3DMAX, €2M in Debt and a CS2 Roster Without a Home

What collapsed wasn’t just a deal

On August 20, 2026, the players and staff of 3DMAX were informed that negotiations with French content creator Cyril “CyrilMP4” Soudant had failed. That ended months of talks that had already consumed, and destroyed, a prior attempt: Spanish organization Team Heretics came closest to acquiring the roster before discussions collapsed in early May.

The headline is the collapsed deal. The substance is a number: total unpaid amounts that could reach around €2 million, including salaries, bonuses, and Major sticker revenue. That figure did not appear in August. Already in September 2024, streamer Sébastien “KRL” Perez had warned publicly about more than €25,000 in delayed payments. The trajectory was visible. Nobody stopped it.

The sticker revenue problem

Counter-Strike Major stickers are not a secondary income stream for organizations at this level. For clubs without endemic sponsorship infrastructure, they are often the primary one. 3DMAX qualified for the Perfect World Shanghai Major in late 2024, then secured qualification for both Majors of 2025 under Valve’s new VRS format. Each of those qualifications had a monetary value attached.

CEO Stéphane Pons stated in February that all team revenues had disappeared — including sticker money — following what he described as a scam from a former partner, with losses estimated in the six to near seven-figure range. The financial crisis predated every roster change. bodyy arrived in early 2025; misutaaa joined after bodyy was benched; NBK- came on as assistant coach. Each addition carried payroll weight onto a structure already underwater. The debt grew while the negotiations about the debt were still ongoing.

How the Heretics talks fell apart

Team Heretics initially offered to cover around 75% of outstanding payments — approximately 1.3 million dollars at the time — with Compagnaud responsible for the remaining 25%, plus a role and equity within Heretics. Workable terms. More than workable.

What followed was erosion. Each month without a signature added wages and maintenance costs to the existing debt. Calculating the total amount took four additional weeks. Then, on the day of the deadline, Compagnaud requested a contract restructuring. Heretics revised. Compagnaud stalled. During that period, 3DMAX missed qualification for the Cologne Major, losing the sticker revenue that would have come with it. The deal didn’t fail because the numbers were impossible. It failed because one party kept changing what they were.

The influencer model, applied too late

CyrilMP4 holds over five million YouTube subscribers, more than one million Instagram followers, and around half a million Twitch followers. In French esports, that audience asset matters. France already hosts Karmine Corp, Joblife, Mandatory, and Gentle Mates as influencer-backed organizations — Karmine Corp’s documented merchandise revenues have at points exceeded those of several Ligue 1 clubs.

The influencer ownership model carries real structural advantages when it begins with operational clarity. CyrilMP4 was not acquiring a struggling team with upside. He was entering active legal proceedings, compounding debt, and a management pattern that had already caused two consecutive acquisition attempts to fail. A source close to the situation described the sums as substantial, and noted that the players now believe they are unlikely to recover the money. Five million YouTube subscribers do not change that arithmetic.

Who absorbs the losses

The players do, for now. The roster reportedly feared losing hundreds of thousands of euros each. Legal proceedings are ongoing; outcomes remain unclear.

The 3DMAX situation follows a pattern that CS2’s sticker economy makes structurally possible: a competitive organization builds its financial base on Major qualification revenue, that revenue disappears through fraud or mismanagement, and the resulting debt is large enough to repel conventional buyers while remaining too complex for influencer-led projects to absorb quickly. Negotiations run long enough to add more cost than they resolve. The roster is left mid-cycle, without a home.

The talent on that roster is not in question. It rarely is.