According to Natalie “Stratospanda” Kristiansen, a former League of Legends player of Beşiktaş Esports revealed that the organisation isn’t paying player salaries on time and in some cases haven’t even paid them. The issue isn’t limited to only League of Legends players, rather players from other games also reported the same.
Beşiktaş Esports is owned by Turkish football club Beşiktaş J.K. Currently the organisation has teams for Men and Women’s League of Legends, a Women’s only CSGO team and a team for Zula.
Natalie “Stratospanda” Kristiansen in her Twitlonger revealed that the organisation had problems from day one. Teams first salary was delayed for weeks and the team went 5 months without receiving payments on time. This was also similar for other staff members of the organisation and other rosters owned by the org.
She also said that Beşiktaş had all their present and past players sign a non-disclosure agreement and threaten players to not go public about the ongoing issue or else their salary will be withheld.
One of her former teammates, Olimpia ‘Komedyja’ Cichosz replied to her tweet saying that Beşiktaş had promised for things like boot camps and media days for which the organisation was unable to pay for.
Allegedly, Beşiktaş took down players Discord server when players from other rosters started asking each other if they were being paid and the situation was starting to get out of hand.
According to some other sources, Beşiktaş J.K. (the football club and owner) have amounted a debt of more than $450 million dollars after building a new football stadium in February 2018. As a result of the rising debt, the organisation even had troubles paying its football players. Later in 2018, the organisation revealed that they were on brink of financial collapse, but they were somehow able to pull through that and were able to stabilize the situation.
Which comes to question about the organisation’s esports division being unable to pay its players even after the stable situation on the football side.
