the team scared people off, according to Steer.
Bora "YellOwStaR" Kim alone at Worlds.
© Riot Esports
Among the ruins
Strictly speaking, Fnatic could have fought harder to prevent this. All four players involved, xPeke, Rekkles, sOAZ and Cyanide, were under contract with Fnatic for the 2015 season. While they had options to get out of their contracts, those options had to be exercised one month before Worlds. None of them stated their intention to leave, so they were committed to Fnatic for 2015.
But in this case, Steer and Fnatic didn't see an upshot to fighting it.
"We could have forced Peke [to stay] and Cyanide not to retire, you know? But what's the point?" he asked. "If there's a player who doesn't want to play, and you force him to play, will he be any good? That's just stupid. You're killing yourself if you do that. We could have kept Rekkles, we could have kept all these players, But if you really, really want to go, why would I chain you to a chair and force you to play with us? That'd be stupid. We had to let these players leave."
It was a pragmatic decision and likely a smart one. The atmosphere was already tense, and trying to force nearly the entire Fnatic roster to keep to their original contracts would have made for a poisonous 2015. But it left Fnatic facing disaster.
With only 48 days until the start of 2015 season, Steer said, "I was like, alone with YellOwStaR. YellOwStaR and me. That was the team."
From the outside, it looked like a disaster. But for Steer, it started to look like an opportunity to build the team he'd wanted since the start of Fnatic's problems. He'd laid the groundwork almost by accident, during a near-disastrous early visit to Korea before Worlds.
Check back next Thursday for part 2 of Rebuilding Fnatic on Red Bull eSports.
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