A Year of Lessons: by Steve Arhancet

[Editor's Note: The contents of this article were created using a transcript of a TLPro interview with Steve Arhancet and then written out by Ken Serra. Subtle adjustments were made for clarification, but not to disrupt meaning and points.]

The 2016 season for our League of Legends team was probably the worst since the inception of the brand as Curse and now Liquid. And it's not so much the end results themselves, but also the little events and decisions that lead to this point. It's understandable that not every team can make Worlds, but it was clear from the state of Team Liquid by the Summer Split play-offs: we definitely didn't deserve nor had a chance to go at all. If the frustration from myself and the organization isn't enough, I can't imagine how our fans must feel.

Since my time as an owner and the merger with Team Liquid, this past season was the most hands-off I've ever played in regards to the League of Legends team. With a bigger organization and the experience I bring, it was better for me to play a larger role in the grander scheme of building TL as a whole. With that, I entrusted a majority of the roster's micromanagement to the coaching staff.

So, how this all came together... In the beginning of 2016, there was a lot of outside money coming into esports and the LCS. The whole Ember thing and the addition of new owners and investors; it was money that had never been seen before and there was a lot of it. It started to become difficult to compete with what other teams were willing to pay for star talent especially since we were relying purely on cash flow. So then, me and Victor (The other co-owner of Team Liquid), we bootstrapped everything together using nothing but our cash flow and built what would be our LCS team and structure out of limited funding. We spent carefully because we just had to.

With that change, the mindset was to take amateurs and just build them into great players. We invested in the structure and the staff, we contracted a sports psychologist, and then I put my trust in what we had built. The ultimate hope was that I could fully entrust the LCS team to this staff I built, and then take a back seat to do a lot more with the Liquid brand. For the most part, we did great.

Initially, for the beginning of Spring, we projected an 8th, 9th, 10th place finish—we weren't inclined to expect much. But somehow, perhaps through sheer will from our players, proper structure, scouting, and training, we exceeded expectations. We might've spent 1/5th what other teams had, yet we garnered much better results. 4th place and a trip to Vegas for the NA finals, that was unexpected. The team performed and I was proud.

Sadly, what lead to our downfall was the Korean bootcamp. It was the worst thing that could have happened to the team, not because of the idea, but because of what would happen and perhaps how it was managed. Since I've been around, we've just never done a bootcamp outside our own facilities. I didn't know what it took to run that sort of thing, but we thought that it would benefit the team. In the end, I did not foresee the conflicts that would arise from it. We just did not have the appropriate amount of staff to handle what took place, especially in another country where the stress levels must have been through the roof with the expectation this roster faced. It was downtown Seoul, it was congested, it was a different lifestyle.

I was also the only owner that didn't go... I know Jack from C9 went, and even Reginald from TSM. At the time, I was working on a huge partnership that would mean a great deal to the future of TL, and just could not afford to take the time. But things got so bad, I was honestly planning to clear my calendar, drop everything, and fly to Korea to help take care of the situation. It was that bad. Afterwards, the resulting conflict... It just created a team environment that—I'm not going to say was beyond repair—would make everything that would come after it much more difficult. There were just more arguments and disagreements. The rest of our season was not the best.

The next thing was our 10-man roster and fielding both an NACS team and LCS team. First of all, next year, we're not going to field a Team Liquid Academy roster. Right now, the Challenger Scene is broken and Riot needs to fix it. So during the 2016 season, the Challenger roster did not work like we intended. Instead of being a development team where you can develop talent to transition into pro leagues, it became more of a competition, and it just wasn't healthy. Rather, we were supporting TWO completely separate teams where one was already pro, and the other wanted to become pro. It definitely cost us.

Either way, our season was rough and I learned a lot about what needs to be done next year. For the 2017 season, we're going to be investing in more staff, better structure, and what will be the best roster we can possibly field with the resources we have. We have a bit more money to spend so we're not just relying on cash flow. With all that has happened, I'm even more motivated to push Liquid to new heights because this, the way we went out for the 2016 season, is just not acceptable. This is not how it ends.

So be warned: if Liquid can do great things with limited cash flow, imagine what we'll do in 2017 when we'll be able to do so much more with less limitations. We really owe it to the fans this time around.

#TLWIN


Want more information? Well you're in luck! Steve Arhancet mentioned quite a bit of awesome things planned for next season on September 22, 2016 during his 2-hour long Discord AMA. There's a lot of juicy bits you'll want to know more about! Check it out here:

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