A new report published by Richard Lewis of Dexerto.com revealed that Swedish organisation Ninjas in Pyjamas are in a dispute with some of their current as well as former players regarding the distribution of money earned from sticker sales.
The members of NiP’s CSGO roster claim that they should’ve gotten a share of the sticker money, but havent as things stand.
Valve released RMR stickers in 2021, after the ESL One 2020 Rio Major was cancelled. Teams still had RMR points and were divided into categories of Legends, Challengers and Contenders. Based on the RMR points, sticker capsules were released and were named 2020 RMR Legends/Challengers/Contenders.
At the time, Tim ‘nawwk’ Jonasson was part of the roster as an AWPer and as per the report, he claims that he has right to a portion of the sticker money too and NiP are contractually obligated to do so.
According to sources, nawwk is looking to take action against his former organisation, for himself and for other players on the roster so they can get paid their fair share. The amount is expected to be around $200,000-$300,000, but nothing concrete can be said as the contract for players may differ from organisation to organisation.
According to the contract:
“[The] Team shall receive 16.67% of the team stickers money earned by the Player. The Player shall receive the remaining 83.33% of the team stickers money divided with his teammates.
The Player shall allocate 2% of the Player’s stickers money to a marketing fund dedicated to the CS:GO team.
Team shall when receiving the stickers money deduct and transfer to a dedicated bank account. The funds shall be spent on initiatives approved by the CS:GO team. Minimum four (4) members of the CS:GO team have to approve how the monies are spent.
The Player shall receive 100% of the individual stickers money, which is allocated to the players.”
The ESL One Rio 2020 Major was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic and it wasnt until October 2021 that we got a new CSGO Major. Since the tournament didnt take place, the NiP management believe the move was done by Valve to support the scene by helping teams stay afloat and pay player salaries without having to release their roster.
NiP’s COO Jonas ‘calc’ Gundersen said
“I understand there’s a lot of talk floating around the ‘stickers’. We’ve talked about this earlier, but it seems people have forgotten. These were ‘Capsules’ created by the teams, and Ok’d by Valve, in order to survive the pandemic and keep paying salaries without any cuts, despite the complete lack of sponsorships and exposure.
Therefore it’s not stickers as it would be normally – because there was no major. This was a desperation move for many teams because elseway something like half would have pulled out of CS:GO altogether.
“I know many teams treated this differently and some paid portions out to the players – we opted not to do that and keep salaries intact and the business running normal, adding more support staff around the team to make it an even better place to win majors. There’s also very different contracts on teams based on the normal sticker money, where you guys get almost 100% and either way everyone does things individually.”
Sources say three active members of the NiP CSGO roster are also affected by this, namely Fredrik ‘REZ’ Sterner, Hampus ‘hampus’ Poser and Nicolas ‘Plopski’ Gonzalez Zamora who haven’t said anything publicly just yet.
