According to sources close to Sheep Esports, current Movistar Riders awper Antonio "Martinez" Martinez has reached an agreement with 9z Team.
Antonio "Martinez" is an awper who was the replacement for SunPayus after his departure to ENCE. He has shown decent stats in T2 despite his team struggling with a satisfying 1.1 rating overall in the last 6 months, by far the best rating of his team.
Spanish Counter-Strike wobbles
Movistar joined CS:GO in 2017 with a full spanish roster. Since then, they have always had a roster consisting of 5 spanish players, only changing this principle very recently as they brought european players to their team. Spanish CS has lived and breathed through Movistar Riders' performance, while 2017 to 2019 were hash years for the iberian kingdom, MRS started to bring better and better results after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Establishing themselves as a strong team in T2 CS, Movistar set their eyes on the big events in the hope of finally placing Spain on the CS map. Spanish glory was brought in 2022 as Movistar reached top 4 of one of the biggest event of the year : IEM Cologne, to everyone's surprise. The same year they also qualified to Antwerpen major, the first time for any spanish team.
But MRS could never truly rise to tier1 CS, following their impressive semi-finals run at Cologne, their star player Alvaro "SunPayus" Garcia would be picked up by finnish org ENCE.
The loss was too big for Movistar who heavily relied on their star sniper. This year's ESL Pro League still was a fairly good result for the spanish team as they reached top 8, but as Ninjas in Pyjamas picked up Alejandro "ALEX" Masanet, the team's captain, it was clear that MRS was reaching a dead end. With the loss of Martinez, the Spanish CS is in danger with the difficulty of finding a replacement that will make the project not need too much time to adapt.
