The Champions and Masters winner goes from streamer to head coach of TenZ, crashies and the rest of T1’s 2027 lineup in his first coaching job.
T1 had five players and one empty seat. Gustavo “Sacy” Rossi fills it. The Korean club announced on that the 28-year-old Brazilian is their new head coach for the 2027 VCT season, the last piece of a rebuild that brought back crashies on Wednesday and TenZ on Thursday. It also answers the question left open in our TenZ story: who the “new Head Coach” was that T1 mentioned when coach sungmin returned on 4 November.
What makes the move unusual is the route. Sacy has never coached a team. He retired as a player in September 2024, spent the time since as a streamer and content creator, and now goes straight into the top job on one of VCT Pacific’s biggest teams. Sheep Esports had reported that he was set to take the job.
T1 called him “a legendary player who conquered both Masters and Champions” and “the head coach set to lead the ultimate team to the top”.
“The only person left to announce”
The announcement came with a video titled “ENCORE THE GLORY”. It opens with the line “As you all know, the only person left to announce the roster is the head coach”, cuts through his title wins with LOUD and Sentinels, and ends with Sacy in a T1 chair:
But now a new opportunity has come my way. I won’t let that opportunity slip away.
A first coaching job, by his own admission
Fifteen minutes after T1’s post, Sacy quoted it with “Uma nova fase” (“A new phase”) and five pages of text in Portuguese. The quotes below are our translation.
He wrote that he had always planned to coach one day, just not this soon:
I knew that at some point I would like to return to competitive play as a coach. I just didn’t imagine that moment would come so fast. And I definitely didn’t imagine it would be at T1.
The offer came as a surprise, he explained, and the doubts followed, because “I had never been a coach before”. He and his wife had just bought a house, and for the first time in a long while he felt he did not need to change anything. He still said yes:
I know that being a good player doesn’t automatically mean being a good coach. I have a lot to learn, a lot to improve and an enormous responsibility in this coming year of 2027.
He also wrote that being “the first Brazilian to be part of T1’s history makes it all even more insane”, and that he grew up in League of Legends following T1 and the career of Faker, “who has always been one of my biggest role models as a player”.
From League of Legends to two international trophies
Sacy started his esports career in League of Legends at 16, and played for RED Canids in Brazil’s CBLOL. In 2020 he left a stable life there for VALORANT, which he called “one of the hardest decisions of my career”. The four years that followed:
| Year | Team | Best results |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Team Vikings | Champions Berlin, 9th to 12th |
| 2022 | LOUD | Champions Istanbul 1st, Masters Reykjavík 2nd |
| 2023 | Sentinels | Americas League 7th, Last Chance Qualifier 4th |
| 2024 | Sentinels | Americas Kickoff 1st, Masters Madrid 1st, Champions Seoul 4th |
The two trophies came 18 months apart. LOUD beat OpTic Gaming 3-1 in the Champions 2022 grand final in Istanbul, and Sentinels beat Gen.G 3-2 in the Masters Madrid final in March 2024. Sentinels announced his retirement on 15 September 2024, a day after TenZ stepped away.
He then joined MIBR as a streamer in March 2025. The Brazilian club said goodbye to him on 9 November, four days before the T1 video, and he answered in Portuguese that it was time to “live the dream one more time”. In the T1 post he wrote that the break from competing was “essential for my mental health and for getting to know myself as Gustavo, not Sacy”.
Old teammates and an old rival
T1’s roster is full of familiar faces. Sacy spent two seasons next to TenZ at Sentinels and won Madrid with him. He wrote that he was looking forward to reuniting with TenZ, “with whom I have already had the chance to share the server”.
crashies is a different story. The American was on the OpTic side in both of LOUD’s big finals in 2022: OpTic swept LOUD 3-0 in Reykjavík, and LOUD took the Champions title from them five months later.
| Name | Role | Contract |
|---|---|---|
 stax | Player | End of 2028 |
| BuZz | Player | End of 2028 |
| iZu | Player | End of 2027 |
 crashies | Player | Not disclosed |
 TenZ | Player | Not disclosed |
 Sacy | Head coach | Not disclosed |
| sungmin | Coach | Not disclosed |
sungmin is not an assistant in name. T1 presented him as “Coach ‘sungmin'” who “leads the T1 VALORANT roster alongside our new Head Coach”, and he brings what Sacy lacks: experience on the bench. The 22-year-old Korean has coached since 2021, including T1’s academy team from November 2024 to June 2025 and Nongshim RedForce until October 2026, and he has worked in the United States as well as in Korea.
That split will be tested quickly. T1 open their 2027 season at VCT Pacific Kickoff in January.
