In a recent press release, Team EnVy has announced that they will be releasing head coach maLek from their team. This news follows a poor performance at ESL Pro League 7. In their last 6 matches, EnVy managed to take home only a single win. EnVy’s owner, Mike Rufail, had this to say.

maLeK joined EnVy in 2017, and while there is always an expected grace period where teams transition into new leadership or management, he still never performed up to expected standards. In 2016, before maLeK joined, EnVy finished the year at #11. In 2017, they finished at #14. Currently, they are sitting at #22.

Despit maLeK’s thirteen years of experience with Counter Strike, he has only been coaching for a year and a half. Starting at the very end of 2016, he coached Owly Six, a team which failed to even qualify for the major tournaments. After three months of coaching them, EnVy picked him up hoping for greater success. Unfortunately, his own inexperience coupled with a constantly shifting roster made for a steady decline in performance.

Constant roster shifts can make it difficult to keep team cohesion and unity, even for EnVy, a team that has taken home 10 international titles. After 2016, EnVy kept only two members of their original roster, SIXER and Happy. By 2017, EnVy was holding onto three members – RpK, ScreaM, and Happy – but it still shows the shifting ground beneath the team. While Happy has been the team leader and guiding voice of the team for years now, it can’t be easy to focus on strategy and winning when the team is constantly adjusting to new players.

One of EnVy’s recent wins was against frontrunner Astralis, a team with a much more consistent record. In three years, Astralis has kept its four main stars without any roster changes whatsoever. In that amount of time, EnVy has managed to keep only Happy. By comparison, Astralis has always been a part of the top teams, partially due to their cohesion. For even the best of coaches, coming into this environment would have been difficult, but it seems like the fault might have fallen onto management and coaching this time around.

Regardless of how it all played out, EnVy is soldiering on at ECS Season 5 without a head coach. We’ll see just how that will affect their performance in the following days.