Arsenal football player Oleksandr "Zinchenko" Zinchenko played today as a substitute for his CS2 esports team owned by Passion UA, against the BLEED Esports team led from the coaching bench by Aleksandar "Kassad" Trifunović.
The famous football player entered esports last year and founded the organization Passion UA, which is best known for its Counter-Strike 2 team, which in itself was big news in the esports community, and today he had the opportunity to play for his organization for the second time because one of the players had connection problems during an online match in the Yalla Compas Spring 2023 tournament.
Namely, Zinchenko spent a lot of time in his free time playing CS2, which is why he was more than ready to test himself against a professional esports team. What is particularly interesting is that just two days ago, the footballer played an extremely important match in the Premier League when Arsenal defeated Liverpool, and today, by force of opportunity, after the traditional one, he also performed in electronic sports.
He may not be the first top athlete to seriously try himself in competitive CS, but we haven't had a case like this or anything similar so far.
What's particularly impressive is that Zinchenko actually played very well, helping his team come back from a 3-9 deficit on the second Ancient map to triumph in overtime 16-12. And in the end, BLEED still won because in the last round of the regular part of the decisive third map, they won 13-11.
Kassad was not happy after the match that his team "barely" beat a team that played with a substitute, a substitute who is a professional soccer player and not a professional CS2 player, which is why he publicly stated on Twitter that it was time for changes in his team.
