LoL: Pad becomes Team Vitality’s Head Coach, Mac Head of Coaching Development

Patrick “Pad” Suckow-Breum become Team Vitality’s Head Coach in the LEC for 2026, with the assistant coach Mauro "Garih" Garih Vidal being promoted. James "Mac" MacCormack is leaving the coaching staff, he will be moving on as Head of Coaching Development for Vitality, where he will serve as the cornerstone of coaching development within the organization.

It was a difficult year for Vitality in the LEC — one marked by several coaching staff adjustments during the season — the team brought in Yasin "Nisqy" Dinçer as support to replace Zdravets "Hylissang" Galabov in Spring, followed by Kadir "Fleshy" Kemiksiz, who took over the role in Summer. The roster never truly clicked, finishing seventh in both Winter and Spring, and sixth in Summer — their best result of the year.

After their tiebreaker loss to Team Heretics in Spring, Fabien "Neo" Devide and Nicolas Maurer, co-founders of the Hive, addressed the situation during a live stream, where Neo stated: “I told the coaches this would be their last chance. If there were no results in Summer, they’d be let go. [...] They’ve had two years to prove themselves.”

Pad has spent several years in the role of assistant coach, but that hasn’t always been the case. After a very brief playing career in 2017, he quickly transitioned into coaching — first in the Danish local circuit, before expanding across Europe with experiences in the UK, Spain, and Portugal. In 2021, he joined MAD Lions as an assistant coach, where he met Mac and Christophe "Kaas" van Oudheusden.

They remained there until the end of 2023, when Mac, for family reasons, was unable to attend the World Championship. Pad then stepped up as head coach for the event in South Korea, where the team was eliminated from the Swiss Stage with a 1–3 record. At the start of 2024, Mac and Pad both joined Vitality to build a new project as the organization entered a new era. However, the following two years were far from successful, with their best result being a fourth-place finish in Spring 2024.