Did the best team in SAM just ruin their season?
Spanish Rocket League player Javier "Carca" Laguna has accused the best RLCS team in South America, FURIA, of throwing during the two most recent RLCS London Major qualifiers. The accusation Tweets include screenshots of recent results and edited-together gameplay clips to support his stance.
Carca believes that FURIA's motivation is the elimination of rivals Complexity from RLCS 2024 Worlds contention.
Carca accuses FURIA of throwing
Carca's accusation came a few hours ahead of the final broadcast of the South American RLCS London Major Qualifier 6. He claims that FURIA threw during the previous Qualifier and, if his theory was correct, were about to do it again.
The alleged motivation for FURIA would be to assist fellow Brazilians Team Secret in qualifying for the 2024 RLCS World Championship. At the time, Team Secret had already secured the second spot at the upcoming London Major but was still 15 points behind Complexity in the rankings.
Now that Team Secret has won Qualifier 6, the gap is a mere 2 points. Anything other than complete failure at the London Major will earn them the second South American Worlds spot over Complexity.
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Analyzing the "evidence"
Let's examine all of Carca's talking points in support of FURIA having thrown.
- FURIA had never lost to Ninjas in Pyjamas until Qualifier 5. At the time of Carca's post, NiP was the #3 South American team. Until Qualifier 5, where they lost to them twice, FURIA had a 5-0 series record against NiP in RLCS 2024. Not only that but the scoreline of FURIA's Qualifier 5 losses to NiP were not close at all.
- FURIA had never lost to Team Secret. Not only had FURIA not dropped a single one of their four series against Team Secret during RLCS 2024, but they only lost a single game across all of them. Carca predicted that FURIA would make it to the grand finals of Qualifier 6 and throw for their first-ever series loss against Team Secret, gifting them additional RLCS points. In a strange turn of events, FURIA actually lost in the semifinals to Erased, who was ranked eighth in SAM at the time.
- FURIA hates Complexity. There isn't really any solid evidence for this, but Carca claims it to be the reason why FURIA wants Team Secret to qualify for Worlds over Complexity.
Additionally, one of Carca's Tweets includes a video compilation of FURIA's alleged throwing against NiP in Qualifier 5. RLCS caster and analyst John "JohnnyBoi_i" MacDonald analyzed this alleged evidence on his stream, where he and his viewers agreed that FURIA's play was subpar, but not suspicious.
Some NA and EU teams have also been notably inconsistent, such as Karmine Corp completely missing out on Qualifier 5. However, no other team has been publicly accused of throwing like FURIA has. The community seems to agree that it's simply unreasonable to expect any team to perform at 100% at all times.
