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esports
How FaZe built the ultimate CS:GO roster
FaZe Clan are on fire – but it’s been a tough road to the top. karrigan tells us how he reshaped the squad and managed to sign three of the hottest free agents in the game in the space of six months.
Go back a little over 12 months ago and it was difficult to see how the FaZe Clan CS:GO team would ever reach the highs expected of them. The organisation’s first real expansion outside of the world of Call of Duty had been a little underwhelming, considering how well the console teams had done over the years. Where FaZe were accustomed to top four finishes at a minimum, their CS:GO roster was struggling to make it out of the group stages of most events they attended. Clearly some kind of change was needed.
On October 19, 2016, FaZe Clan signed Finn ‘karrigan’ Andersen, the former in-game leader of Astralis who had been benched due to a long run of poor results. At the time, many saw this as an interesting, but solid, move as he could offer some much needed leadership to the team. What many didn’t realise was that this would be the start of a near complete rebuilding process for the team, that would take the best part of a year and millions of dollars.
“When I got the offer from FaZe it was easy for me to say yes – it was exactly what I wanted,” Andersen tells us, during the ECS Season 4 finals in Cancun, the last major event of the year. “A new way in my career, a new opportunity to take another team to the top of Counter-Strike. I think we've done that with the old line up that we had. I mean when I first joined the team, the team hadn't made a playoff for nearly a year. So once I came in, I could just immediately feel their support. We would get promoted on YouTube by all the FaZe Clan members, and had the whole FaZe Clan family behind us. I just saw more and more potential the better we became, and that's why we also could build this team.”
As soon as karrigan was brought into the team, results started to pick up and he started to turn the team around in what was the start of his rebuild. While he had strong players when he joined, it was clear to almost everyone that to become a true top four team in the world there would need to be more changes.
“There was of course Joakim ‘jkaem’ Myrbostad moving out and swapping in Fabien ‘kioShiMa’ Fiey – I saw a better player in Kio back then. Then the blow came kind of in the major with Philip ‘aizy’ Aistrup, who wanted to leave for North. I said to FaZe, ‘there's only one player that can make us even better.’ We had to go for NiKo. And I think he brought a lot more to the team and that's what we needed. We needed that one guy consistently high fragging, who can always turn the game if it looks very dire.”
With Aizy gone to North, FaZe brought in what many consider to be one of the top three players in the world in the form of Nikola ‘NiKo’ Kovač. This transfer was a clear signal of intent from FaZe: they wanted to be the best and were prepared to pay a premium to get there. This was the CS equivalent of a team going out and signing Cristiano Ronaldo after finishing mid-table the previous season – it was almost unheard of.
This new line-up really started to show their prowess in the first half of 2017. The team finally got a LAN win at StarLadder i-League StarSeries Season 3 and ended up in the final of their first four LAN events, but they just couldn't quite take that next step and win at a truly top level LAN. The PGL Major came and FaZe went home early, with many questioning what had happened to a team that looked incredibly strong.
“I felt like in the summer period with our old line up,” karrigan says, before pausing to choose his next words carefully. “We hit our peak and there were also many small issues on the team we couldn't fix.”
Following the PGL Major, FaZe made further changes to the roster. kioShiMa and long time member allu were both benched, meaning that Håvard ‘rain’ Nygaard was the only member of the active line-up to have been on the team during karrigan’s time as leader. In their place, FaZe brought in two of the hottest free agents in the world: Ladislav ‘GuardiaN’ Kovács and Olof ‘olofmeister’ Kajbjer Gustafsson.
FaZe have won three LANs with this roster
© ESL / Patrick Strack
“We're just happy that Fnatic was in a break down period and GuardiaN was on the way out of Na'Vi so there were two opportunities and at that point we couldn't say no,” karrigan says. “So if you look at the results before the change, we clearly didn't change just to change. We just had an opportunity and we saw good potential in that line up.”
‘Good potential’ is quite the understatement. At times, Olof has been considered the best player in the world, while GuardiaN was coming off the back of two of the best years ever seen by an AWPer. Combine those two with the outright skills of NiKo and rain, along with the leadership of karrigan and you have, on paper at least, one of the best teams the CS world has ever seen – and one that has cost a lot of cash.
“I think playing under other teams who wouldn't invest that much in CS:GO, it would be hard for them to build this team over that short period,” says karrigan when talking about how it was even possible to put together this roster financially. “It's like you're talking about buying three of the best players in the world in a time span of eight months, or six months. That's pretty big money. I mean, it's important when you buy players, that you don't destroy the market. Since everybody knows FaZe, they're going for the big players, Niko, Olaf, GuardiaN. So it's of course, the price to have them has been high. But I think FaZe have been very good in negotiations and updated us about how much they would pay and how the deal is going to work out, because it's not easy in a market where the players don't have buyouts.”
While official figures for the transfers and salaries for this superstar line up have not been disclosed, you can be sure that it has been more than most of us could imagine spending in 20 years. We’ve never really seen something like this happen, where a team went out and snapped up all the best players in the world to build their team, especially not in this tight time frame. But it certainly seems to have worked out.
“I told FaZe, either you can be one of the best teams, or you can be the best team,” karrigan explains. “So either you wanna strive to be the team that's always in the final, always has a chance to win, or you wanna be a team that sometimes makes top or sometimes makes the final but can't do it consistently. I think they've proven with the team that they want to be the best. If we cannot make it work with this team then I don't know what could. This is kind of a dream scenario with dream players, high peak players, consistent players, in-game leaders, and a secondary caller – even four different AWPers – so I think we have everything in this team."
Despite only playing together in this roster for a few months, FaZe already have three big LAN wins under their belt, including the ECS Season 4 finals where they took home $250,000. Moving into 2018, they’re rated as the second best team in the world, only behind CS veterans, SK Gaming, and look set to challenge the Brazilians for the number one spot. In just over a year FaZe have gone from a solid top 15 team to top two, and have managed to build what may are saying in the ultimate CS:GO roster. Watch this space.
