The Fall of Swarm Gaming

A few months have passed since the old powerhouse of EU rocket league, once the only team to truly challenge Flipsid3 Tactics, disbanded. I've thought a fair bit on the topic since, and wanted to share some thoughts on roles in Rocket League 

First: Some history

Swarm gaming (previously Famous) started out with the lineup of De Boer, Paschy90 and SikiiCEM (now Sikii). I haven't seen much from this era, but I know near the start of the MLG pro league there was a trade to send Sikii to Supersonic Stars (today Crown and Jewels) and Stocki to Swarm. After this, Stocki, Paschy and De Boer made it to second place in the MLG league, losing to Flipsid3 in the finals.

Soon after, however, Swarm picked up Gambit (who had just left Kings of Urban) and Stocki parted ways with the team to eventually join Noble. Gambit, playing from NA, participated in a few matches I saw, in which the quality of the team depleted and they subsequently disbanded.

Now, a question remains of why this happened, and how roles are involved.

Gambit is not (and was not) a worse player than Stocki in my opinion, and playing across the Atlantic can't have been easy but it has also been proved to be doable, even by pros in events such as RPL, so what went wrong?

I believe that the answer lies in the roles that Stocki and Paschy played: Stocki's ability to pick out Paschy uncannily often, who acted in a sort of extremely pressuring striker role, and get the ball to him was key to the team. When Gambit was brought in, this was lost because the two strikers both functioned more as solo units, and the support aspect that Stocki gave was lost.

Despite the undeniable raw skill present in latter-era Swarm, it was not enough to carry the team to glory as they had experienced earlier in their careers, and I think it was a good demonstration of how players need to not only be skilled and know each other, but have complementing styles of play.