Q: After you left First Stand, how are you watching? What are you taking away from that loss?
Spawn: I mean, the CFO match I just watched in person. I had a plane to catch later that day, I had to leave the venue during Game 2. I’d already done draft when on stage with the guys, and then Game 2 happened. Obviously the next day we come together for HLE, give it a good crack. But it still wasn’t good enough to get a win.
So, my initial response was very disappointed. I think that that was kind of uniform across the whole team. I feel like in the past, when we’ve gone to international events, we started kind of middling and then being able to ramp a little bit. I feel like this was the first international event where we came in at an okay level beating KC and then just fell away over the tournament. It felt like a little bit of regression [from] where our previous international tournaments have been.
I would say a little bit of disappointment. Then I would say, at the same time — and I speak to the players about this a lot — I feel like the most you learn in League of Legends is when you get smashed internationally.
We still talk about the TES series from MSI last year nearly two or three times a week in scrims: what they were doing, the way that they were playing the game, the way it made us play the game. [Though] I was disappointed, I wanted to stress to the guys that there’s no better time to improve than right now.
Q: Just out of curiosity on logistics, are you calling them right after the series is done?
Spawn: Not necessarily. I’m either on a call already, which is how I do 99% of the games, either in the screen room, or backstage. I’m already on a call talking to the coaches or, if the setup isn’t allowed, I’m not calling them until they get back to facility. After the HLE games, I think they all had like an hour of press. So I’m just trying to grab people like one on one in calls and like check the mood, check the attitude, figure out like where everyone else’s headspace is at. That one was a little bit more difficult because there’s so much press after you’re eliminated from an international tournament.
But yeah, in an ideal world, I’m already on a call with all the coaches and I can see their reactions. I can see everything. I had Myron, who’s our video guy, sending me reaction clips of all the guys just to make sure that I understood exactly what they were feeling.
Q: That’s so interesting — you get to see all of their expressions, right?
Spawn: You should see my screen set up. I’ve got cameras everywhere throughout the TL facility. Seeing when they arrive, them sitting at their desks, and what they look like. Got two cameras in the review room and the main camera that they talk to, and a camera in the coach’s room.
I’m Big Brother. And all of the cameras have audio, so if I wanna hear what anyone’s saying at any point, I just listen.
Q: Yesterday TL released a video with you debating against “Reddit” coaches. As the TL head coach, people are always telling you how to do your job — how does it feel to finally get to respond?
Spawn: Yeah. I mean, I’m kind of caught in between. Because on one hand, I’ve now been a part of Team Liquid for 5 years. I know the pressure that comes with being on TL. I know the expectations internally from Steven and Dodo, there’s a lot of pressure there.
And I know the pressure from our fans. And I actually welcome it. I always say to the fans — as long as you guys cheer for us as loud when we win as you hate on us when we lose, then I’m good with it. I think that’s a fantastic relationship. Keep us accountable, but if we win, celebrate it with us. That’s what I always wanna feel.
To be fair to the fans, they were really critical of APA and Yeon — now that APA and Yeon are playing better League of Legends, they’re celebrating really loudly as well. I think that the fans do a pretty good job of it.
[That said,] I think responding to the fans can be quite dangerous, because you’re playing in an uneven playing field. I have 100% of information about the team (well, I hope I have a 100% of information about the team), [but] they have like 20%. We’re just having an uneven conversation, and I don’t want to speak down to people because of that uneven conversation.
However, when it is something that they get to prepare for — because they got to prepare and I didn’t really — and they get to come onto the show, then it was very, very fun, to be honest. I was just told to like pick like random topics that I wanted to talk to Redditors about. Some of them I knew, some of them I didn’t. But it was a really, really fun piece of content. I love arguing with people about League of Legends.
That’s what I pretty much did for, like, an hour and a half.
Q: APA had a quote that circulated a lot in the First Stand vlog: “I’m not an idiot. I see everyone calling for UmTi’s head since the start of the year. But honestly I don’t think anyone on this roster is replaceable.” Can you talk a bit more about that?
Spawn: I mean, first of all, I don’t necessarily agree with Eain’s full quote. I think that we’re all replaceable to some extent — the day that we start acting like we’re irreplaceable, is the day that we stop working hard. And if we don’t work hard enough, then we’re just going to be shit, and then we should be replaced.
I think that work ethic in sport trumps nearly everything, so I don’t necessarily agree that no one on the roster is irreplaceable.
I think what Eain is saying is, at our best, we are the best roster, and I think that’s probably a true statement, given the fact that we’ve won two out of the last three splits. And the split we lost, we went undefeated up until the very last day of the season, and then lost in the grand final. We’ve had a really good journey as a roster.
Q: Until you lost to minions.
Spawn: We lost to FlyQuest. Like, you know, the minions meme is good, but I think FLY did play better than us. That day they played better than us, and at Worlds for sure. What I’m trying to say is I can’t remember a time (outside of the 4-peat Team Liquid) where a team has played as consistently dominant for TL as this roster.
Now, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for improvement in the roster. Every single day I’m there pushing, people like UmTi, Impact — on certain days, even Eain and Yeon — to get better every single day. I’m not happy with our current level, to call a spade a spade.
I thought that we were quite fortunate to win split one. There’s a lot of hard work that goes into getting fortunate; we got a couple of teams on good days for us and that’s happened to us in the past. So we feel like it was our time to get a little bit lucky as well, but that’s sport. You just have to be the best team on the day.
UmTi’s in a slump right now. If you asked UmTi, “Are you in a slump right now?”, he would tell you he’s in a slump right now. Like he’s not shy about it either. But it’s my job, as a head coach, to get him to perform like the best jungler for TL until he’s out of the slump or until he’s replaced. And, you know, I believe in him. So up until that very last second, if we ever did replace him, I would be really pushing him to get better as a jungler, and to do the things that the team needs him to do, for us to win.
Q: Do you think that public pressure has affected you guys?
Spawn: I don’t think so. I think, actually, what happened at First Stand can be accounted for by a few things. As you said, at Worlds we didn’t play very well. We went away from Worlds, we tried to work our asses off. It was to mixed success. Some of us worked very hard, some of us needed to work a little bit harder. And that’s what we’re talking about behind the scenes, to fix a core group of issues.
What you guys saw in split one was us working on those issues. APA is playing way more Azir, opening up the champion pool. I think UmTi’s our most fearless player — he was on Maokai Sej duty pretty much all of last year. And now he played, I think, 11 champions during Split 1.
And they’re to mixed success guys. I’m not saying he came out and played 11 champion terrifically, but I’m saying our job as a team was to open up our champion pools, and try and get used to fearless.
So we put a lot of work into all of that, and then what stayed integral to our game plan was our ability that — when we had bad matchups — to be able to lane swap out.
Not that we used it as a crutch, but I think strategically we were one of the best lane swap teams in the world. And then Riot took a big hammer and smashed lane swaps into the ground literally five days before First Stand.
So I love that people say other teams were disadvantaged by First Stand, because if anyone was disadvantaged by what happened before FST, it was us. One of our primary strategies, that we put a lot of time into perfecting, mastering, and even inventing to a certain point, just was removed from the game completely. So, you know, that impacts our ability to play.
Now, that’s not an excuse because I hate excuses. That’s a reason, but to say that’s why we lost is not good enough. Everyone played on the same playing field, right? So we need to be better, and we need to go away and put in the work. We need to fix a lot of the things in our early laning phase, and our ability to move around the map and generate the lane swaps after four minutes.
Honestly, I think it was a large contributing factor as to why you [saw] a different TL show up — because the TL you’re used to seeing is probably a fluid, moving around the map, interacting with each other’s lanes Team Liquid. And I didn’t see it either. So we need to fix it.
Q: Especially in the new vlog, and in previous interviews, there’s a disconnect between Yeon’s champions and his ability to 1v9.
Spawn: I mean, there’s always a sentiment. Everyone has a game plan until they get punched in the face. I think Mike Tyson famously said that. We got punched in the face. Yeon had a bad reaction to getting punched in the face. I was fine with the reaction, and I was also fine with Eain’s follow-up to his reaction.
There’s a lot of things circulating about the Ziggs pick in particular, because I wasn’t the one drafting that. It was Swiffer. But I probably would have done the same thing, because Corki’s our answer to Yone. Last time we played Ziggs into Yone, I think Quid solo killed Eain 3 times and 100T beat us. So we don’t love the matchup.
So when they flex and put Doggo on a suboptimal ADC (Tristana), we feel like we can flex and put Yeon on Ziggs. Yeon had like 8 or 9 Ziggs games in the scrims leading up to it — hadn’t been in a little while, but it was a percent. […] a couple of his satchels that game were honestly teamfight-winning satchels, so I don’t think he played the, game particularly poorly and I don’t think we lost because of the Ziggs pick.
That kind of hits the first part of your question, because I know a lot of people are interested in what happened there.
The second part of the question is [the contrast] of Yeon v 9, as we like to call it, vs the nice stable Yeon that he likes to play. The reality of the situation is, when you go out there […] and you say, “I need to play a 10 out of 10 to win this game,” you open yourself up to a whole bunch of mistakes, because you’re going for every little bit out of the play.
If you make mistakes, your game crumbles very, very early. So I think what Yeon is saying is he likes to be able to play himself into the game, and he doesn’t feel like there are many champions in League of Legends (which there aren’t) that win from minute 1 to minute ~35 when the nexus [explodes].
So he needs to be able to play minute 1 to minute 20, and have Eain, UmTi, or Impact play the twenty to thirty five. Sometimes it’s even Core, like we play Zyra in the bot lane, these late game scaling champions.
Or it needs to be flipped: Eain needs to be on the early game driver, and then Yeon needs to be a passenger until he can take over. Now, obviously there are some different champions that aren’t like that. Varus, for example, can carry from literally wave three through to the end of the game. And they’re the champions that Yeon is best on. As you said, it’s because he’s one of the best players in North America.
But I just think that he wants to feel like he’s a part of a winning team, where we’re helping each other at different points of the game. He really does care about winning more than anything else. As long as the nexus is dying at the end of the game, then he’s gonna be fine with the journey that we take to get there.
In saying that, it’s my job as a coach to set up my best players to carry the most important parts of it. Did I do that at FST? Probably not, and therefore I probably failed the team a little bit.
But it is quite hard in the current meta […] that’s something that I’ve been looking at since First Stand, and how different teams of the tournament were able to do it to different success. Like, I was very interested in how CFO played the group stage, but then I was also very interested with how they lost to KC.
So we’ll take a look at everything we did, and what other teams did to cover their weaknesses and boost up their strengths. And we’ll aim to be a better team.
Q: How much does Fearless limit Yeon’s ability to carry? There are so few marksmen, so does he have to flex to more unique/fringe champions?
Spawn: Yeah, potentially — what you’re saying is really interesting. So let’s get away from the role of ADC, let’s talk about the [marksmen] in the game for a little bit.
There’s normally two baskets. There’s utility heavy marksman, which is like Ashe, Varus kind of picks. And then there’s DPS kind of marksmen. And then there’s a whole spectrum in the middle, with like Ezreal being in the very middle of that, probably with Varus, but like across the board, that’s kind of where they sit.
So, what you need to get good at as an ADC (as we see the best ADCs in the world doing) is being able to play both those styles — of, you know, very, very high DPS, but also very good utility carries. I think that’s where Yeon thrives.
I think there’s a third thing that you’re kind of alluding to, the marksman that [are] the creative pick in game 4 or game 5. The Yasuo, Syndra, or Ziggs bottom lane. Or when Hjarnan used to play Heimerdinger. Where are these creative ADCs? What’s their place in the game? And Nilah and Samira fit into that category as well.
Historically, we have leaned on that quite hard, because the meta has allowed it. We didn’t feel like the meta was great for those picks this tournament, so we were kind of staying more traditional. But Yeon and I have been together for five years now. We’ve played Yasuo full tank bottom lane; we have some experience playing these things even on stage.
We’ll keep working at it, and try and open up his champion pool. Now I think what actually happened at FST is there were a couple of teams that we ran into and we just called it “The Wall.”
When you get to that level internationally, and you’re good, if you’re playing a losing matchup or a slightly negative matchup, they’re just so good at putting up The Wall. In NA, we would push through that wall. One dive and the game would just crack, and like their whole laning phase would be over.
But they’re just so good at giving one creep as opposed to taking a bad HP trade. They’re so good at getting zoned off XP, but then getting back ASAP. They’re so good at taking bad recalls, but coming back into a lane healthy.
So you can chip away at the wall, but it’s very hard to like push through and shatter it. And I think that that resistance is actually probably the main takeaway that we learned as a team — our walls in other lanes that needed to hold were crumbling.
We were going down thousands of gold in the laning phase, and their walls that we were trying to break through were keeping it within 400-500 gold. When you’re playing a full Giant’s Belt down in some matchup, that’s untenable. When you’re playing a Long Sword or a Doran’s Blade down, that’s completely fine. I think that’s what Yeon ran into.
That was the large measure of his frustration. He felt like he was good enough to break the game, and maybe we let him down as utility players, or in draft or whatever. But the reality of the situation is we ran into a couple of walls.
Q: How does NA help you practice then? Everyone always says they get away with stuff domestically that they wouldn’t internationally.
Spawn: So the good news — and like I’ve kind of said this since summer last year — is that TL, FLY, and C9 are all really good scrim partners. I think that that’s why we saw the most competitive split that NA’s had in a long time last summer. Up until the very end, we did not think we were a huge favorite going against FLY in the Grand Finals [of Summer 2024]. We knew that we’re a really fucking good team. So the good news is that it is changing. We do feel like there’s good teams in North America to actually scrim against.
It’s not like every team in the region is fantastic, and I don’t think any every team in any region is fantastic. But I think the practice quality is improving.
And then, we [also work on] what we call shadowboxing. I’m sure you’ve talked to Eain about it before, but it’s like, “Okay, we went for this plan that was successful. But when we actually break down the mechanics of the play, or break down the steps that we went through make this play successful, is it actually something that would work? Is replicable on the world stage?”
And we have to be really, really critical about that stuff. And honestly, it’s a large source of our arguments on the team. What is acceptable gameplay, and what is not acceptable? […]
I remember one time we scrimmed Gen.G at Worlds, they’re like tri-laning and trying out all this shit and we’re winning scrims and it feels great at the time, but then you get on stage and they feel absolutely unstoppable. So it’s like, you know, how much of this can you actually take seriously?
You have to sit down at some point, and look at the game with like no filter on. No lenses and no bullshit, and be like, “Are we playing good enough?”. Your eyes will tell you a lot of the time if you’re playing good enough. So we do that a lot.
The last thing that we need to do a lot more is stop using excuses. Like I hate the NA’s shit excuse, because it means that my players aren’t playing enough solo queue.
If you’re APA, you’ve got like Quid to play against, and Quad. Up and coming mid laners like Toasty. Saint’s running around in solo queue. There are enough good, solid, solo queue players that you can get solid practice [against].
I could list the same thing for every single role. As long as you’re high enough ELO, as long as you’re sitting towards the top of the leaderboard, (which unfortunately, at the moment, we’re not), you get good matchups. Now I understand getting there is a little bit painful, but it’s your fucking job.
Getting up at 03:30 in the morning isn’t necessarily fun for me either, but that’s what we do. That’s why we get paid. As long as we wanna keep getting paid, we gotta do the work.
Q: Speaking of solid practice, do you think streaming scrims, maybe helping worse teams improve, would improve your practice overall?
Spawn: I mean, to be completely clear, teams not watching us scrim (from my perspective) has next to zero to to do with our gameplay. It’s actually more to do with our attitude and how we talk to each other.
I just have to be very careful, as the coach, what gets out there — because, you know, Eain and Yeon have the smallest blow up they’ve had all year. And we’re like “Alright, that’s fine to go into SQUAD. No one’s gonna think anything of that.” And everyone instantly is like, “Yeon’s a terrible teammate. Eain’s the captain of the team.”
All of those statements are incorrect, by the way. Core’s the captain of the team. Sometimes Eain says good things, which he did in that clip, but that doesn’t mean that he’s more of a leader or less of a leader than Yeon, because Yeon leads in his own unique way as well.
People would know this if they listen to my AMAs or interviews: I’m a really honest-first kind of guy. If there are cameras on, and microphones on, people don’t feel like they can go up to Yeon after a bad game and say, “Well, fucking say something then. Do this. Play better on this window.”
Sometimes it comes across a little bit toxic. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s like, “Hey, Yeon, did you say this word here? Did you know that they had information on this play? Did you know that Core was showing like this? This looks really silly and hard, right?”
And sometimes it’s like, “What the fuck are you doing here? Stop running down my game. Get your head in the game, go wash your face or whatever and focus up.”
And I think that the reason we can take that is we know what’s internalized. We’ve never had a leak from our internal bubble. We’ve done a very good job of like creating an Us vs Them mentality. So for my team, as a coach, if I was like, “Alright, now we’re opening it all up, then I’m turning on every camera and webcam on guys”, […] that’s crazy to me to think about, right?
When people think that it’s a competitive advantage because of gameplay, it’s really not that to me. The attitude and the environment that we’ve fostered at TL, I think is something special. I’m kind of hesitant. It doesn’t mean I’ll never do it — because if there’s good reasons to do it, and someone can give me that, then I’ll do it. But I’m hesitant to expose us to that sunlight, because much like the decrepit vampires we are, there is a chance that we just burn up and you never see us again.
Q: You’ve talked about taking care of your family and dividing responsibility before, especially taking care of your young son with autism. Any shoutouts for your family or team?
Spawn: Absolutely. I mean, shout out to my two beautiful boys. Jasper’s the one that you’re mentioning, he has autism. The people won’t see this, just reading the interview, but my whole house is covered in solar system and space stuff. It’s his area of acute interest. It’s cool. He’s super into it. So shout out to Jasper and Henry. Henry is my littlest one. And then my beautiful partner, Jenna, as always, she’s the one that supports me through all of this.
And then shout out to my team. I know it’s hard at the moment, because we need to fix some things. But we will, and then we’ll get back to the top.