2020 was a difficult period for the French team Vitality: after its leader Alex “ALEX” McMeekin suddenly left the team last spring, explaining that his travel schedule was too busy; the team had every chance of ceasing to exist. However, the players managed to cope with the situation and, led by a new leader, who became Dan “apEX” Madesclair, adapt to the new format of online competitions and take several major trophies. However, the beginning of 2021 was not very successful for it: the team failed to reach the playoffs at either IEM Katowice or BLAST Premier Spring.
In an interview with the HLTV portal, apEX spoke about the reasons for the failures and how the team plans to build the game further. According to him, Vitality faced several problems at the same time. Firstly, in January the team was fined a large amount by ESIC due to violations at two matches of the BLAST Premier Global Final. Secondly, Valve decided to deduct points from teams for substitutions in RMR tournaments, which turned out to be especially unpleasant for Vitality, which effectively used a roster of six people. In addition, several players faced personal problems during this period, and apEX was even forced to take a short break.
Now the team has to train hard to compensate for the impossibility of substitutions, and also look for new opportunities to distribute roles in the team. In addition, apEX noted that it hopes for other French teams to appear on the professional stage.
