Clan vs. Country

It was the e-sport equivalent of New York Yankees’ golden boy Derek Jeter leaving the storied Bronx franchise for the floundering Kansas City Royals; or ace striker Wayne Rooney leaving venerable Manchester United for piddling Liverpool in the Third Division. But that was exactly what happened two years ago when Dimitar Aleksandrov, aka DIDI8, one of the best European Night Elves ever to throw a glaive, turned his back on e-sport titan Team fnatic’s WC3 division, to take over JuSt Players, an all-Bulgarian team he had formed and nursed as far back as his days at mTw.

Unlike professional sports, however, where the only way a franchise player like Jeter or Rooney accepts a demotion to a lesser team is the promise of a bigger paycheck, DIDI8 wasn’t motivated by financial gain. Aleksandrov, himself a Bulgarian, had something else in mind— the formation of an all-Bulgarian team strong enough to compete against the best clans the WC3 gaming world had to offer.

Over the next two years, DIDI8 would see his dream of an all-Bulgarian team flourish. “When DIDI8 first created the team, all of the players (ShaDoWTaKeR, OMA.S.Jack, DieSeL, Mask, Oblak, Star21 and Roy7) were extremely motivated to improve and show their skills and make it to the best leagues,” says JuSt’s manager, Theodora “tedet” Ivanova. “They were each ready to give their maximum to reach this goal.”

That they did, qualifying for the WC3L and the NGL-ONE in their maiden year. tedet remembers those kindling years with pride, bemusement, and a hearty share of frustration. “We actually had a hard time almost all the time,” she says. “There were times it got so bad, we thought of closing the team a few times. But that was in the beginning, when it was still an all-Bulgarian lineup. We always tried to make things better and to move forward because we had that passion to succeed. We didn’t want to struggle anymore. We wanted JuSt to be a clan that players wanted to play for, and to establish the name as coming from Bulgaria.”

Eventually, JuSt’s success would attract the attention of World Elite, the Chinese-based team that was home to some of WC3’s best players-- Sky, suhO, ReMinD and Soju-- and which was funded by the war coffers of IGE, its primary sponsor.

Looking to expand its WE.IGE brand into Europe, WE approached the orphan JuSt clan to become its envoys to Europe under the amalgamated tag of WE.Int. Having qualified for the WC3L and NGL-ONE, JuSt had by this time become an attractive destination for some of Europe’s best up-and-coming talent, including Daniel “LiiLD.C” Claesson, Robert “Rob” Abdrakhmanov, and Fredrik “KnofF” Knopf. The team even managed to cajole the legendary Fredrik Johansson, aka MaDFroG, a “Hall of Gamer” if ever there was one, to give his career a second burn.

From competing in local, backroom Bulgarian tournaments to becoming a mainstay in the big shows, JuSt was a story scripted for the movies. It had everything: a revered, grizzled icon in DIDI8, once accused of being a hired gun and notorious clan hopper, turning his back on the increasingly commercialized world of e-sports and its free market atavism, to pursue what many thought was the impossible and antediluvian dream of building a grassroots, purebred all-Bulgarian team—and succeeding.

That’s All, Folks

Three months later, sadly, JuSt’s feel-good script began to unravel. In a highly publicized split a month before, IGE chose not to renew its contract with World Elite. The trickle-down effect led to WE severing its ties with JuSt, although the team says the termination was mutual and based on philosophical differences as much as financial hardship. “For WE, Europe meant the WC3L and NGL,” says tedet. “It was all about qualifying for those leagues and doing well. For DIDI, it was about developing the Bulgarian (WC3) community.”

Shortly thereafter, the team would lose arguably its best player, the Swedish Night Elf LiiLD.C, to multi-titled 4Kings, with the hook of a fatter contract JuSt could no longer match and the chance to play alongside two of the game’s most decorated players, Manuel “Grubby” Schenkhuizen and Yoan “ToD” Merlo.

The rest of JuSt’s non-Bulgarian reinforcements would also move on, leaving JuSt with no recourse but to brave the WC3L wars with the all-Bulgarian team that had gotten them there in the first place. Unfortunately, their best Bulgarian player, Radoslav Kolev, aka JuSt.DieseL, had decided to part ways with the only clan he had ever known, and signed with fnatic-- the same clan, ironically, that JuSt’s founder, DIDI8, had originally spurned.

Cheekily adopting the famous Looney Toones’ catchphrase ThatsAllFolks (TaF) as its new clan moniker, the team would gamely try to honor its league commitments, but by this time, admits tedet, JuSt was no longer the rambunctious gang of underdogs that had inspired an entire country of WC3 gamers just months earlier.

The team, she says, had begun to lose the spirit of fraternity and nationalism it had rallied behind during its pre-WC3L years. “I can't point to a single factor as the reason for the team's closure. Maybe because we had lost our sponsorship and we had gotten off to a bad start in the WC3L, but also our players were either going inactive or creating problems that disappointed us in management.”

JuSt, she rues, had also become the beast it had fought so hard to bridle. “It was around the time we started recruiting international players to reinforce the lineup. We tried to pick up some young players; not stars (LiiLD, Rob), because we wanted to work on our idea of gathering young players and helping them develop. But when we did, the clan started to become more ‘professional’ and not a ‘community.’”

Its best players gone, and now painfully overmatched and outskilled, financially capped and withered by internal player disputes, DIDI8 was forced to face the inevitable -- the dream he had spent the last four years building had slipped through his grasp. On August 31, 2007, JuSt officially disbanded.

“We just didn’t see a rational reason to keep the team going,” says tedet with sublime resignation. “We didn’t feel like fighting through all the politics and trying to keep our best players.”

Months later, an embittered DIDI8 still refuses to discuss JuSt (Gotfrag met up with Aleksandrov at the 2007 World Cyber Games, where he represented Bulgaria in Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars), the memory of his dream project still painfully raw.

“I felt very sad,” recalls tedet of the day JuSt’s flag was lowered for good. “I was so used to being around those guys and we had a lot of great moments together. Some of them were, and still are, really close friends to me and we've been through a lot of things together. I actually cried when telling them we were disbanding.”