JW: "We made a lot of bad decisions; I want to apologise to all the true fans and say thank you for staying"

We chatted with Jesper "⁠JW⁠" Wecksell to take a look at his and fnatic's journey. After several changes, the Swedes started to look like championship contenders again in late 2019, when they won DreamHack Masters Malmö and made two more finals, and they will now try to bring their streak of good performances into 2020 at IEM Katowice.

fnatic were floundering towards the end of 2018 despite capping off the year with a victory at PLG Grand Slam, an event well beneath the team’s stature but something to celebrate nonetheless as they hadn't won anything in months since raising trophies at IEM Katowice 2018 and the WESG World Finals.

JW and Freddy "⁠KRIMZ⁠" Johansson signed three-year contracts with the UK-based organization at the turn of the year. It was a period of tranquility, but the team still seemed to be miles away from recapturing the Black and Orange's glory days. Unbeknownst to the duo, the contract renewal hinted at the direction the team would eventually take months later when larger crises ensued.

"I think you can call us franchise players," JW tells HLTV.org when asked about the organization's belief in the continuity of the project. "It's not really something we had in mind, although it’s fair to say we became something like that. It’s hard to know if we are going to stay here for a long time because it’s not really 100% up to us, but as long as we are feeling happy with the team and the organisation, and we keep being competitive players, I see no reason for us to leave. I’ve been here for almost seven years now and I believe there’s some more gas left in the tank."

Despite the stalwart players signing new contracts and rising star Ludvig "⁠Brollan⁠" Brolin becoming an invaluable asset, fnatic were still an unreliable team that kept nosediving until deeper changes were made. The first signs of trouble appeared when the organization failed to reach the top 16 at a Major for the first time in history when they went out in 12-14th place in the New Challengers Stage of last year's IEM Katowice. "It was such a rough event for us as a team," JW recalls. "We lost on the mental side of the game, we couldn’t control the delays and we played under ‘poor’ conditions in the middle of the night." Things then picked up as fnatic finished in second place at StarSeries i-League Season 7 and IEM Sydney, but another rough patch of form culminated with the team hitting rock bottom at the Europe Minor leading to the StarLadder Major.

"This was probably the lowest point in my whole career,” JW says of the team's fourth-place finish at the Minor. "After that last match, I was almost sure my playing days under the fnatic banner were over." Once it was decided that he would stay on - "a second chance, although some would maybe say it was a third or fourth chance" -, JW played an active role in the rebuilding process, which included ousting coach Jimmy "⁠Jumpy⁠" Berndtsson and moving Richard "⁠Xizt⁠" Landström and Simon "⁠twist⁠" Eliasson to the bench.

"Clearly the way we worked and approached the game was not working at all," he explains. "Having to replace Jumpy in this process was probably the toughest thing because I really felt that he was a great coach and had done nothing wrong. But eventually, everyone around the project agreed that we had to cut as many ties to the ‘old fnatic’ as possible in order to start this new project."

JW knew he wanted to reunite with Robin "⁠flusha⁠" Rönnquist, who had left the team in late 2018 and had been inactive since the Katowice Major, but he wondered whether the time was right. Shortly before the returns of flusha and Maikil "⁠Golden⁠" Selim were announced, Andreas "⁠Samuelsson⁠" Samuelsson - who had added coaching duties to his managerial role following Jumpy's departure - had revealed in an AMA that the team was looking to add some youth to its ranks, which showed that fnatic weren’t locked into one single configuration and all of the questions they had at the time could be reformulated to produce different answers if needed.

“The initial plan was that I would keep playing a rifle role and we would bring in an AWPer and an in-game leader," JW says, "I had given the AWP up for twist and it had felt kind of good to just be free from it, but it had always kind of been my identity. There were a lot of questions and uncertainty in my head at the time.

"We were supposed to bring in flusha as the ingame leader and nawwk from GamerLegion as an AWPer, but (un)fortunately it was not possible to get him so we had to change the plan. After a lot of back and forth discussions, we started to talk about Golden and all the issues we had back in the old team. We knew he was a great and very capable in-game leader, so we decided that with the structure and the way we wanted to build this team, it was probably the best decision we could make as it would also give flusha more freedom and put me back on AWPing duties."

Full of optimism, JW says that this "was probably the best possible scenario," before adding that "maybe the most important piece" of the puzzle was that they managed to convince Jens Hofer, their performance and mental coach, to stay. "He had worked with us for some time and we felt he was amazing at his job, but the issues within the team had escalated before he even began to work with us, so he couldn't reach his full potential. Luckily, he agreed to give us a second chance and everyone committed to trusting the process."

Many pundits and large swathes of the community had their doubts regarding the move and questioned whether the team wouldn’t go back to the mixed results that had led to a fallout in 2018, but JW says that the players instantly believed things would be much different now, with a proper structure around the squad. Going on to win their first event together, DreamHack Masters Malmö, and appearing in three finals and one semi-final in the last four tournaments of 2019, which propelled fnatic all the way to No.2 two in the world rankings, was more than enough to prove the doubters wrong.

"There will be other issues," JW says. "No team is going to have no issues at all, but we believed that with the mindset and structure we have now there is nothing we can't work out, which kind of fueled us, as well. We knew people were going to doubt us but we also kind of knew that we could make it work. This time around we are just doing things in a more professional manner. We are taking care of issues before they become a problem. We don't take each other or the ‘team feeling’ for granted and we work to maintain the feeling and make it better every day. I totally understand the fans’ frustration after these past years, we made a lot of bad decisions and I personally take a lot of responsibility. For that, I want to apologize to all the true hardcore fans and say thank you for staying."

Despite their win in Malmö, not everything was clicking in the run-up to the victory. "We had a lot of struggles initially with some different things when we started to practice from home," JW reveals. "But then we went to the fnatic HQ and had a bootcamp in which we really started to implement all the structural changes that we so badly needed. The bootcamp ended up being the most productive any of us had been to in all of our careers, which made us believe in ourselves. We had a very bad first match against ENCE in Malmö, we didn’t play the way we could. The communication was not really there, maybe it was nerves, I don’t know, but we didn’t play like the team we actually were. We handled that together outside the server, we talked through it and just started to grind the tournament one match at a time, until eventually we were the winners."

"Last year as a whole felt like a progression year,” JW says about how 2019 affected him. "It was such an up and down year that it was hard to be happy with the results, but I’m kind of happy with where it took me. I didn’t get all those titles in the finals I played and I didn’t get the chance to play in front of the crowd at half of the events I attended, but it kept motivating me. It kept me on edge, looking for solutions, and most importantly it taught me a lot about myself and how I can improve and make my team improve. To summarise it, you can say 2019 reminded me a lot of myself as a player over the past couple of years: very inconsistent, with some of the highest highs but also some of the lowest lows."

The winter break and the turn of the year brought a new set of questions regarding fnatic, who ended 2019 as the second-best team in the world and will enter IEM Katowice ranked fourth. The most obvious one is whether they can maintain the level displayed late last year and become a consistent tournament contender. "In a perfect world we would be a title contender on a bad day as well, but I can’t say that we’re there yet," JW argues. "I think it’s fair to say that we‘re a solid top 5 team right now."

But being a part of the elite hasn't solved all of fnatic's problems. They were snubbed by BLAST for the Premier Series while less established teams made the cut, something JW was vocal about on Twitter. "I have some ideas [as to why we were snubbed] from what I heard behind the scenes, but it’s not really something I know if it’s true or not, so I can’t really comment about it," he adds. "I think it’s just sad overall. Their tournament seems like a great event where you can really entertain the fans, both at home and in the studio, which is something that my legacy is so much about, but in the end it’s their choice. If they don’t want to have me playing their tournaments, so be it."

Another downside of not being one of the participating teams at BLAST Premier is that, when fnatic enter the server to face Renegades in Katowice, it will have been 78 days since their previous match. Could the Swedes be the latest team to show signs of rustiness after the winter break? "It scares me a little bit,” JW admits. "But it was also something we were well aware of when we scheduled the year. We decided to not jump into the action too quickly so that we can last until the summer break, which I think was a good idea. We’re obviously all very eager to play, so let’s see how rusty we are in Katowice."

fnatic are one of only three teams to ever win in Katowice, next to the old Polish Virtus.pro lineup that won the Major at the Spodek Arena in 2014 and Astralis. The Swedes lifted the trophy in 2015, 2016 and 2018, but after that last win they fell deep enough and long enough to not be considered title contenders at Big Events for a while, although their run late last year has at least brought them back into the mix. JW accepts the challenge that comes with no longer being an underdog with open arms, which will force the team to "work even harder" to avoid being figured out by the competition. "We have to look at our own tendencies and make sure that our opponents can’t take advantage of them," he explains. "We’re at that point in which the game of Counter-Strike gets really interesting and fun for me, so it just feels great to be in this kind of position again."

fnatic will fancy their chances in their opening match in Katowice despite taking on a Renegades side who have upset big names in the past. Avoiding an early slip-up will go a long way towards getting the team back in the groove of things quickly in a tournament that has all of the top 10 teams in attendance and where they can end up facing Astralis, FaZe, Natus Vincere and Vitality in a stacked Group A.

"We want to keep being competitive," JW says. "We want to go into tournaments and feel that we can play up to the same standards as the other top teams. Our main goal is to eventually lift a trophy or two, that feeling is something you can never get tired of and it’s been way too long already. Overall, we just want to do better than last year, which shouldn’t be too hard, right?”