Gentle Mates release entire VALORANT roster and coaches
The French VCT partner team has released all five players and both coaches after an uneven 2026 season.
Gentle Mates have released every player and coach from their VALORANT line-up, leaving the French organisation with a blank sheet ahead of its first season as a VCT partner team in 2027. The club confirmed the exits in a farewell post thanking marteen, starxo, Minny, Proxh and H1ber.1
Head coach Jiri “KUNDIKUNDI” Honkala and assistant coach Erim “Mavera” Sasal are also leaving. The scale of the move means Gentle Mates will need to rebuild both its playing line-up and its coaching structure before the next VCT cycle begins.
A season that changed direction
The reset arrives after a strong start to 2026. Gentle Mates finished second at EMEA Kickoff, with marteen setting a new kill record for a best-of-five series, and reached Masters Santiago for the first international event in the organisation’s history. The team went 2-2 in Chile and exited in the top eight.1
The rest of the year proved less stable. The side recorded a 2-3 group-stage result in Stage 1, changed coaches and altered its player line-up before the play-ins. A further 2-3 group record in Stage 2 preceded a defeat to Eintracht Frankfurt, ending the season. The changes never settled into a consistent five.1
Gentle Mates’ position as a Riot partner team is secure, however. The organisation will remain in the EMEA structure for the next VALORANT Champions Tour era, giving its rebuild a guaranteed competitive platform rather than forcing it to start from an open qualifier.2
What comes next
The transfer window gives the organisation room to build around a new idea, but there is no obvious continuity from the 2026 roster. marteen’s record-setting Kickoff performance should attract interest, while Minny leaves after two seasons with the club. The eventual recruitment choices will define whether this is a clean reset or another short-term patch.
Our opinion
A full roster release is dramatic, but it is not automatically reckless when the organisation already holds a partner slot. Gentle Mates have bought themselves freedom to build for the 2027 format, at the cost of throwing away the momentum created by their Kickoff run. The interesting story now is not who has left; it is whether the replacement project has a clear identity before the season starts.