Smooya Stood In For Forze And Might Get Kicked After One Match

FACEIT Pro League pugstar Owen “smooya” Butterfield acted as a last-minute stand-in for Foze in ESL Pro League Season 19. After completing their first series, smooya was kicked for factors outside the game. 

Surprise Stand-In

The Forze roster could not field their complete roster in time for ESL Pro League Season 19, as they were missing Vladimir “kelieN” Boldyrev, who joined another team. 

Being an AWPer down in the team, Forze recruited show match player smooya to become a temporary stand-in. This collaboration between both parties was already odd, but fans were excited to see how the professional player turned streamer would perform in the upper echelons of Counter-Strike competition again.

Narrow Loss Against Monte

Forze’s first match was scheduled against Monte. The two teams played a Best-of-3 series in their opening match of Group C.

The first map was a very close game, where Monte took Forze’s pick of Nuke 13-11. The map could have gone either way, but Monte’s newest recruit, Gytis “ryu” Glušauskas, played incredibly well in his LAN debut to help the team win the first game. 

On the second, smooya showed he was still capable of getting frags on an official match and wasn’t just an FPL player. He was the top performer of the Forze lineup, but his 31 kills were still not enough to win against Forze, losing the map 19-17 in double overtime. 

Overall, smooya played relatively well, considering the conditions he was put in. There should have been language barriers and unfamiliar strategies he had to adapt to on the fly. 

Smooya Gets Himself Into Trouble

Fans were commending the Brit for displaying a satisfactory performance after the close series. However, a Tweet from smooya dug his own grave. 

Being a Ukrainian team, Monte celebrated the victory against Forze, a Russian organization. Despite standing in for Forze and playing with the team, smooya decided to Tweet “Slava Ukraini” after the match, which he deleted immediately. 

Still, today, any influential person’s Tweets cannot be deleted without anyone seeing them first. As a result, smooya’s actions angered the Forze organization, and he is likely to be kicked from the team after playing one series.

Smooya Tweeted that a crazy situation is happening, and updates will follow. As of now, he has not posted anything else. 

If the story ends up true and smooya has been removed from the Forze roster, the team will be forced to play with their 34-year-old coach, Аrtem “fierce” Ivanov as the stand-in.

Smooya might have wasted his last chance of being a professional player. Though no team can doubt his in-game skills, he has always had the same issue of being a troublemaker. Smooya has not been in a “real” professional team since 2022, and after this incident, we might not see any upward trajectory for his career. 

Header: Instagram @smooyacs