ALEX officially leaves Vitality

Vitality confirmed today that its CS:GO captain ALEX has left the team.

The announcement confirms yesterday’s report from 1pv.fr, which claimed that ALEX was leaving due to the constant travel. That reason was confirmed by Vitality and ALEX today.

“Last year we traveled 36 weeks of the year and by July I was struggling to keep up with the intense traveling schedule,” ALEX said in a TwitLonger. The former in-game leader said that the team wanted to cut the traveling down to 22 weeks, but that wasn’t possible due to CS:GO‘s current ecosystem.

“The accelerated professionalization of the CS:GO scene, through ESL Pro Tour and BLAST Premier arrivals, changed the ecosystem and we could no longer get down to anywhere near the amount of weeks discussed earlier,” ALEX said. “That being said, the only logical course of action for me after the year that had just passed was to withdraw myself from the team before becoming too tired to put the necessary work in.”

ALEX said he offered to stay until Vitality found a replacement, but the team decided to move forward and look for someone right now. Ali “hAdji” Haïnouss from LDLC is Vitality’s main target, according to 1pv.fr’s report. But it’s unknown at this time who will be the team’s captain since hAdji isn’t an in-game leader.

ALEX had been playing for Vitality since he was brought in to replace Happy in December 2018. With the help of his tactics, Vitality became one of the best CS:GO teams in the world. They had several deep runs at events and won two big tournaments last year, the ECS season seven finals in June and EPICENTER in December.

It’s unknown if ALEX is just taking a break from competitive CS:GO or if he’ll retire.