Organizations that didn’t make franchising are starting to make moves to either allow the sale of players’ contracts or let them out of their contracts to explore more options. XSET is the latest team to release its VALORANT roster ahead of the 2023 season.
The entire XSET VALORANT player roster was released recently, along with analyst Drew “DrewSpark” Spark-Whitworth and coach Don “Syyko” Muir.
Zachary “zekken” Patrone and Brendan “BcJ” Jensen were released from their contracts, and Matthew “Cryocells” Panganiban was transferred to 100 Thieves for next year. Jordan “AYRIN” He and Rory “dephh” Jackson are currently unrestricted free agents.
XSET hasn’t released any plans for next year after it didn’t make partnership with Riot for the 2023 season. It is unclear if XSET plans to field a roster in the tier-two scene next year for the Ascension tournaments or if it will leave VALORANT altogether.
The roster did well this year and finally made it to an international event after just missing Masters tournaments in many of the Challengers events in the past two years. XSET went to Masters Copenhagen and fell fairly early in the tournament, but stayed quite a bit longer in the Champions tournament, where they finished fifth-sixth. The only NA team to go farther than them was OpTic, who lost to LOUD in the grand final match.
Aside from Cryocells, no other XSET members have officially announced that they’ve joined another team yet. This morning, Dot Esports reported that Syyko is signing with Sentinels, but no official word from the team has been released at time of writing.