Natus Vincere have announced their acceptance into the VALORANT EMEA franchise league and leaked a potential new player for their roster.
The team in a video showed the owner of Na’Vi, Yevhen Zolotarov, running around the organization’s headquarters with the box that has the Spike from Riot Games to make the announcement. The three minutes video confirms that they have been accepted into the EMEA league.
The video at the 38th second showed Zolotarov run into the merchandise room where a jersey was laid out in plain sight. The Na’Vi jersey have ‘ANGE1′ inscribed on it. A closed caption also accompanied it,’ New 2023 samples arrived’.
Kyrylo “ANGE1” Karasov is on the FunPlus Phoenix roster, a team not accepted into the EMEA partnership program.
Although FPX had a great season after dominating the EMEA region and qualified for back-to-back LAN tournaments. Despite their success in 2022, the Masters: Copenhagen winners were not accepted. They won the tournament after taking down Paper Rex in the finals.
FPX also closed the year with a fourth-place finish at VALORANT Champions.
ANGE1, a Ukrainian, is the current in-game leader for FPX. Since Na’Vi is also based in Ukraine, these two factors make him the perfect player to showcase in the video should Na’Vi sign the entire FPX team.
Even though FPX was not accepted into the partnership program, none of the current VALORANT players announced their free agency.
This is unlike other organizations like Acend and G2 Esports, which were not accepted and released their players after the news went public.
Having signed contracts with Na’Vi, FPX players did not publicly announce that they were looking for a team.
This situation is similar to XSET, which was denied acceptance into the Americas partnership league.
However, they had been in talks about signing as a core five with G2 Esports.
From today, teams are officially allowed to start signing players.
Written by Oladipupo Mojeed
