ALEX Officially Joins Cloud9's New Roster

After officially leaving Team Vitality yesterday, Alex "ALEX" McMeekin has just been announced as the first official player of Cloud9's new CS:GO lineup. The Brit signed a three year contract with the American organization worth $1,650,000.

C9 announced that it would be performing a total roster overhaul as it actively looks for a new home for its current lineup. Henry "HenryG" Greer, one of the most successful casters in esports, recently announced that he hung up the mic and would be joining Cloud9 as the team's new manager. Alongside HenryG, C9 also revealed that Aleksandar "kassad" Trifunović, who helped Renegades become a world-class team, would be joining as coach.

C9's current assistant coach, Joshua "m1cks" Micks, took to Twitter to explain that he would become the new team's analyst, at least until the end of 2020. 

ALEX joined Vitality in early 2019 following a long stint with Team LDLC. The Brit took over the leadership role in Vitality in place of Vincent "Happy" Cervoni, spending a little over a year with the team. Under his leadership, Vitality notably won EPICENTER 2019 and cs_summit 4 while also making deep runs at ESL One: Cologne 2019 and DreamHack Masters Malmö 2019. 

ALEX hasn't played an official match since February of this year, as the in-game leader decided to step down from the active roster following burn-out from all the traveling. 2020's online era doesn't seem to be coming to an end, and asides from the potential IEM: Global Challenge, there are no tier 1 LAN events planned for the remainder of this year, so this may be a factor in ALEX's return. 

HenryG also announced on Twitter that the roster was yet to be completed. Considering the colossal roster overhaul, it's presumed that C9 is trying to build a tier 1 team, and ALEX is the perfect man for the job. Mathieu "ZywOo" Herbaut, the best player of 2019, played exceptionally well under ALEX's leadership. While it's unlikely to find someone with ZywOo's potential right off the bat, there's a good chance that ALEX could develop solid tier 2 players into world contenders moving forward. 

With ALEX, kassad, and HenryG all being European, there's a possibility that the rest of the roster may be as well. That said, we could also see a situation similar to that of Complexity Gaming, where three of the players are European, and the remaining two are American. Regardless, with the currently announced pieces, it's hard not to get excited at the thought of C9's new roster.