After months of speculation, the hammer has finally dropped on one of the premier names in Counter-Strike.
Swedish Counter-Strike: Global Offensive side Fnatic announced today that they would be significantly overhauling their roster.
The team’s results had been in steady decline since their championship victory at Dreamhack Winter. After barely making the top eight at EMS One in Katowice and at Copenhagen Games, Fnatic dramatically crashed out of the group stage at Dreamhack Summer, dashing any hopes they may have held of defending their title.
That stinging result only strengthened calls from fans for the Fnatic to make changes that had been rumored since the team began to struggle in league player earlier in the year.
Manager Patrik “Carn” Sattermon had repeatedly expressed confidence in the team’s roster as it was composed, but that confidence wasn’t enough to carry the group through their disappointing summer.
Fnatic announced today that Jonatan “Devilwalk” Lundberg and Andreas “Schneider” Lindberg will no longer be playing for the team, though Lundberg will stay on with Fnatic as coach.
“I never had the goal of me being the best player in the world, my goal was always to make this team the best in the world, and if I can help out with that in any way to reach that goal I will gladly do so,” Lundberg said in a statement.
Replacing the two will be a pair of Swedish players from recently closed Swedish side Team Global: Olof Kajbjer and Freddy “Krimz” Johansson.
“We all know each other from before so it was a really easy decision to team up,” Kajbjer said.
The move gives Kajbjer and Johansson an opportunity to play with one of the more stable organizations in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, something that should come as a welcome change after the peaks and valleys they experienced as part of Team Global’s various iterations.
Whether that newfound stability will help the pair bring Fnatic back to prominence remains to be seen.
Fnatic has already been invited to take part in the $250,000 ESL One tournament in Cologne, Germany later this year.
Screengrab via Youtube
