NaVi Director on Boombl4's departure: “To be honest, we have no ideas at all about who we can take into the roster”

Mikhail 'Olsior' Zverev hosted a broadcast on his Twitch channel, where he interviewed the Operations Director of the Ukrainian esports club Natus Vincere. Alexey 'xaoc' Kucherov spoke about the future of business, NaVi 's role in the war between Russia and Ukraine, decisions related to the departure of Boombl4, the policy of doing business and much more.

The director of NaVi spoke in more detail about the situation with the departure of the team captain. According to him, the team does not know with whom it is worth playing further, but it was necessary to exclude the cybersportsman in any case:

Many people who follow esports don't watch one player or another in isolation. Speaking specifically about Boombl4, he recently reported on his attitude towards the war, everything is fine with that. His departure is connected precisely with reputational losses. He himself is well done and everything is in order with his position, but what is happening around him is not something that we could really put up with. It is very dangerous. It was very difficult for us to say goodbye to such a player, and even more so to the team captain. To be honest, right now we have absolutely no ideas about who can be taken into the squad. Rumors about YEKINDAR are not true. As for Buster, we would like to try playing with him, but we are not ready to have any negotiations with Virtus.pro. He can try to negotiate with them himself, try to buy out his contract or something like that, but we are not going to negotiate with Virtus.pro at all. Instead, let's try to take and test another player. What was around Boombl4 was so important that we had to remove him, despite the fact that now we have no options and thoughts about who we can replace him with.

Alexei said that the departure of Boombl4 is most likely the only replacement in the CS:GO roster:

Most likely Boombl4 was the only replacement. I will not say that this is for sure, but so far we see the situation as such, yes. Now nothing can be said for sure. We haven't decided anything with the CS:GO roster yet. We have a couple of options, but there are a few nuances that need to be addressed. Later it will become clear with which of the players we will go together, but even if we cooperate, at first it will be just a trial period.

There are some nuances that I cannot talk about because they can put players at risk, but I will say this. Of course, we talked with the players about why their wives make such posts and talked about how it is very bad. We negotiated and tried to come to certain decisions, but now when there were no results from this, you can see how it affected and what decisions were made and what consequences it brings.

Kucherov explained why the club did not exclude the player before the start of the Major tournament. He attributed this to the very serious consequences that could come in the event of such a turn of events:

From a purely economic point of view, most of the money is earned by the team, not the club: stickers, prize money. If we take the average Major, then this is not such a big loss. But if we talk about the technical component, then it should be taken into account that the roster-lock was a month before the start of the championship. It was impossible to kick someone. If you remove a player, then the coach would take his place and play at the Major tournament as part of the players. If we skipped the Major, then in the end we would have to fire 90-100 employees. In general, the major is the dream of many players, and it would be very bad to deprive them of this opportunity. Otherwise, you might even have to reassemble the CS:GO roster, which would be English-speaking.