LoL: Legendary Russian player (29) wants to support family, signs with small team – is now desperate

In League of Legends, the 29-year-old Russian Danil “Diamondprox” Reshetnikov is considered a veteran, he went to the world championships four times, the first time in 2012. In May 2022 he wanted to support his family with LoL and signed with a Norwegian team. Half a year later, the Russian seems to have lost faith in e-sports.

Who is Diamondprox?

• The now 29-year-old Russian comes from St. Petersburg and was already a big hit in the first seasons of League of Legends, more than 10 years ago: in 2011 he made a name for himself as a jungler on “Team Empire”, whose core later when Moscow Five and Gambit Gaming had great success in Europe.
• He played as a jungler and shone on champs like Lee Sin, Nasus or Volibear. The Russian was seen as someone who could single-handedly establish champs as good jungle picks in the early seasons, even when heroes were actually considered weak.
• Between 2012 and 2018, Diamondprox took part in 4 world championships: 2012, 2013, 2017 and 2018. Internationally, however, it was not enough for great success. His prize money from 10 years of LoL is estimated at $157,850 (via esports earnings).

Pro signs with team for ‘absolute minimum to support family’

He has now landed with the team: In 2022, Diamondprox was surely nearing the end of his career at the age of 29: he signed with Norway’s “BiFrost” in May 2022 and was due to compete in the regional NLC league, where teams from Scandinavia and Great Britain play against each other.

He says he made it clear to the team that he was playing for the “bare minimum to support his family”.

“Contracts are like toilet paper in the business that bosses wipe their butts with”

what went wrong In a post on Twitlonger the Russian explains that he was never paid for his more than 1,000 hours of work for the club.

The team put him off for months, saying how difficult it was to send him money in Russia because of the sanctions. When they found a way to send him money in November, they said the time wasn’t right and they were waiting for sponsorship money.

Now the team’s CEO has resigned and the money has still not come. Instead, he received an email that the team was probably facing bankruptcy.

He says:

So essentially they screwed me for months, wasting my time, getting me into debt because of bills piling up instead of me looking for new ways to make money. […]

The whole situation has been stressing me out for months and I’m afraid to look for another LoL team. Especially since my best friend in esports, Edward, just got cheated on badly too.

No one cares what we sign, contracts in the business are like toilet paper and a team owner can wipe his ass with it […]

By my calculations, I’ve given BiFrost over 1,000 hours of my labor, plus the time I spent training for the Aurora Cup. I don’t know if I’ll ever work my ass off like that again, work 12+ hours a day every day and then get ZERO money and cheat my family by not supporting them better.

I hope that there is such a thing as karma in this world and that it will hit them hard when it hits.

That’s behind it: This is a phenomenon that keeps popping up. Esports seems to some investors to be hype, “the next big thing” to make money from. But only the top teams are really successful – for many others it is a subsidy business because there is hardly any income.

Some teams from the 2nd or 3rd row in e-sports therefore have enormous financial problems, the owners pour in tens or hundreds of thousands of euros, at some point the money is gone and the players are ultimately the ones who suffer.

There are more frequent stories that either no money was paid or the players train and live in conditions that are life-threatening:

CS:GO pro player dies at 19 – team now has to pay €72,000 to his family