Arsenal and Ukraine national team footballer, Oleksandr Zinchenko, subbed himself into his Counter-Strike esports team.
PassionUA.gg, his own esports team that competes in CS2, were playing against Illyrians in the United TwentyOne tournament.
Their player zeRRoFIX was apparently unable to play in the match ‘due to internet problems’, so Zinchenko subbed in.
Considering Zinchenko’s esports team aren’t particularly prominent compared to other orgs, with some 281 followers on X (aka Twitter), this looks like a bit of a publicity stunt.
Regardless, it worked. The tweet above racked up almost a million views, with over 1,000 likes and 300 retweets.
The account also tweeted out Zinchenko’s first kill in an esports match above.
They ended up winning the first map, losing the second, and winning the third, to take the match.
Zinchenko’s usual PassionUA.gg roster consists of Ukrainian players marat2k, jambo (no, not the UK League player), jackasmo, zeRRoFIX and s-chilla, plus coach kane.
The CS community reacted with surprise and delight to the situation.
Zinchenko has been doing pretty well with Arsenal this season, with the side currently second in the Premier League, behind Liverpool.
It’s of course not the first time footballers have got involved in esports. David Beckham has a stake in the UK’s Guild Esports, Sergio Agüero and Mesut Ozil and others have their own orgs, and Neymar and others have also played the likes of Counter-Strike on stream.
Last year, Tundra Esports announced Virgil van Dijk as an ambassador and shareholder in music video to gaming grime song ‘Outplayed’ by P Money.
Related article: Spurs footballer Son Heung-min named ambassador in Pepsi’s EA Sports FC partnership
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Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
