The biggest LoL team in the world is T1, led by three-time world champion Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok (24). However, the star of the Koreans is fading in the League of Legends. Once again, they lost to Gen G. in the LCK 2021 playoffs. They had already stolen the fourth World Championship title from the Korean stars in 2017 and prevented their participation in the 2020 World Championship.
This is the situation at T1: In the early days of LoL, SK Telecom T1, with mid-laner Faker, was the dominant team in League of Legends. They won the World Championships in 2013, 2015, and 2016.
At that time, especially T1’s mid-laner, Faker, made a name for himself as a sort of super player who always made the right decision, could win matches alone, and led his team to unprecedented excellence. Faker was simply regarded as the “LoL God.”
Things changed in 2017 when T1 lost the World Championship final against Samsung Galaxy. Since then, the legend of the “unstoppable Demon King Faker” has been in crisis: The super team T1 has looked surprisingly beatable in recent years:
- The team restructured and made it to the semifinals of Worlds in 2019, but was eliminated by the Europeans G2 Esports there.
- In 2020, T1, with a newly restructured team, failed to qualify for Worlds: New strong teams had emerged in South Korea, the old rival, Samsung Galaxy, had reformulated itself as “Gen G,” and shattered Faker’s dreams of flying to Worlds 2020.
- Faker is now 24 years old; he won’t play many more seasons in LoL. Rivals and colleagues have retired in recent years – but Faker and T1 wanted to make a strong comeback in 2021.
T1 hires brilliant coaches and a super talent, but it’s not enough
How 2021 went for T1: The Spring Season 2021 was supposed to be the next attempt to bring Faker and T1 to the top of LoL:
- They hired the world champion coaches from 2020, Zefa and Daeny
- Additionally, “Keria” joined the team – the 18-year-old is regarded as a new super talent in the support spot
- The regular season went mediocre. They finished in 4th place in the LCK with an 11-7 record. But there was hope: The old magic would ignite when T1 and Faker received the “playoff” buff.
How T1 failed this time: T1 won the quarterfinals in the playoffs convincingly against the newly formed DRX.
However, it ended in the semifinals: Once again, T1 shattered against Gen G., the old rival. The bitter part is that T1 had no chance this time. They were eliminated from the playoffs with a 0-3 score. Gen G. looked remarkably strong.
The mid-laner from Gen G., Bdd, took all 3 MVP titles with Orianna and Syndra. Faker’s direct opponent ended up with 8 kills and an impressive 19 assists: In the first two games, Bdd didn’t die at all; only in game 3 did he fall twice.
Faker played Viktor and Zoe. He ended the series with a single kill, died 6 times, and only got 3 assists.
LoL fans harshly judged on reddit: The previously hyped T1 was absolutely hopeless against Gen G. Now, people rave about Bdd just as they once did about Faker in his best times.
The big dreams of the coaches envisioned T1 reaching the finals and beating the world champions DAMWON Gaming. But they won’t even get to face the final boss:
