Delving Deeper: Why creating Europe’s infrastructure in League of Legends isn’t simply just a matter of recruiting talen

Half the organizations in Europe are either shady or incompetent.

Most new teams in Europe have zero idea what they are doing and as a result they come in unprepared, underfunded and overwhelmed by the responsibilities of owning and managing a team. Since most tournament organizers require teams to be proper organizations, for many managers this is their first instance of seeing a significant contract that deals in real money, and sometimes they just decided to quit the scene altogether, along with all their earnings they received.

Often-times it is indeed malice, greed and a sense of entitlement are the true contributors that drive people into theft. Brokenshard stated that the Dragonborns CEO stole over thousands of euros from them and we've seen many other organizations such as Absolute Legends repeatedly lie to their players and staff about their affairs. Ex-Complexity Black’s manager allegedly stole most of the team’s prize money.

Brokenshard also added:

Dragonborns were an extremely shady and incompetent organisation. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one still unpaid from the time on there. Besides being shady, it took 6 weeks to get a gaming house set up, and the living conditions in that house were awful (since they were in LCS.)

It’s clear that a significant proportion of European eSports is littered with incompetence. Recruitment processes are often terrible, and newer organizations often have zero understanding of what it takes to manage a proper team.

Linas Markulevičius, the former recruitment manager of Absolute Legends had this to say:

Smaller organizations jump on the opportunity to sign a "decent" team without doing any research or even having a conversation with every player in the team. This reflects the general mentality of failed CEOs in eSports: "Find a quick fix for something now, don't think about what happens next year." I have a lot of personal experience of this issue from my time at Absolute Legends. A few great examples of the ingenious choices by the former CEO include signing League of Legends teams that would disband less than a month later even though he'd been advised by the entire management not to do it, appointing a new general manager after having a three hour conversation with him or signing console team without telling anyone in the management or even contacting his social media team to prepare an announcement.

It becomes an even bigger issue when CEOs promise large wages to players and then realize they've made a bad investment so they either delay the wages for months or refuse to pay them completely. Since the team's "manager" is usually a random staff member who has zero managing experience or some friend of one of the players, they have absolutely > no idea how to respond to something like that without legal action (which is way too expensive to justify a few thousand euros of wages). In Absolute Legends' case, former Australian Dota 2 roster which was managed by David "GoDz" Parker got their money back as soon as GoDz threatened to reveal delayed wages issue to the public however, many other players were left high and dry because they simply didn't know what to do.

Some like Copenhagen Wolves, preserve and learn, but stuff like that is rare in Europe. Copenhagen Wolves experienced the same as what a new team does: incompetence. But because of experience and good management and a good understanding of the LCS rules, they have re-emerged as a competent organization for the time being.

All is not lost for small European teams, Brokenshard has stated that TCM Gaming, has been quite excellent in his ventures:

However, one of the organisations I was in while on EU that really stood out to me was TCM. I don't think I've ever worked for a more honest and straightforward group of people than in TCM. Everything that was promised was recieved, anything that I requested, if within reason, was looked over thoroughly and considered to the best of their ability. Unfortunately TCM are a bit of a diamond in the rough. I'm very grateful that compLexity share the same mindset and work ethic, but unfortunately organisations like these aren't very common in the EU infastructure

The ones that are competent generally have a poor understanding of League of Legends so they let teams take care of themselves.

Heaton is a brilliant owner and manager. But by even his own admission, he lets the League of Legends team take care of themselves. It clearly has not worked. Any competent analyst in Europe would have told you that Nukeduck was suboptimal on traditional AP carries and their shotcalling was not very good. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out and help change this. Nukeduck very clearly has the mechanics and drive to get better but with zero direction he keeps repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

Fnatic’s League of Legends has come under fire lately for slacking and not trying their best. Ever since the removal of Harry Wigget, the most prolific manager in the European scene, the team has been on a slippery slope and have cited motivation issues. It’s not entirely surprising that the team is once again facing attitude issues but this time the person that managed to reign them in is no longer with them. Fnatic always seems to step it up when it matters but at this point their displays have quite frankly shown how incompetent the rest of Europe is when it comes to League of Legends.

Fnatic seem to be making some steps towards resolving these issues as Yellowstar has recently admitted that Fnatic need an analyst/life coach. Patrick “cArn” Sättermon the Chief Operating Officer of Fnatic stated:

We do at this stage have a very good idea what has to change and improve to make us not only a relevant team in Western League of Legends, but also internationally. Exactly what will happen can at this point not be revealed, but we will happily announce any change when the time is right, and I'm positive these news will excite you guys.

Finally, we appreciate that our position as a world-leading gaming organisation comes with responsibility, and with that being said, I would like to clarify that we are working hard to maintain a great relationship with you, the community. Whenever/if any of our brand ambassadors steps outside of what we deem as appropriate behaviour, we do take proper actions to avoid similar things to be repeated.

Alliance is also having issues, while their manager is extremely competent at his job, he’s not a player manager and doesn't live with the team. Alliance still has major communication issues and the organizational structure still has some deficiencies that need to be rectified before the next split. Alliance has all the talent in the world but a lack of proper structure for them to bring it forward. They are looking to fix it and I hope they do.

SK have finally gotten a wake-up call by finally getting rid of an under-performing player who just killed the mood with the team. They have replaced him with Incarnation and a sports psychologist. They get it and the results they have delivered in this short span of time has been impressive. They don’t have the best mechanical players but they do have by far the best support staff for a LCS team. Put Fnatic or Alliance on together with SK’s support staff and you’d have a potentially world tier team.

Supa Hot Crew seem to be on the right track by picking up LastShadow as their head coach/analyst, whist I'm not fully convinced that remote coaching is as effective as onsite coaching, barring obvious exceptions like CLG’s MonteChristo they are at least making attempts

Markulevičius also commented on this:

The main issue in Europe is how the organizations approach team management. Smaller organizations can't justify spending money on competent personnel to manage teams. I have a very good example from my personal experience in Absolute Legends.

Most new teams that were signed under the organization would either keep the manager they had before, get a random person assigned from the current staff just because he has some scene knowledge or just be left without a manager completely. The main issue with assigning random staff members is that most of the time they have absolutely no experience managing people, even less so pro-gamers with often horrible personality issues.

Keeping old manager doesn't work because more often than not they have just as little experience as a random staff member, and they just happened to be friends with one of the players, this especially applies for teams from Eastern Europe. Having no manager at all doesn't work because lets face it, majority of pro players are still kids who have absolutely no idea what they're gonna do with their lives tomorrow, even less so next year. When players choose to manage themselves it either results in the CEO screwing them over or them doing whatever they want because there's no middle man between the upper management and the players can't really be punished in any way without making themselves look like the victims.

There are little to no homegrown organizations in European League of Legends. SK, Fnatic, Millenium, NiP and the Copenhagen Wolves owe their roots to Counter Strike and all besides CW have been entrenched in the European scene much longer than the game has been. To them, League of Legends is but another part of the organization. Had League of Legends not existed, the organizations would generally be fine. They built their fanbase on the success of their previous titles and have diversified into League of Legends. Their support structures and organizational attitudes weren't designed for what League is experiencing and whilst talented players have carried Europe for over three years, the support structure cannot seem to cope up. Simply put, European organizations need to treat League of Legends as more than just a regular team division if they want to keep Europe competing.

Take League of Legends away from SK, Fnatic, Milennium, NiP, Alliance and they will be fine. Fnatic and Alliance have solid Dota 2 teams to which they can rely on to perform, NiP has their legendary CS:GO team and Milennium is a major gaming portal in France. SK will take a major blow initially as of all the major League organizations they are the most invested in League of Legends but eventually they’ll come back and be solid as a rock. Gambit may die. Supa Hot Crew will be non-existent.

Compare that to North America: CLG, TSM and Cloud 9 all invest majorly into League of Legends as their prominent game. They live with the community. Cloud 9 and TSM have some additional teams from other games but it is nothing compared to what they invest for their flagship teams. Dignitas and Curse, whilst not home grown organizations invest the same. All of the NA LCS organizations besides Evil Geniuses have League of Legends as their flagship brand. I struggle to say the same thing about Europe.

Players are above all in the current system.

Tabbz’s post on the current situation about sums up basically the core fundamental issue with European esports: the players rule.

The problem is the way things are structured: The hierarchies go as follows

Korea: staff > coach > players. Players have to listen to and respect their higherups. Kind of like an army chain of command. This way they can play as a unit and listen to the commands of their general (coach) and war strategist (analyst). The staff / coach creates and manages the team and the roster instead of the other way around.

EU, players > all.

Put a bunch of kids in charge of their own professional careers, yeah.

EU teams lack an authorative figure and are allowed to do whatever they please. This causes chaos like partying, not preparing / practicing enough, bad schedules and little motivation. It also means team arguments are hard to solve, when there's no higher authority to step in and end it. Just creates a lot of problems when nobody can put you on your place and tell you to shut the fuck up and practice more.

NA used to be like that too, but they're starting to get their shit together. It's time for EU to do the same, or we'll keep crawling behind the other regions and never accomplish shit.

Alex Ich stated this in his departure from Gambit:

Our attempt to hire an analyst yielded minor results: everyone in our team was so used to listening to himself that it was difficult and by no means immediate to embrace his suggestions. His role was important though: he provided an outsider's opinion, paid attention to our problems and tried to solve them with picks, realizing that it's impossible to alter our characters. We had ignored a lot of his suggestions in our match against Roccat and have consequently paid for it.

The simple fact is that organizations are not willing to pay much for a person who is not a person who is a marketing machine. Analysts in Europe have no real power and no real control over roster decisions. They are basically just suggestion machines. The KT Arrows kicked Riris of the team due to attitude issues despite Riris being one of Korea’s most promising AD Carries and replaced him with a weaker yet still competent AD Carry with Arrow. Until players have more power taken away from them, the West will still have to play catch-up.

So to sum up, Europe doesn't just need analysts and coaches. It needs an infrastructure reboot. League of Legends is the first true global eSports game and the current infrastructure designed around Counter Strike in eSports is struggling to keep up with the accelerated pace that League of Legends is undertaking.