Golden: "I want to be back in the server"

The Swedish in-game leader opened up about his time in fnatic, helping the organization's academy team, and what his next steps will be.

Maikil "⁠Golden⁠" Selim returned to fnatic in September of 2019 after spending a year in Cloud9 and was a crucial component in the Swedish team's victories at DreamHack Masters Malmö 2019 and ESL Pro League Season 11 Europe, but as the coronavirus pandemic went on he and his teammates took a hit, slowly dipping in the rankings throughout the latter half of 2020 and the beginning of 2021.

The poor results ended up in the 27-year-old's benching, as well as that of Jesper "⁠JW⁠" Wecksell, going into the summer break. These changes brought on the advent of an international squad in fnatic as Freddy "⁠KRIMZ⁠" Johansson, Ludvig "⁠Brollan⁠" Brolin and Jack "⁠Jackinho⁠" Ström Mattsson teamed up with the British duo comprised of of Alex "⁠ALEX⁠" McMeekin and William "⁠mezii⁠" Merriman.

During his time on the bench over the summer, Golden joined up with in-game leader Kevin "⁠Kevve⁠" Bohlin and manager Andreas "⁠Samuelsson⁠" Samuelsson to create fnatic's academy team, fnatic Rising, who finished the first WePlay Academy League in third place behind MOUZ and Young Ninjas, giving Golden some time to reflect and give back. But now the Swede once again has his eyes on the prize and is waiting for the right time to get back into the server not just as a coach, but to start playing again.

Let's go back to when you returned to fnatic in 2019 and breeze over how things went then, because you started out doing pretty well. Then the online era came and the team struggled more and more until finally you were benched. Can we quickly go over that period of time?

When I returned to fnatic we started out pretty good. We had like six events in which we made the semi-finals at the worst and we made like two or three finals. We were feeling like we were heading in the right direction with everything and we just needed to find our consistency heading into the late stages of tournaments. IEM Katowice 2020 was our last LAN together, then covid-19 took over the world and after that we got stranded at home.

It was a challenge for that lineup because we had a lot of experience that we weren't able to use at its highest potential. We were slowly declining from the top and it made it much harder living during the pandemic. We were just trying to find a solution to it and we tried so many things that at the end it didn't work out with anything. We kind of lost our identity, trying to find things that pleased everyone. I felt like that hurt us more than it did good. But I also see that we had to try new things. Looking back at it I kind of regret a lot of stuff and want to do things better the next time around. Not the big things, in terms of the game, but small things.

What would you say you learned from that experience?

Something I learned is that I should not doubt myself. It happened during covid, then I felt like I was doing better after some reflecting. When it gets that bad with losing you kind of cannot take the blame, and I should be more stubborn with myself to not always put everything on myself. I think my team also understood some of this and we had some talks about it. I had some talks with the coach and the mental coach, that it was about me doubting myself, but how can you not doubt yourself when you've been losing for a year and a half?

Reflecting back, I think that it hurt the team, but I don't think I was the only one that doubted themselves or the team, the team was struggling hard. Living during covid-19 there has to be some perseverance, you have to have the mentality where you always have to think that you'll come back stronger. I think we did that in a positive way and that the entire team did a good job at that, but in the end we didn't make it.

Why do you think fnatic couldn't make it? What made you one of the big casualties of that period of time?

I believe that everyone started playing online kind of like we used to play on LAN. Doing aggressive stuff, random stuff, peaking a lot, and having that confidence of going out and knowing that you will probably get the kill. When you see it in the online era right now, the teams that are winning, they're not thinking of the consequences of using all of their utility or anything tactical in that manner. I thought that we did that a lot, having more of that aim map style, everyone aiming a lot or having positions with a smoke and smoking yourself out and using it to your advantage in one-ways.

It has always been like that, but this was like a new type of thing, where everyone just threw all of their stuff away and had maybe had one smoke left and then used it to get themselves out of a bad situation. This isn't bad, but you also see the teammates running around and just shooting without thinking of what could happen. They just had that confidence. Most of these players are young and it's a very particular play style which will work very well on LAN in certain situations, but doing it is the hard thing. It's not as easy as it looks sometimes.

So props to them, because that's what we couldn't do online, we didn't have that kind of confidence after we placed poorly in two or three events. We couldn't get that confidence to do that stuff, to take the random duels we usually took on LAN. After people started to make those moves on us online we couldn't find an answer.

Do you think these teams that have been coming up will be able to replicate this on LAN or do you think the old guard will be able to return to the top?

In a way, regarding if I think they can do it on LAN, it's probably yes. We could do it with experience because we had very experienced players. Those players could really take that into action. I believe the newer guys will be able to do it much faster than the old guard because they'll have a softer start in terms of LAN due to covid restrictions. As that happens, they will be more familiar with LAN in a much easier way. If they have no other play style than the way they are playing online, then that's the only way they know how to play.

In terms of thinking or calling, I think that may be a bit more difficult if there are people shouting in the arena and stuff like that. To calm your nerves may be a difficult task and even if they are able to do it, which I'm not saying they will be successful, there may be a lot of other factors like them not being able to aim on LAN as well as they do at home. So I think they will be able to replicate it, but I don't think they'll be perfect in their first LANs.

flusha left the team at the beginning of the year, and it seems like it started a snowball of instability. Can you run me through that time of change?

The beginning of 2021 is a bit complicated. We got Jackinho as an AWPer, but we still used JW until we felt that the team was stable in a way in which Jackinho could be comfortable with the AWP. JW also had to adapt to the era of the AWPing meta and there were a lot of small things that needed to happen.

As time progressed, I think it was like three months or so when we changed Jackinho to the AWP. That was the third change we made and after that we had to make a lot of positional changes in the game, so we just kept changing a lot of stuff and I think that's when the instability came into even more effect than before. We didn't actually find a consistent way in terms of roles and we couldn't even win a best-of-three at the time, so it was pretty difficult.

Did you see a way out of the tunnel?

After playing the last tournament before the player break... No doubt we'd put in a lot of time into different aspects, be it with the team or yourself, although it wasn't enough, but I did see light at the end of the tunnel. I thought that LANs would come back after the break and that we would try to have a return to LAN. I thought we'd take the break to assess ourselves, reflect, and come back. Come up with a new structure regarding how we practice, the schedule, just to make things easier on us and think out of the box to come up with solutions.

Those were my initial thoughts, maybe we just needed to take baby steps, to make the playoffs, taking one match at a time. There was always something new happening or something we hadn't seen before, there was always something, which made things very difficult because then we had to go through that thing, asses it, try to find what went wrong and how to solve it, and this happened each time until the point that we'd start making the same mistakes all over again, which is when things got really depressing.

So basically you were always fixing and dealing with new issues until after a while the old issues started to come back, like a vicious circle...

Yeah, we were in like a paradox.

So you were then moved to the bench, how did that happen? Is it something you saw coming or is it something you were surprised by?

fnatic wanted to go international beforehand, there was a rumor on Reddit or whatnot, so I kind of saw it happening as the Swedish scene was struggling to bring up talents. I was surprised in the timing of the benching because I thought that we should really give it a chance after returning to LAN and if that goes bad then we really didn't waste that much time, but they wanted to do it during the break, which is a respectable decision, but I was kind of waiting for a bigger change to come if we didn't perform on LAN. So yeah, I thought that the timing was a bit off, but of course that's just my opinion.

What do you think about fnatic moving into an international roster?

I think it's good that they move into a more broad pool to find more players to bring in. So yeah, I think it is good that they went international, but I also believe that it could be hard on team chemistry. I don't think it'll affect the current fnatic guys because they are three Swedes and two Englishmen, so I think it'll go well in terms of chemistry and communication, they're not a team with players from many different countries. I still feel like they have some of the Swedish thing going on...

It seems like a sort of hybrid before jumping to a full international roster, it's like a transition...

Yeah, exactly. I would agree that this is not the final form of the international roster for fnatic, probably not, but there are a lot of things regarding how it will affect them. The play style of the Swedes is very different and I think they'll always have this sort of style or intuition that you cannot just remove and it all depends on the IGL, if he wants to adapt to that style or not. It's not an easy thing to do, to adapt to that style, if you're an IGL.

Do you think this is almost a cultural thing in terms of understanding the game. There are differences between the Swedish guys and people coming from different Counter-Strike schools?

Yeah, I would say that the Swedes are more about being confident, thinking they can win all of the duels, being a little cocky, thinking they're being smarter than the enemy, and aiming a lot. The last thing, also, is intuition, which is very important. I think those kinds of things explain how a Swede sees CS:GO a lot.

That explains a lot about how olofmeister, JW, etc. played at their peak, being very confident playmakers.

Yeah, and as an IGL I didn't always think this way. Especially when I came back from Cloud9, I changed my mentality of playing like a Swede. That's when I thought more about maybe not always having to be too cocky or overconfident and instead focusing on being more consistent. That's when things were going better for us.

So you think Swedes need to move away from their old understanding of the game?

Yeah, I also think that we meshed both worlds very well when we were playing well prior to covid.

You've been on the sidelines for a couple of months and you took up helping fnatic Rising. How did becoming a part of that project come together?

I was told that I was on the bench and after some talks with management they told me they were going to make an academy team. They asked if I could help and I said yes. From there, me, kevve and Samuelsson chose the players and we put it together. We started practicing and from there on out I was in the server with them, coaching a little bit. It was a good thing for me to do while I reflected about my own performance on the main team. I needed something else to think about and also, the most important thing, is that it just feels nice to help these guys.

So what was the selection process like?

We started out with kevve and me sitting down to talk about finding three more players, since we already had Peppzor. We had to find them pretty fast, we had like a week before the WePlay Academy League. Searching on FACEIT was pretty hard, we'd made our own list of 10-30 players and we categorized them and looked up what kinds of roles they had in their previous teams, where they had played, how old they were. We had to find all of that information on our own.

I thought that it was going to take too long and that we probably weren't going to find the right people. So instead we got fnatic to send out a form that people could apply to and that's when the selection really came to life. We made people write down the things that we really wanted to know and we selected the people we thought were interesting. We had a talk with them and that's when they started to practice with us.

What were some of the criteria used in the selection?

One of the questions was something like 'Do you take a lot of initiative?' Some people answered blatantly, 'No.' Others said 'Yes.' A follow-up question was something like 'Do you help the IGL? Can you give ideas?' So these were some of the criteria we used and then we also looked up their ELO on FACEIT. Their age was also the most important thing, we couldn't have more than one player older than 21, so yeah. I don't have all of the questions in my head right now, but some were more than just yes and no answers. I wanted to know how they think, if they think more about themselves or about the team...

How do you think this team is going to evolve and change? How long do you think it's going to take before it can actually pump out players to the main team? Where is fnatic Rising right now?

fnatic Rising is in the earliest stages you can be in, we don't have the full structure that the main team has as it's been a hectic period of just getting the players. I had to find them during my break, but we made the team and it's performing. They had two practice days before the WePlay Academy League and yet they made it to the LAN finals, which is a great thing. For them it's just about getting a good placing and thinking about playing. They'll have some time to reflect on the WePlay Academy league and see that they got a big achievement coming from nowhere.

They were just happy to be in Kyiv, which makes me feel like these guys are humble enough to be even greater than just this. I'd say that in six months or even less we can have the full structure behind this team. More meetings with the coaches, mental coaches, fitness coaches, they need this stuff and knowing what's important in their health is key because it'll just make them perform much better. Knowing that at an early age is a tremendous advantage.

Do you think this academy system is the future of bringing up talent as opposed to FPL and pugging leagues? Is this the next step in the evolution of youth development?

Yeah, for sure. I come from an academy team as well and I really do believe in that process. I do believe in it more now than I did before because of this academy league and because the teams are very invested into having that. They're understanding that they cannot go out and buy a player for $1 million or whatnot. The surges in player prices are so high that there's no way, teams can't survive, and academy teams are a smaller investment that is really a big investment it terms of the future of their CS:GO teams.

How was your personal experience in giving a hand? Being in the server with the guys, teaching them, and giving back.

It's been fun, they listen to you very carefully and they're very interested in what you say to them. You can feel the energy, which makes me want to do it more, helping them out more. It makes me happy that they take the constructive criticism that I give them and my thoughts about the game. In a way, it also helps me when I talk about basic or small stuff because I reflect on other things that have happened to me in the game.

When I explain something, I may not explain it as well to myself as I do to others, so I also learn from that. I even learn more speaking to them than I do when I just think to myself. This helps a lot, so I've come up with new things in the game that I'm going to use in the future, so it's helping me as well. The most fun part of it is to see how excited they are. They just played their first LAN and it's the same as when I was just starting out, so it's cool to see that and help them. It's a giving thing, both for them but also for me.

So you've done the coaching thing while you try to figure out your next step, but what is it you're looking forward to in the horizon?

I want to be back on the server. I feel like this past year-and-a-half has been a constant struggle during the online era. I wanted to take some time off to reflect, refresh myself and perhaps change the way I call. Now that LAN events are slowly getting back, I'm confident that the play style I envision will be consistent.

How do you see that happening?

Hopefully I'll find the right people and team to get back on the server at the end of the year or some time after that. If I can't find what I'm looking for, I'll then make my own team. As I spend my time now, I've been watching most of the pro matches and trying to keep up with the meta while I'm sitting on the bench.