HEROIC replace coach TOBIZ and analyst R0nic with doto

HEROIC changed the staff behind its Counter-Strike team before it changed the team. On Monday, July 6, 2026, the organization announced Joonas "doto" Forss as head coach, HLTV, the reference news site for Counter-Strike, reported that evening. In the same move it parted ways with the head coach of the past year, Tobias "TOBIZ" Theo, and with its analyst, Mathias "R0nic" Pinholt.

The new coach is not new to the club. doto, a 30-year-old Finn, ran HEROIC's academy team for more than a year, until the organization closed that project, according to HLTV. He now takes charge of a main team that has slid down the ranking since the spring, and whose lineup was rebuilt within a day of his appointment.

HLTV reports of June 4 and July 6, 2026, and TOBIZ's own post on X.

Two departures and one arrival

Three people are concerned, in two different jobs. The head coach prepares the team's tactics, runs its practice and stands behind the players during matches. The analyst studies opponents and the team's own games, and feeds that work to the coach and the players. HEROIC has replaced the first and let go of the second.

HLTV's wording for both exits is that the club parted ways with them. The report does not describe a resignation in either case, and it names no new analyst. R0nic, a 25-year-old Dane, is listed by the site without a team.

HEROIC's own words are not quoted in the report. The one voice in it is the outgoing coach, who wrote on X that his one-year journey had ended and that HEROIC had told him the day before that it wanted to go in a new direction. He closed on a short note. "Taking some valuable lessons with me and looking forward to my next adventure," TOBIZ wrote.

A coach promoted from inside

doto's path to the job runs through the levels below the top. As a player he appeared for HAVU and ENCE, HLTV writes. He then coached ENCE Prospects before joining HEROIC to coach its academy, the junior team an organization uses to develop players for its main roster.

That academy no longer exists. HLTV says doto held the post for over a year, until HEROIC ended the project, and gives no date for either. His promotion therefore brings back someone who already knows how the organization works, into a seat he has not held before: the main team of a club ranked 33rd in the world is a step up from an academy bench.

The man he replaces made the same kind of step twelve months ago. When HEROIC signed TOBIZ, on June 28, 2025, his whole coaching career had been spent at MOUZ NXT, the academy team of MOUZ, where he had worked for close to three and a half years, HLTV reported at the time. Before that he had been a player, as captain of Singularity. HEROIC was his first job at the top level. For the second time running, the club has given the seat to a coach who comes from an academy team.

The year under TOBIZ

TOBIZ, a 31-year-old Dane, arrived in a summer of departures. The previous coach, Eetu "sAw" Saha, had left for G2 after the BLAST Austin Major together with one of its players, SunPayus. HLTV's report of the signing called it the first step of a rebuild that was likely to be substantial, and the roster box printed with it shows why: three active players, LNZ, tN1R and yxngstxr, with nilo and xfl0ud on the bench. HEROIC was ranked 18th in the world on June 23, 2025.

HLTV lists three results from the year that followed. HEROIC won a tournament, DraculaN Season 5. It finished second at the CCT Global Finals. And it qualified for the IEM Cologne Major, played in June.

The year was also disturbed from outside the server. Alkaren, the team's AWPer, the player who uses the game's sniper rifle, was removed from the lineup because of visa issues, in HLTV's words. yxngstxr took the rifle in his place. TOBIZ told HLTV in June that the player had been brought into the role quickly and asked to do a job that was not his, and that he had handled it well.

From 20th to 33rd in eight weeks

The slide that preceded the change can be dated. On May 11, HLTV ranked HEROIC 20th. PGL Astana was the team's first big tournament since PGL Cluj-Napoca, and it began with a 2-0 win over Aurora, then ranked sixth. Three defeats followed: to FURIA, to Gentle Mates in two maps on which HEROIC won ten rounds in all, and to magic, the world number 40, in a third and deciding map lost 6-13. HLTV's report of May 12 put the team's win rate on the attacking side at 39.3 per cent for the event.

At Stake Ranked Episode 2, in Barcelona, HEROIC went out on May 28 against 9z, in a series decided on a third map that went to two overtimes. By then, HLTV counted five series lost in a row between Astana and Barcelona.

The Major did not break the run. HEROIC entered in Stage 1, the tournament's first stage. On June 2 it lost twice, to Sharks and to Lynn Vision, each time in a best-of-one, a match played on a single map. It beat Gaimin Gladiators the next day. On June 4, Liquid won a best-of-three series, in which the first team to take two maps wins, 13-5 on Nuke and 13-11 on Inferno. HEROIC was out with one win in four matches.

Between the first line and the last, HEROIC lost 15 places. Thirteen of them went in the eight weeks from May 11 to July 6.

What the coach said after Cologne

TOBIZ spoke to HLTV in an interview the site published on June 5, the day after the elimination. He called the exit typical of a difficult year. He put the two defeats of the first day down to individual mistakes, and said the team had shown something closer to its practice level in the win over Gaimin Gladiators.

He refused the easiest explanation. The change of AWPer, he said, could no longer serve as the excuse for the results; the team's own errors were the main problem. He described a side that could not hold a level, in small tournaments as in big ones, and that struggled to name what went wrong.

He also put himself inside the review. Everything had to be looked at, he said, his own coaching included, and the group needed a more direct conversation about its problems. On the future he would say little: the team would go home, rest, and then decide its direction. Invitations to tournaments had arrived, he added, without anything being confirmed. The interviewer noted that the roster had been announced as fixed until the end of the season.

A month later, the review reached a conclusion on the staff. TOBIZ's post says HEROIC informed him the day before he published it.

A different five by the next evening

The lineup HLTV printed with the news of July 6 was the one from Cologne: xfl0ud, nilo, susp, Chr1zN and yxngstxr, with Alkaren on the bench. It lasted less than a day under the new coach.

On Tuesday, July 7, HEROIC benched xfl0ud, yxngstxr stepped down from the active roster, and the club announced two signings, HLTV reported in a series of articles that day. MartinezSa, a Spaniard, arrives from Gentle Mates as AWPer. Brollan, a Swede, arrives from MOUZ, where he had been benched in April. nilo, susp and Chr1zN remain. They are 21, 21 and 19.

doto therefore starts with three players he inherits and two he has to fit in. One question is already half answered. Brollan directed MOUZ's play for over a year as its in-game leader, the player who calls the tactics during a round, but HLTV writes that he will move away from that role at HEROIC. The club said roles would become clearer once the team has practiced and played official matches. Who calls, and how the five are arranged around a specialist AWPer for the first time since Alkaren's absence, is the new coach's first piece of work.

The club set the bar in the same announcement. HEROIC said its ambitions had not changed: to be among the top teams in Counter-Strike and to compete for trophies.

Barcelona first

The first test has a name. HLTV gives Stake Ranked Episode 3, a tournament in Barcelona with US$100,000 in prize money, as the debut of the new lineup. It is the city where the team's run before the Major ended in May, at the previous episode of the same series.

Three of the other teams named for the event sit above HEROIC in HLTV's ranking of July 6: paiN in 19th place, Ninjas in Pyjamas in 27th and 3DMAX in 29th. The two teams HEROIC lost to on the first day of the Major stood lower when they met: Sharks were 35th and Lynn Vision 31st on June 1.

For TOBIZ and R0nic, nothing further has been announced. HLTV's roster pages list both without a team.

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