ESL apologizes for hosting Americas RMR in Sweden
When ESL first announced the IEM Road to Rio RMR locations for Europe, Asia, and the Americas, there was anger, confusion, and harsh criticism that targeted the tournament organizer for failing to place the Americas RMR in its own region. While the European RMR will be held in Malta (EU) and the Asia RMR will be held in Melbourne (AUS), the Americas RMR was announced to be held in Stockholm, Sweden.
In ESL's defense, they noted that hosting the RMR in North America "should ensure that all teams participating in the IEM Road to Rio Americas can benefit from a familiar location and avoid the significant visa application and processing delays faced by many countries, incl. the USA, which could have otherwise jeopardized their attendance." This comes in the wake of IEM Dallas in June, which was plagued by teams failing to have their full rosters due to the harsh visa requirements for entering the United States.
In a statement, Shaun "Apollo" Clark, Director of Product Management at ESL, stated:
We (or I) take accountability for not meeting the expectations we are held to, or should uphold ourselves. It’s very simple, the Americas RMR should have taken place from either North or South America. I am not here to point towards excuses or add deeper rationale behind a poor decision, we simply were too slow in taking the appropriate action which led to the tournament taking place in a visa-neutral country.
At this point, we can’t reverse this, for any teams wanting to arrive earlier we are working on connecting them to or suggesting potential boot camp locations to optimise conditions ahead of the competition. Not our remedy but what we'll go through.
It’s important we get these things right, we got caught up in optimising logistics and we lost sight of what was the right thing to do / best for the community.
In a follow-up tweet, Apollo included tags to Jason "Moses" O'Toole and Richard Lewis, the two most vocal critics of ESL's decision in the last few days. In describing the decision, Moses called the move "insane" and "embarrassing". Richard Lewis was equally harsh towards ESL, saying that you "Can't help but feel there was some kind of way to foresee these issues", noting that they were acutely aware of the visa concerns due to the aforementioned IEM Dallas event.
As to why ESL chose not to host the RMR in Brazil, where Americans would conceivably not have any concerns with visas, Ulrich Schulze stated that the original plan was to cover all key regions of the world with events, with only Brazil having the Major. Schulze continued; "By the time it became clear that the visa situation for the US would not resolve, only feasible fallback was one of our existing facilities."
With the clock ticking away, teams from the Americas will have endure the difficulty of crossing into Europe to make it for their own regional qualifier while the rest of the world has a much less strenuous travel schedule. But hey, maybe they can get some European practice in during this time.
