Fnatic League of Legends head coach Fabian ‘GrabbZ’ Lohmann has pulled back the curtain on the LEC team’s internal issues.
Fnatic’s LoL team has struggled in recent years and were eliminated from the LEC Spring Playoffs just last weekend after a brutal 3-0 loss to Karmine Corp.
The defeat caused GrabbZ to take to social media to leave a scathing review of his team:
“Not surprised by the result, surprised by how little of a fight we have shown today.
“It’s also getting tiring to pretend the efforts day to day are enough. Everything will stay internal but the tone will change for summer.”
This was followed up by assistant coach Christopher ‘Duffman’ Duff who added:
“You earn confidence and trust through meaningful practice but if you don’t do that then you earn the opposite and it showed today.”
Grabbz hosts Fnatic fan conference on Twitch
After these public allegations of poor attitude in training, GrabbZ then hosted a live stream on Twitch where he took questions from Fnatic fans and answered what he could.
During this, he made the surprising revelation that Fnatic tried to fix some problems by scrimming while muted:
“A tool you can always use is just no-comm scrims, which we did. I think we should have done it more, to just not talk to each other in scrims and just play the game.
“Because at times we did that it was actually pretty good, which means players see the correct play but I guess they convince each other in a way when they talk that they can do something else.”
He later clarified that this was not done for the playoffs and was just something the team tried during the season.
GrabbZ then finished his stream by insisting that Fnatic were exploring possible roster changes for the LEC Summer Split:
“We’re heavily examining right now who actually wants to be in this team and wants to put in the effort to actually make us [a winning team].
“We are more than willing to make changes if we think someone doesn’t want to pull his weight… We deserved to lose, because we didn’t put in the work.”
Fnatic will still be dreaming of qualifying for this year’s LoL World Championships, but there’s stiff competition for EMEA’s three seeds.
Fnatic have found themselves in a top four that has emerged in the LEC with G2 Esports, KCorp, and Movistar KOI all impressing.
And the competition might get even tougher with reports that Natus Vincere will replace Rogue in the LEC for the Summer Split.
In my seven years of esports writing, I’ve introuduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I’m most proud of the latter.
