The South Korean team T1 has become world champion in League of Legends twice in a row with the same roster. They wanted to keep the team for 2025 and were prepared to pay any price for it. But top laner Choi “Zeus” Woo-je didn’t succeed. The 20-year-old is moving to South Korean champions Hanwha Life. T1 boss Joe Marsh explains what went wrong.
This is the situation: On November 18th, 4 contracts at T1 expired, only Faker was definitely in the squad for 2025.
It was clear that T1 wanted to keep every single player on their winning team. The 5 players are now known as ZOFGK (Zeus-Oner-Faker-Gumayusi-Keria). T1 announced its intention to keep all 5 immediately after the World Championship.
As T1 CEO Joe Marsh later explained, they were willing to pay each player a top salary for their position. This also worked for Keria, Oner and Gumayusi, but Zeus was lost to Hanwha Life.
This loss of the player is unpleasant for T1 for many reasons: among other things, they now have to redesign their entire ZOFGK marketing and they have to integrate the new player Doran into the team.
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Fans react to Zeus’s departure with horror – the rumor mill is abuzz
What was rumored? LoL has a huge scene that accompanies processes and changes. After Zeus moved, rumors immediately arose about what had happened. Because this change was a shock for many fans.
The anger quickly focused on Zeus’s agent. It was then said that the agent had delayed the deal forever. Apparently T1 planned to grab Gen G.’s toplaner, Kin, if Zeus didn’t sign. Because his contract also expired. But Kin was apparently at the same agency as Zeus and it was suspected that the agent was playing a double game.
In any case, T1 fans were outraged at how they could lose the player. Ultimately, T1 brought in Doran after Zeus was gone and Kin had also been extended in Gen G:. Doran is considered the third choice for the position in South Korea.
Joe Marsh feels lied to by Zeus’ agent
This is what the CEO says now: In In an interview with fmkorea, the CEO of T1, Joe Marsh, spoke in detail about the loss of Zeus. He says:
Marsh says (via dexerto):
When he (the agent) visited our office on Friday, he openly stated that he had ‘nothing to say’, which struck us as unusual for someone whose job it is to negotiate contracts. After signing the three players, we even made an additional offer, although we knew that the first rule of negotiations is not to make further offers without receiving a response.
Marsh says: T1 were willing to pay any price, even if the agent had made an outrageous maximum demand of €2.7 million, that would have been something they could have at least talked about. But nothing happened.
In the end, the agent would have agreed to come to T1’s headquarters with Zeus to sign the deal. The agent then simply canceled the appointment and was no longer available for T1.
Marsh also says the agent talked about a deadline from Hanwha Life. But that was a lie from the agent, because Hanwha Life was unable to confirm this deadline to Marsh:
In my opinion, someone in this situation is not being completely honest. Having worked with HLE for many years, I trust their word about what they say. It’s disappointing that such tactics played a role in the process because we believed Zeus deserved transparency and fairness in such an important decision about his future.
Agent dismisses allegations as exaggerated and untrue
What does the agent say? Zeus’ agency, “The Play”, simply said in a short statement (via reddit) that it can be seen that a discussion is coming to a head. But many of T1’s statements were exaggerated or untrue. Prepare a statement.
The president of T1 should perhaps take a cue from his German counterpart, President Knabe, on how to negotiate correctly and sign great players or, well, maybe not: President Knabe signs star players for “half a fortune,” but makes a terrible mistake