Last year, after the world was introduced to the formidable talents of one of the best players of his generation, many people believed that Team Spirit would become unstoppable with Danil “donk” Kryshkovets as their entry fragger.
They were entirely wrong. After all, Spirit won IEM Katowice and three other S-tier tournaments in 2024, including the Shanghai Major. They also played in two other Grand Finals.
But in 2025, it quickly became clear that Team Vitality, MOUZ, and, later, Team Falcons, had figured out their tactics. Because of this, Spirit started to show obvious signs of weakness in the playoffs of many of the most important events.
They still won BLAST Bounty Spring and PGL Astana, but that was largely because they didn’t have to play against their strongest rivals. Whenever they encountered Vitality or MOUZ, they lost.
This resulted in disappointing results at ESL Pro League S21 (3rd – 4th place), BLAST Open Spring (3rd – 4th place), BLAST Rivals Spring (3rd – 4th place), and the Austin Major (5th – 8th place). Each time, they were eliminated by one of the two teams mentioned above.
Of course, for most esports organizations, reaching the semifinals of S-tier tournaments and even winning or placing 2nd in some of them would be considered a huge success. But when you have players like donk and Dmitriy “sh1ro” Sokolov on your roster, it’s hard to be satisfied with such results.
The Solution
When Team Vitality faced a similar problem last year, they ultimately decided to bench one of their excellent players, Lotan “Spinx” Giladi, and replace him with an even stronger player, Robin “ropz” Kool.
This decision proved to be beneficial for both Vitality and Spinx. Vitality went on to win seven consecutive S-tier tournaments while Spinx completely transformed his new team, MOUZ, making it one of the best in the world.
Team Spirit was faced with a similar problem. Their decision was to bench Boris “magixx” Vorobyev and bring in Ivan “zweih” Gogin, a 17-year-old with tremendous potential who might improve the overall strength of the roster significantly.
In the upcoming months, we will see if this change was an inspired one. Most likely, magixx will continue to stay with Spirit until zweih is either fully integrated or removed from the roster.
