Excel Esports Reveal New Valorant Roster

Excel Esports revealed a revamped Valorant esports roster on Monday, January 10, featuring four new faces representing the organization in the 2022 season.

Excel Esports rebuilt its roster ahead of the 2022 Valorant Champions Tour (VCT) season, with four signings. As revealed, the new additions include Dragan “elllement” Milanović, Oscar “ozzy” Scott, Egor “chiwawa” Stepanyuk, and Patryk “paTiTek” Fabrowski.

The quartet will team up with Muhammad “Moe40” Hariff, as the only returning player from 2021.

The roster changes follow Excel’s intentions to completely rebuild its roster, following the departure of four core members. Alend “Ale” Khalaf left the team in September, while Marc “Honeybee” Begley cut ties with Excel in October.

The most recent two departures in Vincent “Happy” Cervoni Schopenhauer and Ruben “RUBINO” Villarroel Brødreskift left the organization in November, leaving Excel with Moe40 as the only active member.

Besides the new signings, Excel also announced the return of former coaching staff. The team will continue with head coach Jimmy “Jumpy Berndtsson and assistant Sam “Fields” Greenfield.

The drastic roster changes come only months into Excel’s entry into the Valorant esports scene. Regardless, it’s clear that changes were needed.

Since the inception of Excel’s Valorant team, the organization was only lightly involved in the competitive scene. Since forming the roster, Excel attended only two low-tier tournaments yet failed to achieve much.

Excel placed second at the VALORANT Open Tour: France – Spring Qualifier in May and were ready to attend the organization’s first tournament. However, things did not play out as planned.

Excel had to pull out of the VALORANT Open Tour: France Finals due to the departure of Happy and Honeybee. As a result, Excel failed to form a full lineup and were forced to withdraw.

Shortly after their forced withdrawal, Excel found replacements and formed a new roster. However, success was hard to come by.

Their only other tournament appearance happened in August when Excel attended the LVP – Rising Series #3 European Qualifier. Unfortunately, the team failed to deliver and crashed out in the first round, where they lost against SAW.

Excel Esports has had a rather lackluster start to its journey into the Valorant esports scene. But things are looking up for the British esports organization, which now fields a mix of rookies and veteran players.

Chiwawa, who joined Excel as an inactive member of Ninjas in Pyjamas, brings heaps of experience competing at the highest level. With NiP, chiwawa regularly competed in VCT in 2021 and even placed top-four at the VCT 2021: Europe Stage 2 Challengers 1.

Of the four new signings, paTiTek is the most exciting one, having been a part of G2 Esports early into his Valorant career. With G2, paTiTek dominated the Valorant scene in 2020 but was cut from the team after G2 crashed out of VCT 2021: Europe Stage 2 Challengers 2 in fifth-eight place.

At the same tournament, paTiTek played alongside ozzy, who served as a stand-in, but for only two weeks.

Besides his short stint with G2, ozzy was competing in some smaller teams. That includes HSDIRR, who he was a member of between March and April 2021.

Like ozzy, elllement has limited experience competing at the top level. He enjoyed a brief stint with OG (February-May) and made only two VCT appearances in EU Stage 1 Challengers 2 and 3.

With a new-look roster, Excel look set to up their involvement in Valorant and compete to become one of Europe’s strongest teams. Whether Excel will manage to achieve that status remains to be seen, but we should get a clearer answer soon.

Excel will play their first match of the 2022 season in the VCT 2022 Europe Stage One Open Qualifier, where they will compete for a ticket for the VCT Stage One Challengers circuit.