CAZ eSports, a team known for their varying levels of success within the UK scene have released their CSGO team who recently appeared at and won the Dreamhack Summer BYOC tournament. This comes after team captain Ben “r0m” Smith and player Owen “SMOOYA” Butterfield lashed out at the organization on Twitter, claiming broken promises, lies and even letting the team go hungry during their trip to Sweden. The players will however be sticking together as players and looking for a new organisation who will better suit them.
CAZ’s COO Ben Bagg had this to say about dropping the European lineup:
To be honest we had a rocky ride at Dreamhack, some bad organisation skills on my front, due to Brexit and 2 events for Terra Computer all at the same time. Ended up having to re-imburse the team some internal travel expenses in Sweden because of it. This was done. That was a big nail in the coffin, but going to Dreamhack was a massive waste of resources, and I regret that event completely.
Also had some gear lined up for the team from sponsors, which is always at the sponsors discretion but we were never able to lock down the stock in the 3 months, which for these sponsors isn’t a long time, even though in eSports it unfortunately never comes to fruition for them, and then when they returned from DH, player drop and wanted salaries that we hoped to give them based on a plan from the team for their online campaigns till September for exposure etc. After all of this we decided to drop the team, as we didn’t have any exposure for the cost of giving them a salary which is what they wanted. And we were not willing to give it to them anymore. So we chose to rebuild our financial reserves and come back to a UK based focus
This all lead them to picking up “The Working Men”, a team lead by Jake “JAKEM” McCausland, who you may recall as captain of some of the previous CAZ teams featuring Rory “Dephh” Jackson and Kia “Surreal” Mann. TWM were recently seen winning the ESL UK Premiership Spring Season in ESL’s new UK studios in Leicester. Beating Reason Gaming 2-1 in a close match that went right down to the wire. However as standard within the UK, the team joining CAZ is not exactly the team that won the ESL UK Premiership, there has been a couple of changes within the lineup.
Marketing Manager Eren “Laws” Lawrence had this to say on the new lineup:
We are delighted to have Jake leading another roster in our organisation, after his successes with us in 2015 we have developed a productive relationship with him as a person and player. We will work with our new team closely and this opens up a new chapter for us as we look to make our mark once again in the UK eSports scene
The team joining CAZ eSports now consists of:
Jake “JAKEM” McCausland
Robin “robiin” Sjögren
Kostas “tsack” Theodoropoulos
James “Kryptix” Affleck
Jake “Boaster” Howlett
We’re looking forward to seeing a lot from this team in online tournaments, LAN Events, as well as the Summer season of the ESL Premiership.
