Ricardo “dead” Sinigaglia, MIBR’s manager, said the team tried to sign some superstar players while the team was still a part of SK Gaming in 2018.
Nikola “NiKo” Kovač and Richard “shox” Papillon were considered the first options.
The Brazilians were unsatisfied with their lackluster performance at WESG World Finals in March 2018 and wanted to replace Epitácio “TACO” de Melo and Ricardo “boltz” Prass.
In an interview with Roque Marques at Mais Esports, dead revealed all the players SK tried to sign. “We had not thought about s1mple at first,” Dead said. “We had thought about NiKo and shox, but shox could not come because of his wife.”
After shox said no, SK moved on to Håvard “rain” Nygaard, NiKo’s teammate on FaZe Clan. But rain didn’t want to leave FaZe and NiKo canceled the negotiations after that.
SK reached out to s1mple and Freddy “KRIMZ” Johansson then, but the negotiation didn’t move through with the Sweedish star, even though his contract with fnatic was expiring at the time.
“That was when s1mple said: ‘What about Egor “flamie” Vasilyev?’ We had some talks, we met with everyone. s1mple said: ‘I’ll go’. Flamie was at the airport when s1mple said that he was no longer coming.”
The Brazilians tried to recruit all these six players, before reaching out to Jake “Stewie2K” Yip and Timothy “autimatic” Ta, the star duo of Cloud9. Only Stewie2K accepted the transfer and TACO left for Team Liquid right after.
SK let boltz in the lineup for a while, until they bring Tarik Celic in July 2018, when they were already representing MIBR.
“The situation was so bad, even for boltz, that bringing in tarik was better than what we had,” Dead said. “We were so traumatized by what had happened with s1mple and by all the negative responses that we had got that we thought: ‘This guy wants to come, and his buyout is okay’.”
MIBR’s international roster didn’t pan out through the second half of 2018. They only won Zotac Cup Masters, a tier-two tournament in August 2018 and placed second a couple of times at BLAST Pro Series Istambul in September 2018 and the finals of ECS season six in November 2018.
The team went back to its Brazilian roots last December when they benched the two North-Americans to play again with TACO and João “felps” Vasconcelos. MIBR hast yet to win a big tournament. The last time this core of players won a big tournament was under SK’s banner at ESL Pro League season six finals in December 2017.
Update May 23 9:30am CT: Flamie said to HLTV.org that he was not at the airport when the deal fell through. According to the Russian player, he only had a plane ticket to join SK Gaming.
