It’s been quite the slide for the Dallas Fuel. Entering the season as the highest-ranked NA team, the Fuel have done their best to avoid living up to expectations — at the end of stage II, the Fuel are 5–15, embroiled in personnel drama, and have had more players suspended for longer than any other team. The latest scandal? The KyKy/Rascal/aKm drama.

On March 23rd, Fuel head coach KyKy gave an unusually candid interview to journalist Harry Baker, talking about the trials and tribulations of coaching. One his quotes was particularly revealing, discussing why Fuel DPS aKm had been forced to play Genji, a hero with whom he is not adept, instead of running out DPS Rascal, who is much better at the hero than aKm.

Are those difficulties why we didn’t see him as much as people thought that we would, and why aKm was being played on Genji, which was pretty controversial among the online communities?

We’re going to release a questionnaire-style thing answering a lot of these questions really soon. I can assure you that they all had reasons behind them. It’s part of the reason why we didn’t see Rascal, but aKm playing Genji was more so because he was forced into it because Rascal decided that that week was not a good week for him to play. I didn’t have much of a say in that. Rascal wasn’t too happy with the improvements we were making that week and it kind of just took a turn for the worst. So aKm was kind of last minute — our strategies were Genji strategies and we knew that Soldier strategies wouldn’t work there.

I’ve always taken issue with coaches characterizing players as responsible for personnel decisions — if a player doesn’t want to play, it’s not up to the coach to publicly out the player as such. It’s not something that should realistically be discussed by the coach, and it’s largely the standard in professional sports leagues — a standard which the OWL is attempting to reach.

But it’s another thing for teammates to publicly air grievances about other teammates. aKm posted the following ~~on the Dallas Fuel discord~~ (EDIT: I have been informed that this was on aKm’s personal discord) regarding Rascal (h/t /u/blissfullybleak):

Idk why are people hating on me that much. I played 1 map in 3 matches, and i still get hate, just because i had to fill in a role that i wasn’t comfortable on to help the team because the guy supposed to play decided to be unprofessional and not play last minute. And he gets all the praise and stuff, when he wasn’t being a good teammate.

I don’t blame aKm for feeling frustrated — Fuel fans are disappointed after having been sold on what was supposedly a top-tier team, and they’re lashing out at him for what they can see. But at the same time, aKm has heard his coach tell everyone publicly that Rascal isn’t playing because he doesn’t feel like it. And he’s blaming Rascal.

But maybe Rascal isn’t all to blame. During a stream yesterday, Rascal said that he hadn’t simply refused to play — he had been benched from scrims by KyKy.

As a coach, KyKy is fully within his rights to bench a player for tilting, but to tell the public that Rascal had instead decided for himself that he didn’t want to play? That reeks of unprofessionalism, and it drags a players’ name through the mud for no good reason. As a coach, KyKy needs to stick up for his players, not trash them publicly. As aKm’s comments show, there’s already a divide between Rascal and aKm, who are teammates, thanks to KyKy publicly airing his grievances against his own players (though according to a translation of one of Rascal’s streams, he and aKm have made up — still, this shouldn’t have been a problem in the first place).

It’s a case of he-said-she-said, and clearly either one of KyKy or Rascal are not telling the full story — but in either case, KyKy is at considerable fault. If KyKy is telling the truth, he still shouldn’t be disclosing the nature of Rascal getting benched so publicly — it’s an internal team-personnel decision. And if KyKy has been lying about his own players to the media to cast them in a negative light, he doesn’t deserve to coach the Fuel, for this and a multitude of other reasons.

KyKy’s claim that Rascal removed himself from scrims and matches also reveal the toxic attitudes towards players’ mental health. While players are occasionally physically injured, a much bigger obstacle to performance is mental health, where players get into toxic mindsets, are depressed by performance, feel burned out, etc. It’s easy to forget that despite being high-profile figures in the esports world, many of these athletes aren’t even old enough to legally drink.

In that sense, if a player needs to take time off to recover from being in a poor mental state, they should not be criticized for doing so. If Rascal feels that he’s tilting and wants to take a break from the team temporarily, teams should be accommodating of it and not blast it publicly.

In contrast, Pine, New York Excelsior’s “Big Boss” DPS took much of Stage Two off after feeling depressed and suffering from a panic disorder. NYXL’s staff had kept quiet on Pine’s absence despite repeated requests from fans to sub in Pine. Instead, Pine himself disclosed why he had not been participating in this stage, apparently of his own accord.

Full disclosure — I’m an NYXL fan and I serve as a community moderator for NYXL (Edit: and to be abundantly clear, the opinions in this article are solely my own, not those of NYXL or my employers). I’m not highlighting this example to shine a light on NYXL — only to shine a light on positive treatment of players who need help with their mental health, and on professionalism when dealing with fans. The coaches and management of professional sports teams are not indebted to fans to tell them intimate details regarding every decision about the player, least of all in a manner that paints a player in a negative light — a player for their own team, a player representing their brand.

Giving players time off to deal with mental issues is not without precedent. In 2015, one of the New York Yankees’ best pitchers, C.C. Sabathia, checked himself into rehab for alcohol abuse on the eve of the postseason. It didn’t matter how much the Yankees needed Sabathia for the playoffs — Sabathia was dealing with an illness and needed help, in the same way that a player with a tweaked hamstring needs rest or a torn labrum needs surgery.

In this sense, asking not to play is not inherently unprofessional. Esports training is a constant grind, and fatigue and stress are to be expected, never mind how they might compound on top of already existing mental health conditions. It’s one thing for a player sign with a team and then refuse to play out of laziness. It’s another to expect a talented player in a poor mental state to play in front of hundreds of thousands of people and risk further trauma.

Fuel’s priority seems to have not shifted from the start of the season — they’re focused on winning games. Focusing on winning games is not a bad goal for an org, but when there exists clear personnel problems with the team, the team needs to take a step back and look at themselves in the mirror. Clearly, the culture surrounding the team is not helping matters, and attempting to push past that culture and focus on winning has just made things worse.

The Fuel are clearly striving to emulate a traditional professional sports team in terms of marketing and branding, but their lack of professionalism and discretion betrays their immaturity. The Fuel have the talent. The Fuel have the players. But they don’t have the culture — and it’s holding them back.