In soccer, we often hear educators and trainers say that the important thing in the training of young people is versatility. They don't necessarily look for results at all costs, but they try to instill a soccer IQ in them, by having them play in several different positions so that they understand the whole field.

Is this something that is applicable on CS? Or is it better to specialize a player quickly to maximize his chances of being chosen by a team as a sniper/entry, etc.?

I didn't know this idea from soccer training centers, but that's what I told my players at first. From the beginning, I explained to them that the scene was very closed, so if they wanted to break through, they had to apply as soon as a place became available, no matter what the role was.

If a player like misutaaa is a B anchor on CT-side and entry on T-side, and tomorrow Vitality is looking for a A anchor and a lurker, they won't think about him. On the other hand, if you know how to play everything and you play everything correctly, you will be on their shortlist and you will have more chances to join the team.

On CS:GO you are obliged, at some point, to play different roles, even if you don't like it too much. But for example, we used to do trainings, even whole weeks, where I changed the roles completely. I'd move Kevin from lurk to entry, I'd move them around to do my own trials, but also, and most importantly, so they'd learn the roles, so they'd know how to react to what was going on the server. So for me, being able to play all the positions is mandatory, except maybe the role of sniper.

Even the in-game leader position, I tell my players that they all have to be able to lead a minimum. An in-game leader is just the one who gives an idea, an impulse on the round, it's mostly a question of will. In my idea, a Tier 1 player, he has to be able to play all positions.

That's why, in Vitality, there have been quite a few changes of roles and positions, they've put RpK in A, Kevin in B on Mirage, and so on. Even if they're not super comfortable, they need to be able to play all the positions.

For a long time on the French scene the newcomers have been put in ungrateful positions : DEVIL, bodyy, rodeN, even today misutaaa and Nivera have not been put in their preferred positions. Do you find it normal that a young player must first "prove himself" before being able to request anything? Isn't there a responsibility from the teams in the way they scout the recruits?

It's easy to have an opinion from the outside, but if I had the opportunity to have a team like Vitality, which recruits misutaaa and Nivera, my mentality would be to put them in their best positions, it's coherent with what I've been doing for 2 and a half years. The idea is to ease their transition from the lower level to the Tier 1. If you put a young person in ungrateful positions while you have your career made, but you want to keep your stats and roles, it's a bit selfish.

But I understand. It's like in soccer, when you're the new kid, you sit where they tell you to sit. In life in general, when you're a young kid, you do other people's dirty work, that's how it works. But does that help the player integrate and therefore the team's results? That's debatable.

Maybe that's why misutaaa had a hard time at the beginning. For other players, it's even worse, maybe that's what killed a DEVIL's career for example. Sometimes you have to put your ego aside and unfortunately, in France, the egos of the players are huge.

As for me, I put my ego aside and if I'm called a loser, I don't care. If I'm good at what I do and the team I coach is good, I'm 32 years old, being insulted by an idiot on the Internet goes right over my head. At a higher level, the players have their own little comforts and they don't like to be pushed around too much. So I don't really agree with giving young people ungrateful tasks, but I understand where that comes from.

It's in line with the idea that the top of the French scene took a long time to trust young people, we had little renewal before the arrival of ZywOo. Beyond the ego of the top players, wasn't there a question regarding the level of the young players at the time? Do you think that the fact that people like you, AsP or krL didn't make the transition to Global Offensive could have hindered the emergence of young players before 2018?

To be honest, I think that if I had continued to play without interruption, I wouldn't be the person I am today. I might be like some top players, with a big ego, you never know what would have happened. That's why I understand how they react to this, because I could have been like them.

Afterwards I was always a teamplayer, trying  to be empathetic, so maybe I would have been a little bit less affected by this problem, but maybe I would have been an asshole. So I can't really say that if krL, AsP or me would have stayed on top of the game, we could have dedicated ourselves like that to get the young people out. Maybe I would have just taken my salary, I would have played my game without worrying about young players. So it would be a lie to pretend that I could have done that earlier.

On the other hand, as far as training is concerned, this is something that the current teams and players should have thought about 3 or 4 years ago, with real investment. In France, I don't think there's anyone who has done what I've been doing for the last two and a half years, except maybe wallax. He did it with ZywOo in particular, even if when ZywOo came with wallax, he was already the best player of the team and one of the best in the country. But he tried to do the same kind of project, taking little known players and making them go up. It's not for me to judge whether he succeeded or not, but he had his projects.

He even had a little more money than me because he had teams and structures that followed him, like *aAa*. I have been paid 0 euros. For almost 3 years that I have been working hard on this, I haven't received any salary, the only money I have earned is the tournaments that I have won personally.

The question is what if structures had put some money on people like me or wallax a few years ago - or even today, it's never too late - to coach players and help young people make the transition to the top ? We might have had other players who would have come out. The whole period when I wasn't active, when the top of the scene was building up, we didn't have those investments and we felt the consequences until recently. It has had an impact on the French subtop, which today is at a really low level.

Speaking of these investments, there was the trend of the academies for a while, we remember EnVyUs in 2017.

For me, this was not an academy. The players were already old and well known, it was a second team, a reserve, but not an academy. Guys like Lambert, JaCkz, VKLL, PetitSkel, hAdji, they were all 25 years old, it wasn't an academy.

There were rumors about a G2.Academy with misutaa as a figurehead too. Were you involved in that project?

I have to say that I laughed a lot when I read the information that came out by the great reporters and by your colleagues. There was never any mention of a G2.Academy as such. It was about entities around G2 that could take a team. G2 never wanted an academy, whether for financial or ethical reasons, to avoid conflicts of interest. The idea was an entity close to them that would have served as a bridge for G2.

The thing is that G2 went international and the project took a nosedive. But if G2 had remained French, my team would probably have joined a structure affiliated to G2. With the same principle as between North and AGF Esports.

If it had worked out with G2 Esports, and they had given you the keys to the ship, how do you imagine this project, what is your ideal vision? Are we just talking Wonderkids with a structure and salaries? Did you have an idea on how to articulate the interactions with the first team? We remember that this was the problem at Envy, they had the same tag but they had no contact with the players and staff of the first team.

At Envy, there was no real global reflection around the academy. For us, we were already pretty well organized, and the project I wanted to do was to coordinate with the management of the main team. I wanted to know how they wanted to train and mould the players so that I could prepare them for the first team, in case of burnout, a kick, a need for a 6th player. So a real collaboration with the staff of the first team.

In the older generations, the rise of a young player was mainly done through TeamSpeak and community Mumbles, where pickups were organized. Today, a player like ZywOo admits that he never really hung out on these chans, he just played FaceIt with his buddies. Nivera seemed to be in the same situation.

We have players who arrive with other types of reflexes, more individualistic, they don't necessarily play regularly with a leader and a collective framework, they learn another CS. For someone who, like you, is trying to discover and train new players, does that make your job easier or more difficult?

For me, the FaceIt is just an indication of skill. That's why my second project, next to the main Wonderkids team, was to continuously scout the scene to find other players to join the team and make up for early departures. What I wanted to do, and still want to do, is a complete scan of the scene, see the profiles and make selections to open the door to clusters of players. But at least do some pre-selection and targeting of unknown players.

It's a job that nobody has done in France and that I'd like to be able to do, find the future misutaaa, Nivera, ZywOo, etc. But it takes a lot of time, and I work, I have a family life, I can't be full time on this without pay. That's why I asked, when we were negotiating with structures for Wonderkids, to be paid on a full-time basis to do this detection work.

I didn't ask for 10,000 euros, around 2,000-2,500 euros, which was more than enough for me to live on. And when you see what the players earn, it doesn't seem like an exaggerated request.

Just this investment that I asked for and that I am still asking for, for the future of the structure and the French scene, there is no team that has been able to say yes to me. That's why I made a tweet that got people talking by reminding them that a year ago, nobody wanted the Wonderkids project, whereas now everybody wants the players.

No one in France has the soul of an investor, we only have scared people who count their money and then invest unnecessarily on the side. If you spend your money in the right place, like a real business leader, you have an entrepreneurial intelligence, you know that going after young players is the way to go.

When I asked the structures 100k/year to have salaries for the 5 players, plus a coach and travel expenses, I asked them for a maximum of 2 months of payroll of a pro team. Sometimes even less than a month. How much does that represent for them, invested over a year and which, if you think carefully, can bring you more or save you money?

For example, if Vitality or G2 had taken Wonderkids from the beginning, with misutaaa, Nivera, sabAAAA, Python, Kyojin and me, they would have potential income from the sale of these players.

Today, a player like misutaaa or Nivera, you can easily sell him for 70 000 or 100 000 €, and just on one sale you pay back the investment of the full year. I didn't understand why you can't think like that when you're the manager of a structure. It means that you lack long-term vision, it's a total aberration. And on the other hand, I see that they spend 10 000 €/month for mental coaches, it's terrible.

The management, the strategy, are bad, when you see that they snubbed me a year ago, and 8 months later they find themselves paying for the players that I brought to them on a plate. It's completely backwards.

That's the problem with the French scene, there's never been anyone who's taken things in hand intelligently. We never gave people like me the opportunity to really contribute for what we were able to bring to the table. So maybe I'm a stranger to them, after all I don't have a lot of followers, so they don't consider me. It's a problem today, the number of followers has become too important in assessing a person's talents on the French scene.

When misutaaa came in Vitality, apEX cited you and said it was great that there were people like you who took care of young people, train them. And in the same interview, he later explained that when they got misutaaa, he started from scratch and they had to teach him everything. What did you understand in that? How far can a subtop leader take a player in his knowledge and preparation to the top?

It's funny that you bring this up because it also struck me when I was watching the interview on the live broadcast. I'm not sure if he mentioned me personally but whatever, I don't care about the fame. But for him to say that the player had to start from scratch, I wanted to say "why are you recruiting him then?" If he has so many limitations, why do you take him, it's paradoxical. Does that mean that everything we did for two and a half years was useless?

So I went to see him on Steam, because Dan is a friend of mine, to ask him for explanations. He told me that he had expressed himself badly, and that the message had come out wrong. He wanted to say that if we had have more resources for the young players, we would have had more time and we could have trained misutaaa even better for the Tier 1 level. On that, he is right. I can only playing 3 hours a day and I have to manage a whole team, I can't go into the intricate details, the complex aspects, I can only do the most important thing.

What apEX meant is that for a team that is almost top 1 world, he lacked things, and that makes sense. For example, in terms of communication, misutaaa was really not good. It wasn't for lack of telling him that he needed to improve on that, that he needed to communicate more in the game. But if the player doesn't make the effort on his own, I can't play for him.

So I think when apEX says that, it's really about communication: he saw the mismatch between misutaaa's communication and the Tier 1 requirements on that front. So we can say that a player hasn't learned anything, but it's also the player's responsibility to practice and be careful with everything they're told.

Overall, obviously misutaaa has the basics, he has all the basics. But of course he has a lot of room for improvement on certain points. On communication, I've brought him from 0% to 30%, but 30% is still not enough for Tier 1. It's up to them to take over and continue his progress. It's something I could do, but not under the current circumstances, with 5 players at the same time and only 3 hours a day of training.

It's been almost 3 years now that you have dedicated yourself to the training, to the scouting, you have brought up misutaaa, Nivera, Python, I saw that you have played with jeyN too...

Ah jeyN we can talk about it too ! jeyN, it was me who took him after PoliaKing gave me his name. At the end of 2018, we were looking for a player, many suspected jeyN of cheat and he asked me if I was still willing to take him. I offered him to do a couple of practices with us to see what he was worth, and I gave him the opportunity to join the team, win the Epsilan #16 two months later (Make Your Destiny - flex0r, BaWaN, misutaaa, jeyN, PoliaKing) and make top 2 at a GamingGen we should have won.

After that, there was internal conflicts between PoliaKing, BaWaN and jeyN and I shut everyone out. I kicked everyone and, eventually, they got back together and teamed up against me, even though I had given them everything. As a thank you, they spat at me.

Afterwards, jeyN was recruited by Heretics and it was Cyril Michel, the agent and brother of kennyS, who came to see me and asked me what I thought of jeyN. I could very well have shot him down and told him not to take him. But I advised him to take him, I told him that he was very strong, that he had a bit of a special character but that he was a very good player, and he was taken.

I don't even know if he knows that, jeyN, so he insulted me, he unfollowed me everywhere, deleted me Steam, what an awful mentality.