Martin “Rekkles” Larsson has 5 LEC titles, a legacy as arguably the greatest ADC Europe has ever produced, and a career that spans over a decade at the highest level of competitive League of Legends. And right now, in 2026, he’s publicly asking whether his own teammates hate playing with him.

That’s not clickbait. That’s not a misquote pulled from a 3-hour stream. That’s a decorated veteran, competing on a challenger-tier team in EMEA Masters, laying bare the kind of doubt that eats players alive — the kind nobody talks about until it’s too late.

The Reddit thread hit 4,000+ upvotes and 825 comments. The community felt it. Because this isn’t just Rekkles drama. This is what happens when a legend outlives the era that made him.

What Rekkles Actually Said

During a recent stream, Rekkles openly questioned whether his teammates on Witchcraft — the EMEA Masters team formed around former Fnatic mid laner Nemesis — actually enjoy playing with him. Not whether they respect him. Not whether they think he’s good enough. Whether they like having him around.

That distinction matters. Mechanical skill, game knowledge, champion pool — those are things you can point to on a spreadsheet. But the feeling that your presence in a voice call makes the room heavier? That’s the kind of thought that lives in your chest at 3 AM and doesn’t leave.

Rekkles didn’t frame it as a certainty. He framed it as a question. But anyone who’s been in a competitive team environment knows: by the time you’re asking that question out loud, you’ve already been living with it for weeks.

The Long Road From Fnatic to Here

To understand why this hits so hard, you need the full arc.

Rekkles joined Fnatic in 2014 as a teenage prodigy and immediately looked like the real deal. He became the face of European League of Legends — consistent, methodical, and devastatingly efficient in teamfights. Over the next several years, he racked up domestic titles, represented EU at Worlds repeatedly, and built a brand as the continent’s most reliable bot laner.

The high point: 2018 Fnatic, the roster that tore through EU, made Worlds Finals, and gave Europe its best shot at an international title in years. Rekkles was the emotional core of that team.

Then things got complicated.

  • 2021: Rekkles left Fnatic for G2 Esports in one of the biggest free agency moves in LEC history. The fit never clicked. G2’s identity and Rekkles’s playstyle clashed, and the experiment ended after a single year.
  • The Carlos era: G2’s owner Carlos “ocelote” Rodríguez reportedly made Rekkles’s departure messy, with rumors of contractual disputes and a general sense that Rekkles was left in limbo. The whole situation reeked of an org prioritizing ego over player welfare.
  • T1: Rekkles went to Korea. Let that sink in — one of EU’s all-time greats packed up and moved to the LCK, joining T1’s roster. It was bold. It was exciting. It didn’t work. He never found consistent starting time, and the cultural and competitive adjustment proved too steep.
  • The return: After T1, Rekkles came back to Europe. But the LEC had moved on. Younger players had taken the ADC spots. The top teams didn’t come calling.

So he ended up on Witchcraft.

What Is Witchcraft, and What Went Wrong

Witchcraft is a team built by Nemesis for the EMEA Masters circuit — essentially Europe’s tier-2 competitive ecosystem, where teams fight for recognition, prize money, and a shot at the big leagues. It was supposed to be a redemption vehicle. Nemesis and Rekkles, two former Fnatic teammates reuniting with something to prove.

On paper, it had narrative juice. Two veterans who’d been written off, teaming up outside the LEC to show they still had it. The community was interested. Expectations were cautiously optimistic.

Reality was less kind.

Witchcraft underperformed. The results weren’t there. EMEA Masters is a brutal environment — it’s full of hungry young players grinding 14-hour days with nothing to lose, and veteran name recognition doesn’t buy you a single dragon. The team struggled to find cohesion, and the losses piled up.

For Rekkles specifically, this was a new kind of failure. He’s lost before — Worlds Finals, playoff eliminations, roster implosions. But those losses happened on the biggest stages in the world. Losing in the tier-2 circuit, surrounded by players half your age, with your legacy already written? That’s a different kind of pain.

The Psychology Nobody Talks About

Here’s where this story goes beyond Rekkles.

Esports has a veteran problem. The industry is obsessed with youth — 17-year-old phenoms, rookie of the split narratives, fresh mechanical talent. And that obsession creates an unspoken message to anyone over 25: your time is up, and staying is a burden.

Rekkles is 29. In traditional sports, that’s early prime. In League of Legends, it’s ancient. And the gap between “respected legend” and “washed player taking up a roster spot” is razor-thin in public perception.

When Rekkles asks if his teammates hate playing with him, he’s voicing something that every aging competitor in esports has felt:

  • Am I slowing the team down?
  • Do they wish they had someone younger?
  • Is my presence making this worse?
  • Am I here because I earned it, or because of my name?

These questions are poison. They don’t make you play worse mechanically — they make you play scared. They make you second-guess calls, defer to teammates you should be leading, and shrink in moments where your experience should be the biggest advantage on the team.

The cruelest part? The answer might genuinely be “no, they don’t hate playing with you.” But imposter syndrome doesn’t care about the answer. It cares about the question.

What the Community Reaction Tells Us

The Reddit thread blowing up the way it did — 4,000+ upvotes, 825 comments — tells you something important. This isn’t a niche story. This resonated.

The comments broke into a few camps:

  • Empathy: A huge chunk of the community responded with genuine support. People who grew up watching Rekkles on Fnatic, who remember the tears after the 2015 Worlds exit, who consider him a foundational figure in EU League. They want him to be okay.
  • Harsh reality: Some comments didn’t sugarcoat it. Rekkles’s playstyle — safe, scaling, team-dependent — has fallen out of meta favor. Modern bot lane is more aggressive, more lane-dominant, and less willing to wait for 35-minute teamfights. The game evolved, and maybe he didn’t evolve with it fast enough.
  • Blame the scene: Others pointed at the broader failure of European esports infrastructure to support veteran players. There’s no coaching pipeline, no structured transition from player to analyst to coach, no real safety net. You either keep competing or you disappear.
  • The Carlos thread: Inevitably, people revisited the G2 situation and how the handling of that exit might have permanently altered Rekkles’s trajectory and confidence.

What almost nobody said was “who cares.” That’s telling. Even people who think Rekkles is past his competitive peak recognized that this moment is human in a way esports content rarely is.

Legacy vs. Identity

The deeper story here is about the difference between legacy and identity.

Rekkles’s legacy is secure. Five LEC titles. Multiple Worlds appearances. A Worlds Finals. Years as the face of European ADC play. Nobody can take that away, and no amount of EMEA Masters losses changes what he accomplished.

But legacy is a thing other people talk about. Identity is what you live with every day. And if your identity for the last 12 years has been “elite competitive League of Legends player,” what happens when that stops being true?

You can’t just swap it out. You can’t wake up one morning and say “I’m a content creator now” or “I’m a coach now” and have it feel real. Identity transitions take time, and they hurt, and they’re especially brutal when they happen publicly in front of hundreds of thousands of people who remember who you used to be.

Rekkles isn’t the first player to go through this. Doublelift went through a version of it in NA. Faker will go through it eventually — though the LCK’s reverence for him will soften the landing. But Rekkles is going through it right now, in real time, and he’s doing it out loud.

That takes guts.

What Comes Next

There’s no clean ending here. Witchcraft might improve. Rekkles might find his footing in a new meta, on a new team, or in a new role entirely. He might retire. He might stream full-time and find peace in that.

What I hope doesn’t happen is that this moment gets reduced to a meme. “Rekkles crying again” has been a low-effort punchline for years, deployed by people who’ve never had to compete at anything meaningful in their lives. This isn’t that.

This is a 29-year-old man who gave everything to a game and a scene, and is now confronting the possibility that the thing he built his life around doesn’t want him anymore. That’s not funny. That’s not drama. That’s the cost of competition that nobody puts in the highlight reels.

The LEC might have moved past Rekkles. But the least the community can do is not move past this moment — because the next veteran who feels this way might not say it out loud. And that’s when it gets dangerous.

Esports will keep celebrating the 17-year-old rookies. But if it can’t also take care of the players who built the stage those rookies perform on, the whole thing is rotten at the foundation.