Jose "F1RE" Maria Iznardo Salar, head coach of tenth-place team ZETA in the Domino's Superliga for only one split, has resigned from his position. Last year, the Spanish team finished tenth in Spring and ninth in Summer; yet another tenth-place finish was unpalatable. However, the organization abandoned its Winter split roster identity too late in the offseason, and it failed to secure the players F1RE was aiming to sign.
Like many ERL teams, ZETA pivoted to building its roster around content creation and notoriety this year, following in the footsteps of Marc "Caedrel" Lamont's absurdly successful Los Ratones. Daniel Esteban "ElOjoNinja" Vaquero Cotilla, a Twitch streamer with almost 100k followers on Twitter, and Isaac "ptt" Flores Alvarado, an ERL veteran and former EU LCS player under the name PePiiNeRO, were the core of that roster strategy.
Unfortunately, the team fell flat on its face, going 0-9 in the Winter Split Round Robin stage.
Looking ahead to Spring Split
For Spring, ZETA has picked up Turkish toplaner Kerem "
Sangrod" Güzel, Swiss jungler Romeo "
Sriffow" Branca, Portuguese midlaner and former LVP champion Francisco José "
Xico" Cruz Antunes, and Austrian botlaner Felix "
Mauki" Grohs. Mauki was
recently replaced by Kobbe on the NLC roster of Venomcrest Esports, as reported by Sheep Esports. ZETA is set to retain only Spanish support Javier "
escoX" Escobedo Sevilla from its Winter Split roster.
With the exception of Xico, the new roster has little-to-no experience at the ERL level — some have solid Division 2 resumes, but a team this raw isn't likely to find success in the Superliga. With the organization unable to match his competitive ambitions or secure the talent he sought to compete with, F1RE chose to resign from his position.
The former head coach had a wealth of Tier 1 experience as an Analyst in the LEC and LCS — since 2019, F1RE has worked with Schalke 04, Misfits Gaming, Cloud9, CLG, and Astralis. If ZETA managed to retain him, the coach would have likely been a key asset as the organization tries to reverse its trend of consistently bottom-tier results.
