Faze Clan Fires CEO After Losing Over $14m in Q2 2023

Faze Clan, a popular esports organisation that was once synonymous with the esports space, has fired CEO Lee Trink. CFO Christoph Pachler will take over for Trink on an interim basis, Bloomberg reports.

In its early years, Faze Clan acquired an extravagant and swaggering reputation. The company ran teams in a variety of esports games, produced gaming-related content for social media sites like Twitch and Snapchat, and offered branded clothing. Trink sought to portray Faze as a youth-oriented cultural and leisure brand when he took over as CEO in 2018, having no prior experience in the esports industry. On a 2019 episode of The Vergecast, he declared, “We are the voice of this current gaming generation,” and equated the growth of his business to that of hip-hop. Near the end of 2021, the company had a close to $1 billion valuation.

However, Faze Clan has suffered significant losses under Trink’s direction, including an estimated $48.7 million from operations in 2017, according to Bloomberg. Shares have fallen from almost $20 to 18 cents. Faze Clan had more than $70 million in debt by the end of 2021, the year Trink started joking around the idea of going public. It has been stated that the majority of its teams are unprofitable, and just in 2023, it has announced two waves of layoffs.

In interviews with Bloomberg, seven former employees warned of “a mismanaged organization marked by poor spending decisions, excessive pay, and expansion into unprofitable categories like esports.” Notably, the corporation spent up to $60,000 per month renting a number of expensive homes. The staff members said that Trink “took FaZe’s influencers to upscale Los Angeles steakhouses and wore a diamond-encrusted necklace featuring FaZe’s “F” logo.”

Employees of Faze Clan have recently become involved in a variety of other disputes. The company came under fire most noticeably for its contract work with English YouTuber Sam Pepper, who has been accused of sexual harassment on numerous occasions. An insider “with knowledge of the company’s sales” told Bloomberg that incidents surrounding Pepper have made it more challenging for the company to find sponsors.

ALSO READ: FaZe Clan Lose $14M In Q2 2023, All Reasons And Controversies

As advertising expenditures have shrunk, the traditionally sponsorship-dependent industry of esports has experienced sharp losses in recent years. Companies from all around the sector have reduced staff. Activision Blizzard fired about 50 workers from its esports division earlier this summer. One fired employee at the time told The Verge, “I can only speculate that Activision Blizzard is closing its esports division.”

Before becoming the organization’s CEO in September 2018, Lee Trink first joined FaZe Clan in 2016 as an advisor. That was almost precisely five years ago. He oversaw the company’s significant growth, reinvention into a lifestyle brand, and NASDAQ public listing when he was at FaZe.

On the competitive front, FaZe teams won a number of prestigious competitions during his leadership, with the Call of Duty League in 2021 and the PGL Major Antwerp in CS:GO in 2022 maybe deserving the most attention.