One year, zero wins: Only two franchised VALORANT teams are still winless this year

Masters Tokyo, the mid-season international LAN for the VALORANT Champions Tour 2023 season, is just over a month away, and the best teams across the world are starting to separate from the pack. At the same time, the teams at the bottom are finding out why they’re not up there with the best, and one of them is the winless DetonatioN FocusMe from VCT Pacific.

Six games in, DFM has yet to win a game in their region. With their loss to T1 on April 29, they remain the only team across all franchised organizations to still remain winless. Even if you go back to the LOCK//IN tournament that started off the franchised league, you’ll find that DFM lost to Giants in the opening round, immediately eliminating them from that tournament. The other team who has yet to win a series are the VCT Americas team KRÜ Esports, but they’ve made games consistently competitive, especially in their recent 2-1 loss to LOUD.

Back to DFM, the team itself, a mix of the former Northeption and REJECT rosters, joined franchising as some of the best players from the Japanese region in 2021 and 2022. The Japanese trio of Shogo “takej” Takemori, Yoshitaka “Anthem” Enomoto, and Ryumon “Reita” Oshiro all had success regionally, albeit at different times with different teams. 

Adding the Northeption players of Park “Seoldam” Sang-min, Tomoki “xnfri” Moriya, and the veteran Seo “Suggest” Jae-young to the mix, they looked to at least compete around the middle of the pack with other teams in the Pacific region. Instead, they started slow and never got into second gear, failing to find that coveted first win despite close games against Gen.G on April 2, and T1 on April 29.

After that loss to T1, they still have three more games to try and finish this regular season with one win. Yet, their opponents don’t look promising for that goal, especially their next opponent. DFM face regional giants DRX on May 8, their toughest opponent so far in 2023. Then, they face Global Esports on May 13, and Talon Esports on May 16 to end off the regular season.

Out of those three matches, the series against Talon seems to be the most winnable, but even that is harder than it seems. Talon, despite starting strong in LOCK//IN and falling off heavily to start regional play, are starting to climb back up after their win against Gen.G.

Related: Talon shut down Gen.G on Fracture, scoring a major upset in VCT Pacific

Needless to say, the path to getting a win is there, but it isn’t easy for the Japanese-Korean mix. All that is certain right now is that they are the only winless team left across the franchised leagues in 2023, and whenever they get that first win, it’ll be a weight off of their collective backs.