Pad speaks on Team Vitality’s 2026 roster, becoming head coach, “best” Humanoid deal, Hylissang upset, and Nisqy’s attempted mutiny

Team Vitality’s coaching staff was publicly on the chopping block following two years of middling results, during which continued roster tweaks failed to trigger significant improvement in fortunes. The end result was a restructuring which saw Mac move to a developmental role as Pad, his right-hand man and collaborator of five years, has been promoted to take his place as head coach. In a wide-ranging interview, Hotspawn spoke to Pad about the change, the team’s addition of Humanoid for the 2026 roster, and what went wrong for the team in the past.

Team Vitality coaching change was inevitable

While a change for the organisation was a certainty, for Pad, this off-season was finally the time for him to try his luck as a head coach within the LEC and call time on his partnership with Mac. For Vitality, this presented an opportunity for continuity with a project roster that had Mac/Pad pieces still under contract, while still allowing a change in environment that, in their eyes, could see improvement next year. Despite having received a “very, very interesting” offer elsewhere, Pad accepted the chance to stay.

One of the big things that has sort of been the case for Mac and I for many years now is that you cannot really say one name without the other. And, at the end of the day, I think for me now it’s time to make my own name.

We joined Vitality at a time where the finances and esports were also quite different. We came on quite a decent salary, both of us. So when you have two lads who are very well paid and overlap in a lot of coaching roles within a team and don’t produce results, then at some point you probably have to break that pairing up, and in this case it ended up being a 1/1 break instead of both of us leaving.

When Vitality gave me the option to become head coach, I thought it was important for me to see out the project, because if you look at our roster, the players that we promoted, obviously Mac and I were in it together… So knowing that, if I had left for that other job, I think that that would not be fair to them.

Humanoid rejoins Pad and Carzzy

While the bulk of Vitality’s 2025 roster is to remain, a solitary change has come in the mid lane. Despite a promising rookie season, Czajek has been made to make way for two-time LEC winner Humanoid. While other positions, primarily in the bottom lane, were up for consideration, the team was certain that a mid switch was required.

While Pad admitted that he “adores” the outgoing Czajek, he explained that the decision to make a move was a result of the player’s “level of ambition” that, in his eyes, does not match that of his teammates, and was a failure on his and Mac’s part not to have detected before his signing.

When I asked Czajek, and if you ask Czajek, does he want to play eight solo queue games a day, and a scrim block, and then go and do positional coaching with a coach, and then go and learn more about League of Legends every day for a whole year? Does he want to be the very best in the Orianna/Azir matchup, and does he want to be the very best in the Galio and Annie matchup, as soon as this matchup changes? No, not as much as Lyncas wants to, or me, or Naak.

Humanoid’s four-year stint with Fnatic has finally come to an end, failing to produce an LEC title despite four finals appearances. He was benched by the side last Summer to make way for Poby, an import from T1’s academy, after which Fnatic saw a minor improvement in results.

The Czech player’s attitude had been called into question over the last couple of seasons, and, while Pad accepts he can be “troublesome”, he also pointed to Fnatic’s own dysfunction as a variable.

The narrative surrounding Humanoid right now is garbage, is trash… If we just look at [it] statistically, this guy has been in the LEC since 2020, and he has gone to Worlds every year he’s been in the LEC.

If anyone had bothered to go and watch his games from Spring and Winter when he was supposedly done with the team and burned out and not good, and you went and watched that team play, which obviously I did because that’s part of our scouting process, everyone would see that this guy is and has been consistently a top three mid laner EU for the past six years, even when he is in a bad environment, when things are not changing, when he is being troublesome, because he’s also a troublesome lad. I’m not delusional.

A lot of his rep also comes from the last one-and-a-half years within Fnatic, where he was not asked about any roster changes for his entire duration there. He was never used for player input on player replacement or player scouting.

Despite his faults, Pad believes the environment on Team Vitality will get the best out of Humanoid, whereby the team is willing to take “direct feedback” to improve:

The guy is unbelievably direct. I think there’s a big reason as to why people like Inspired and Marek have a bit of a bad rep, and it’s because these guys are so passionate about winning and they are very direct.

They don’t cater their communication style to the individual. They just have one way of giving feedback. And if you place Marek in an environment where one of two things doesn’t happen, either players cannot take direct feedback or they [don’t] all want to improve, well then there’s a recipe for disaster because then you will have Marek who gives up.

The Dane also gave a glimpse into the financials of the signing and Vitality’s position overall, following prior years of more expensive rosters.

If people had followed the rumours about our financial situation because of XYZ people on the bench or the ghost of Perkz, they would also know that I’m not paying a million for Humanoid. I’m not. I got Humanoid on the best deal anyone has ever gotten Humanoid. If this is not a good deal, then I don’t think there’s ever a good deal.

The Hylissang fiasco

Vitality’s insistence on sticking with veteran support Hylissang through much of 2024 and 2025 drew constant criticism, though the coaching staff frequently backed the player and insisted that success was to come once newer players gelled with the Bulgarian. But that time never came, and Hyli was eventually replaced in Spring of 2025 by the roleswapping Nisqy. Nisqy was only to last a single split before he, too, was removed from the roster in place of Fleshy, who sticks with the side heading into the new year.

Pad explained how it was “very clear” that Hylissang fit within the “systems” that he and Pad wanted to implement, but early struggles were brushed off as having been an influence of prior roster pieces that did not fit with their vision. A struggle to find a middle ground in playstyle was an early problem, a red flag that Pad admits he was “too blind to”.

I think that that that overshadowed some of the flaws of Hyli going into off season, and our approach then was that we like our systems, we think that when we have a team that is together long enough, and we can implement these, that we will be a good team. We still believe that we could coach LEC to a really high level. And the whole plan was to replace two pieces who were much more prone to the playstyle of allowing the enemy team to make a mistake rather than forcing the enemy to make a mistake.

Ultimately, continued issues reaching that point finally saw Vitality pull the trigger on a support move, with Pad disappointed in his former player’s inability to guide his newer teammates despite his repeated public support for the player.

I would like to, of course, remain friends with Hyli, because he’s such a great person, I love spending time with him. But I am so upset, and I’m so sad that when everyone told us to chop his head off, get him off the roster, rebuild, we gave him another shot, we brought in players to play around him, and he didn’t have the tools to spend time with Lyncas in a way that allowed Lyncas to play more aggressively.

The Nisqy experiment

The decision to bring mid laner Nisqy in as a support last Spring was a shock, though Pad revealed that options to replace Hylissang were limited, with first-choice Fleshy not possible due to expected visa delays.

First option was Fleshy. And I think something that people often forget is that, at the end, when we have done our scouting, the candidates that were available for us in Spring was either Nisqy or Mersa. And maybe in hindsight, Mersa was better.

I think maybe the whole idea of ‘mid laners have better hands than support and they can roleswap easier’ — I think there was probably too much copium. Probably too much copium there.

Despite a repeat seventh-place finish with Nisqy on the roster, Pad felt that there were positives with his presence on the team, particularly with the development of their rookie pieces.

What prevented the Belgian from having a longer stay, Pad says, was an attempt to secure the team’s mid lane spot for himself, despite it having been made clear that he was to join as a support without the possibility of switching back while with the side.