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Over the next few days will we be releasing part of our interview with Fantic’s Chief Gaming Officer and Counter-Strike legend Patrik “cArn” Sättermon. Last time he spoke about Fnatic’s current Dota 2 team while today he jumps into the complex world of League of Legends.
League of Legends has been one of the most consistent games for Fnatic over the last five or so years. They have always been at the top of the European scene, they are former world champions and arguably have the biggest fanbase in the EU LCS.
One of the main reasons for Fnatic’s success has been their ability to build big names, who become superstars in their own right. A few have left over recent years but this past offseason saw Bora "YellOwStaR" Kim leave the organisation to become a manager at PSG.
To find out how this impacted Fnatic and what goals they have for the new team we spoke to Fantic’s Chief Gaming Officer Patrik “cArn” Sättermon.
eSports Pro: Finally let’s talk League of Legends. Obviously you’ve lost YellOwStaR again. How big of a blow is that for you? Because despite leaving earlier, like the Spring, he’s known to be a Fnatic player.
Patrik “cArn” Sättermon: “He, together with Rekkles, surely are our League of Legends identity if you look at the past two or three years and before that, you obviously had great names like xPeke, Cyanide, sOAZ and names like that. Yeah, it’s a big blow identity wise, but then we’re talking about a player that told us quite early on that he may have one year left or a few months left.”
“We saw it coming, but exactly what the plans would have been for him post his retirement was unclear. But yeah, he expressed his desire to retire, we 100% respect that. We had him contracted to end of 2017 and we most definitely would have offered him a spot in our team, but yeah, similar to other things, we just had to adapt. We need to be flexible and make the right choices and the right choice is not to force someone that wants to retire to stay as a player. It doesn’t make sense.”
“He definitely goes down literally in our Hall of Fame. We owe him so much in terms of our gratitude and everything like Fnatic has established in League of Legends. Our massive fan base. Multiple top four placements in the world. All in all, if he happens to read this or see this or whatever, a big thanks to YellOwStaR. We fully support him in his future with PSG. The game is on. Let’s hope they qualify from Challenger and maybe we can meet and face them in LCS.”
eSports Pro: Let’s talk about your new roster, what are you hoping to achieve with them? (Note this interview was conducted hours before the 2017 Fnatic roster was unveiled.)
cArn: “We are very excited. We have really assessed the market with a small caveat that we wanted to close this quite early on, meaning we don’t want to leave to the end of December. We went back to basics. We relied a lot on our current player or players for that sake. Team management had a lot of good conversation with players and did a lot of trials and this is going to be the result of this.”
“Does this mean this is going to be the lineup forever and ever? We don’t know, right? According to today’s health and technology, people will die one day and stop playing one day. Point being, the ambition with these guys is to work long term. We have contracted the new players for multi-year contracts. Yeah, we’re just going to work as hard as we possibly can and make the right decisions going into LCS Spring Split. Do our very best there. Just week by week assess how things are going. Our goal is to win Split, the Spring Split, and then move forward from there. Simply put.”
In the final part of our interview with cArn he tackles the touchy subject of LCS relegation.
