The EKO roster was handed 30 days of notice on the 1st of April and the organisation has now officially announced the split. The organisation has pledged to stay in the scene and is currently looking for a new roster to play under their banner. For Oscar “LVN” Levin and the rest of the team, they will now be competing as Ex-EKO.
The squad played under the EKO brand for three months and in that time obtained a third-place finish at Insomnia 68, second at EPIC.LAN 35 and 175th in the HLTV world rankings. On top of these team accolades, we also saw some of the young talent led by LVN show their worth. Jamie “JamieG” Grice had an exceptional showing at the Beyond Spring Invitational 2022 whereby he boasted a 1.58 rating in just 4 maps. The team is sticking together as free agents and with an average age of just 21, there is definitely potential that any organisation wanting to get involved in UK CSGO could use. UKCSGO.com reached out to Luke ‘EMPEROR’ Ingram for a comment.
In short they messaged on the 1st of April saying due to unforeseen circumstances they would be handing us our 30 days notice, some of us originally thought it was a meme due to it being given to us on the 1st of April. They suggested the idea of continuing with them without a salary however this isn’t viable for our circumstances as playing with a salary allows us to devote the hours we do against the teams at our level without having to get jobs/pick up more hours at current work. With this being said we went to iSeries, played ESL Premiership playoffs & continued playing to the best of our abilities and here we are as free agents looking for an organisation again.
For the organisation, they’ve shown a commitment to the scene by announcing they will be looking for a follow-up roster. It will be interesting to see if they will have a roster before EPIC.LAN 36. UKCSGO.com also reached out for a comment from the owner of EKO.
We signed the roster to get into UKCS properly as this was our first experience with a high tier roster. Everything went really well and this is a fantastic roster, it did its job perfectly for us as we want to be known as an organisation that can produce talent. As we progress, we want a team that can invest in EKO as a long term project, to help us grow a community. With this roster whilst on the server they were perfect, outside of the server we didn’t always align on our viewpoints and since we are self funded went a different direction. They’re great players and great guys, it just wasn’t the perfect fit. For our future we just want to grow, improve and create a community around EKO and UK esports in general. We are first and foremost fans of counter-strike, we aren’t going anywhere.
Ex-EKO are now:
Oliver “husky” Gollings
Jamie “JamieG” Grice
James “Mad” Debono
Rory “cryths” Ursell
Oscar “LVN” Levin
Luke “EMPEROR” Ingram (coach)
EKO Splits with CS:GO Roster
Read: https://t.co/svILFIwsOF
— EKO eSports (@eKO_eSport) May 11, 2022
