Cover and Thumbnail Image Courtesy: Liquipedia
With the CS:GO community showing its displeasure about Fnatic and mousesports not being invited to BLAST Premier 2020 by the organizers, Nicolas Estrup - BLAST Director of Product in an interview with HLTV explained the process of selecting a team, indirectly giving us the reason behind not inviting certain teams to BLAST Premier 2020.
“The hardest part about ultimately having to pick and choose was: which criteria do you do that based on?
Anyone who has been in Counter-Strike for more than a couple of minutes knows that we cannot solely rely on rankings to determine who participates when we're thinking long-term."
While he did not share particular details about what these criteria were, it was enough to know that ranking wasn’t the only metric that was looked upon while inviting the teams.
But this reasoning did not fair well with Sam Mathews - Founder & CEO of Fnatic, who revealed that the organization was surprised when BLAST Premier 2020 chose not to invite them. He went on to show his displeasure by Estrup’s statement saying that,
“Seeing them publicly slate our org, the most storied in esports & a legacy in CS rivalled by few, is beyond disappointing.”
Andreas Samuelsson - Head Coach for Fnatic also shared his disappointment saying that,
“We have been quiet trying to understand but nothing makes sense for us. ‘thinking long term and not only of the rankings’??? That's extremely rude to an organization with the legacy we have.......”
Fnatic has clearly taken the reasoning as a personal attack on their organization, but the points put forth by them are accurate. Fnatic most certainly has a great history associated with it, especially when it comes to counter-strike. They are one of the oldest and most celebrated organizations that are still around in the business.
And while the community was in an uproar, showing their support and questioning BLAST for excluding Fnatic, Richard Lewis took to Twitter criticising the public for their behaviour.
Not seeing eye-to-eye with the public opinion and demand, Lewis seemed to be a bit irritated by the fact that the community even after multiple explanations doesn’t understand that “Invite tournaments / partnered leagues can invite whoever the f**k they want to participate. There is no obligation beyond doing what is best for the business that hosts them.”
He continued by sharing this photo saying that “Esports fans and their priorities will never cease to blow my mind.”
Image Courtesy: Richard Lewis
In a bid to prove his point, he stated some negative facts highlighting various moments when the community took little notice of things done by BLAST.
It doesn’t seem likely that BLAST will be making any changes to the teams invited for its 2020 season, but this can be a lesson learned for the future.
