Derke leaving Fnatic? VALORANT-Star enters Restricted Free Agency

With the 2024 VCT Rostermania currently upon us, it’s expected for teams to do a bit of reshuffling in preparation for the new season ahead. After the recent news regarding Team Falcon broke, it seems Fnatic is the next team to make headlines, with one of their key players, Nikita ‘Derke’ Sirmitev, recently announcing that he has entered restricted free agency.

Derke’s announcement is one of many recent announcements by prolific players regarding their future endeavors outside of their current teams. In Nikita “Derke” Sirmitev’s case, he has been a Fnatic player since April 2021, having previously played for Russian esports organization CrowCrowd. He is one of only two active players in Fnatics that were present in their first international grand finals at Masters Reykjavik, which they unfortunately lost to a formidable Sentinels team.

Current Situation with Fnatic

With Derke’s imminent departure, the only player from the original team will be Jake “Boaster” Howlett, a player who’s been the captain of the Valorant team and in-game leader (IGL) ever since. Derke is widely regarded as one of the top Valorant players in the world and easily cracks the top 10 of current active players. His notoriety stems from his proficiency as a duelist, often making aggressive, calculated plays against opposition masterfully utilizing agents like Jett and Raze.

img: Fnatic’s Derke – src: @DerkeBased on the way things are right now, Nikita “Derke” Sirmitev is still very much a Fnatic team member and will remain as one till the beginning of the 2025 season. What has changed is that he is now open to offers from any interested organizations who might want to snatch him up to strengthen their rosters.

Below is a tweet he posted on August 28, 2024, giving us a hint of his current situation with Fnatic:

In his tweet, he lets fans know that he is currently in restricted free agency and is open to offers from teams in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, Asia Pacific region, and North American region. His tweet gathered a lot of traction in the community, with fans wishing him well in his endeavors as they showed their love and adoration for the seasoned player.

Fans of Fnatic and even rival teams actively showed their respect for the player, citing him as one of the steals of the season for any team lucky enough to snatch him up.

Kibzu~[@SoraKibzu], “Consistently a top 3 player in the world every year? Who’s going to get the pick-up of the century 👀” Twitter, Aug. 28, 2024. Available:

(accessed: Aug. 28, 2024).

One thing that may be getting overlooked is the fact that although he is in restricted free agency, that doesn’t necessarily mean he has to go. The way it works is that despite being allowed to entertain offers from other teams, it’s well within Fnatic’s rights to match any offer made by a different team. Granted this may be very unlikely. It still remains a possibility if Fnatic fail to find a worthy replacement given the caliber of player they stand to lose going into the 2025 season.