Fnatic once again took the safer route and brought back two familiar faces to complete its CS:GO lineup when Robin “flusha” Rönnquist and Maikil “Golden” Selim rejoined the team today.
Some fans might be excited for this reunion, but history suggests that Fnatic may need to change more if the organization wants to find success again.
The Swedish powerhouse has made similar moves in the past. Fnatic sent the trio of Jesper “JW” Wecksell, Freddy “KRIMZ” Johansson, and flusha to GODSENT in August 2016 and replaced them with Jonas “Lekr0” Olofsson, Simon “twist” Eliasson, and John “wenton” Eriksson.
It only took two months for Fnatic to bring KRIMZ back, trading him with Lekr0. In February 2017, they brought back JW and flusha to replace twist and Joakim “disco doplan” Gidetun. Fnatic kept recycling players by signing Lekr0 in August 2017 and twist again in October 2018.
Now, the organization is recycling its team once more with Golden and flusha, who left in 2018. Golden led Fnatic to glory at IEM Katowice and the WESG Finals in March 2018 and was surprisingly replaced in June when he wasn’t the in-game leader anymore. Flusha, on the other hand, left in September.
This move indicates that Fnatic wants to go back to Golden’s tactical system, which helped the team win two big tournaments last year. The only difference this time is that they don’t have Lekr0, who’s now on NiP. Instead, they have Ludvig “Brollan” Brolin, the only young player on this team.
But what Fnatic really need to do is reinvent themselves. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive‘s meta shifts quickly and fans have seen many top teams fail to replicate their success from the past, like Fnatic tried in 2017 and MIBR in 2019.
If Fnatic chose to go back to Golden’s system, they’ll likely fail to catch up to the best teams in the world, like Astralis and Team Liquid. This team needs to stay together for the rest of 2019 and figure out how they want to play in 2020.
And if this reunion doesn’t succeed, the organization should stop recycling players and put some money into younger Swedish talents, like GamerLegion’s Tim “nawwk” Jonasson, to revamp the roster.
Fnatic will have a couple of weeks to prepare for their first LAN tournament with Golden and flusha at DreamHack Masters Malmö, which starts on Oct. 1.
