Toast’s VALORANT team costs more than winners of VCT Champions 2022 earned

OfflineTV’s content creator Disguised Toast is paying over $5,000 a month to his VALORANT players, who recently qualified to VALORANT Challengers North America via the open qualifier.

Toast didn’t provide the exact salary of the players when pro player Yassine “Subroza” Taoufik asked him, and instead told him to guess the salary and he’d say if it’s higher or lower. Subroza asked if Toast was paying his players $5,000 a month and the OfflineTV star said it was “higher than that.”

Toast revealed in a subsequent live stream yesterday that the project costs $500,000 per year for now, which is considerably more than what he had planned when he thought about creating a team. The budget Toast had in mind was between $250,000 and $300,000. For reference, LOUD won $300,000 in prize pool for winning 2022 VALORANT Champions.

Disguised features the veteran in-game leader Josh “steel” Nissan and four lesser-known players in Damion “XXiF” Cook, Drake “Exalt” Branly, Joseph “clear” Allen, and Amgalan “Genghsta” Nemekhbayar. The team is being coached by former CS:GO pro Kyle “OCEAN” O’Brien, who scouted and gave opportunities to players like Stewie2K and Twistzz in the early days of their careers. It’s unclear if everyone is earning the same salary given that steel is vastly more experienced than the other four players.

Disguised had an undefeated run at the VALORANT Challengers North America open qualifier, having defeated Drift, Coconut Munchers, Entertainment District, Team Fish Taco, Where is Fullerton, NSIC, and Oxygen Esports to qualify for the main event. They only lost maps to Where is Fullerton and Team Fish Taco.

Even though Toast is seemingly spending a lot of money to fund his VALORANT project, the team is far from making any money to relieve some of the financial costs. Disguised didn’t win anything for qualifying for Challengers and doesn’t have any sponsors yet. Toast thinks it’ll take some time before he can land some sponsorship agreements because the project is still in its early days.

For now, all the money to pay the players in Disguised is coming from Toast’s own pocket. His latest stream on Twitch said in the title that he needed to stream TFT to fund the VALORANT team.