T1 launches two Valorant teams and is looking for "the new Faker"

Valorant esports scene gradually takes shape and big organisations are actively recruiting playersBut there's a well-known organisation that is ready to work twice as hard... literally. The T1 team plans to launch two Valorant teams, one in South Korea and one in the United States.

If you're used to Riot Games' games, you know T1. This organisation, formerly known as SKT T1, is a triple League of Legends world champion. But you may have missed that it also has Fornite, Hearthstone or Super Smash Bros teams too.

Joe Marsh, T1 CEO, explains in an interview for ESPN Esports that the organisation has great ambitions for Valorant.

"We're not here to build a bottom tier org, we want to be winners, we want to win championships. When Valorant was announced when it was Project A, we knew we wanted to jump in."

Joe Marsh's goal is to transpose the model that made the Korean League of Legends team successful on the American continent. T1 will therefore have an eponymous team in Korea, and a NA Academy team in the United States.

The latter will initially consist of a stable roster of gaming professionals like CS:GO or Rainbow Six: Siege. But the organisation also intends to keep an eye on the new talents that will emerge on Valorant. The declared goal is to "discover the new Faker", star player of the League of Legends team. This is why the organisation recruited Brax as the first representative of its Valorant team, the player being considered a true Counter-Strike prodigy.

However, questions remain as to the possibility of maintaining two teams on the competitive circuit. Riot Games tends to discourage or even ban this model, depending on the levels of competition in League of Legends. Riot has so far given no information about its future professional league. Joe Marsh hopes, however, that the circuit will not be as closed as on Riot's MOBA and that teams from different continents will have the opportunity to compete more that once a year.

Players of the American T1 team are:

• Brawton 'brax' Pierce
• Keven "AZK" Keven Larivière
• Austin 'crashes' Roberts
• Victor 'food' Wong
• Tyler "Skadoodle" Latham

The Korean team is not known yet.