Fnatic’s ‘League of Legends’ coach admits ‘we basically need to rebuild the team from scratch’

When Luis “Deilor” Sevilla first took over as Fnatic’s League of Legends coach in January 2015, he was inheriting one of the strongest teams in Europe. The first-ever World champions back in Season 1, Fnatic had won the EU LCS in three of four splits, finishing second the only time it didn’t win the whole thing.

With Deilor, a former First Division Spanish League coach, Fnatic didn’t miss a beat. In two seasons under his helm, the European powerhouse has won both EU LCS splits, including an 18-0 regular season during the most recent split that eventually led to an appearance in the World semifinals.

But Season 6 in Europe looks like a completely different challenge. Fnatic lost three starters from last year’s squad to North America. Out are Huni, Reignover and YellOwStaR, in are Gamsu, Spirit and Noxiak. Meanwhile, Origen and H2K, Fnatic’s main challengers last split, look even stronger than before, and newcomer Vitality has put together an All-Star roster that looks to threaten the Big Three from Summer 2015.

SB Nation had the opportunity to ask Deilor a few questions about the new-look Fnatic and the upcoming split.

Fnatic has gone through roster transitions after successful seasons before. How will the team adjust to having to replace three starting members this split?

We basically need to rebuild the team from scratch. Febiven and Rekkles are two really adaptive players that don’t demand a high amount of resources, so that means that we will be able to mold the team to maximize the strengths of the new players, while improving their weak points.

With those changes in mind, and off the backs of an 18-0 LCS run, what is the team’s goal for this split?

The goal is to create the foundation to be a world class team when the end of summer split arrives. We will need many weeks to develop our communication system and synergy. Maybe we will have a rough start but with time and hard work we will reach our goal.

Fnatic’s main competitor in the EU LCS appears to be Origen, particularly after the addition of POE. How does the roster feel it stacks up compared to Origen’s, especially considering that Origen’s roster is now the one that has been together longer?

OG is the only team in the LCS that doesn’t come from Challenger Series or have multiple roster changes, POE plays a similar style to xPeke, they won’t have language issues and they started scrimming for IEM San Jose. This means that not only the way they play will be really similar with POE, they also started playing together a month before most LCS teams. And they won’t have any communication or synergy major issues because they have no Koreans. They should have the upper hand during the beginning of Spring Split, but working hard we means shouldn’t have any problem catching up.

With the recent announcement that the EU LCS will be switching to Best-of-2s starting in the summer split, how will that impact the team’s preparation? How does the team feel about the change in general?

The preparation will be really similar, the only major change will be that you need to draft for blue and red side every week for both teams.

How does the team judge its performance at Worlds?

If we see the big picture, where we started and where we ended, I think we did great. If we just focus in Worlds tournament I have a bittersweet feeling because I know if we had done a couple things better we could have won the whole thing.

Gear in eSports is different than in traditional sports, like Fnatic’s players getting the chance to design their own gear. How did the players approach this opportunity, and do they expect it to make a difference in the team’s play?

Patrik “cArn” Sättermon, the Chief Gaming Officer, oversaw the No. 1 in the world CSGO team and the undefeated summer split LoL team in 2015. He believes Fnatic Gear will play a part in the success of the teams, but because it’s more about a players preference rather than bringing some new technological advantages to the players abilities -- he feels it’s still entirely up to the players and the quality of their training in order to outperform their competition. Fnatic Gear, being designed to the player’s feedback, is more, for him, about providing gear the players can feel comfortable with in order to focus more on what’s important: the game.