xQc reveals interest in acquiring The Guard’s Valorant team

Popular content creator Felix ‘xQc’ Lengyel has revealed that he is considering acquiring the Valorant roster that played under The Guard’s banner. The team holds a spot in the VCT Americas league after winning Ascension.

Riot Games has offered the former The Guard players the opportunity to retain the slot they obtained in the VCT Americas league, provided that they are able to find “a suitable candidate organization.”

The announcement came after Riot faced backlash from the Valorant community over its initial decision to remove The Guard’s slot from the league after the organization had failed to meet the deadline to agree to the Team Participation Agreement. “We moved too fast when making the original decision, quickly realized it had been a mistake, and your feedback made that clear,” Leo Faria, Riot’s Global Head of Esports, said on September 1.

Interest in the former The Guard’s players, whose contracts were terminated at the end of last month, is understood to be high. The team is guaranteed a two-year stay in the VCT Americas league, after which it will be moved down to Challengers and must qualify again.

Speaking on his stream, xQc revealed that he is thinking about signing the roster.

“I was thinking about buying The Guard from Valorant, even though it’s going to be expensive,” he said.

When asked why he doesn’t sign a Counter-Strike 2 roster instead, xQc noted: “I don’t think I have enough time to set up the whole structure before it starts. People need to have a full structure.”

He added: “Since it’s like tier-one Valorant, teams have, like, where they’re going to live, where they’re going to practice, their only support team, and sh*t like that. It’s fully fledged out. Building that might take a little bit of time.”

xQc went on to say that he estimates that the cost of running a tier-one team for two years would be around $2–3 million “at most, which isn’t crazy.”

xQc sets his sights on Valorant esports, again

This is not the first time that xQc has publicly admitted to being interested in having his own Valorant team. In March, he was even in advanced talks with Turtle Troop, a tier-two team competing in the Challengers League.

Negotiations eventually broke down, with the players accusing xQc of “ghosting” them just as they were about to put pen to paper on their contracts. This prompted an apology from the streamer, who admitted to being “embarrassed” by this matter. “I understand that in that amount of time, I definitely should’ve communicated more,” he noted, offering to pay a full month’s salary to the players.

xQc is expected to face stiff competition for the team’s signatures, with recent rumors suggesting that G2 Esports and FlyQuest are also in the race for the team.

Keep track of all the changes in the Valorant scene with our off-season rostermania tracker.