Rekkles somberly reflects on Fnatic’s toughest season to date

Entering this split, long-time European powers Fnatic looked in good position to compete for another EU crown. The winners of five of the first six EU LCS splits, Fnatic finished a disappointing third last split but brought back star support Bora “YellowStar” Kim, raising expectations for the team.

That’s not how the regular season shook out -- after a relatively strong start, Fnatic collapsed down the stretch, finishing in fifth place in the regular season after losing a tiebreaker to surging H2K. Now Fnatic will have to face H2K in the quarterfinals, with a spot in Worlds likely on the line.

Fnatic AD Carry Martin “Rekkles” Larsson posted a long message on Facebook about the team’s disappointing performance and what’s to come.

Here’s the full text:

It's no secret by now that it's been a tough year. Even though we managed to grab third in the end of Spring Split, all in all it wasn't one of our better performances. Going into the Summer Split & with Bora coming back, I think everyone expected things to change for the better. Which it also did, at least to begin with. As weeks went by things started getting worse & worse, to the point where we ended up replacing our seemingly weakest link at the time. However it had little to no effect towards our actual issues - the team & how we play with eachother. I personally believe, regardless of who's playing & who's not playing, we have a roster stacked with individual strength (for the majority). Unfortunately that pretty much sums the team up though, as whenever we're playing together it feels like it's "every man for himself".

The result?

When we face worse players than ourselves, we can win games strictly of that. However, when we face teams who're able to match us individually, which goes for the most part of the teams in the LCS, we stand little to no chance. With every team improving as such a great pace over the Split, it's quite logical that we've had a worse second half & ended up where we did.

I know this might come off as if I'm being to harsh on myself/us, but I really believe that if we don't get our shit together, the series against H2K will not be one to remember & with the importance of it (with G2 likely to win the Split, the winner of our Quarterfinal is almost certainly going by points), it's the last thing I want to happen.

We'll have to figure it out, together.