For more than a year, NAVI have lived in an awkward space between being good enough to justify patience and inconsistent enough to make every bad tournament reopen the same conversation. The current lineup has won trophies, reached finals and shown that, on its best days, it can compete with almost anyone. It has also gone through stretches where the individual level disappears, the system looks laboured, and a team with NAVI’s expectations suddenly feels several steps removed from the elite.
The question of a roster change has followed this team almost from the moment makazze replaced jL in July 2025. Every time NAVI looked close to the end of the road, a result bought them more time. Budapest did it at the end of 2025. ESL Pro League and IEM Atlanta did it before the player break this year. Even after the Cologne Major, when B1ad3 explored the market, the right move never materialised. Now, after nearly two months away from officials, NAVI have been eliminated from the Esports World Cup by Legacy in one of their poorest series of the year.
The makazze roster did not start badly
When jL stepped away from competition in July 2025 and makazze was promoted from NAVI Junior, NAVI’s first tournament was not a disaster. They reached the semi-finals of IEM Cologne. The problem was everything that followed. NAVI won only two of their next six matches, finished 9th-16th at BLAST Bounty and the 2025 Esports World Cup, and then went 9th-12th at BLAST Open London. The encouraging debut quickly gave way to a stretch in which the roster looked far less convincing.
B1ad3 was open about what NAVI were doing at the time. He did not sell the roster as an immediate championship team and repeatedly framed the second half of 2025 as a developmental period for makazze and the new five. By September, he had already attached a deadline to that process: “The Major will be our exam.” Budapest would provide enough evidence to decide whether NAVI should keep investing in the lineup or consider changing it.
Budapest complicated the decision. NAVI reached the semi-finals and came painfully close to going further against FaZe, winning Ancient 13-5 and leading Nuke 8-2 before FaZe recovered to take the map 13-11 and eventually the series. B1ad3 later confirmed that NAVI had explored the market before deciding the run had shown enough potential to continue.
That was the first major roster decision postponed. NAVI had assessed available players and possible configurations, but Budapest convinced them that six months of work had produced something worth preserving. In February, B1ad3 said they believed the roster had reached a point where it could regularly contend for semi-finals, finals and, on the right day, trophies. After a Major semi-final, tearing everything apart would have been difficult to justify.
Then 2026 gave NAVI another reason to wait
The start of 2026 was shaky, but NAVI soon produced the sort of results that make roster discussions look reactionary. They won ESL Pro League Season 23, where makazze collected his first career MVP after posting a 1.38 rating at the LAN finals. Two months later, NAVI won IEM Atlanta and w0nderful earned his first career MVP with a 1.31 rating across 16 maps. Between those trophies came runner-up finishes at BLAST Open Rotterdam and BLAST Rivals. Those results made another immediate change difficult to defend. makazze was showing that his academy level could translate to tier one, while w0nderful was reaching the star level NAVI had hoped to unlock consistently. The roster was not dominant, but two trophies and two more finals kept obscuring the troughs.
The Cologne Major was supposed to clarify whether those peaks had become NAVI’s real level. Instead, it produced another ambiguous answer. NAVI beat Legacy and The MongolZ in Stage 3, but losses to Spirit, Falcons and G2 left them at 2-3 and outside the playoffs. Their elimination series against G2 was competitive, with 13-11 on Dust2, 14-16 on Inferno and 10-13 on Mirage, but B1ad3 refused to hide behind the close scores. He said that with the mistakes NAVI were making, they did not deserve a top-eight place.
This time, NAVI did more than discuss possibilities. Before EWC, B1ad3 revealed that the organization had genuinely pursued moves during the break: “We tried some negotiations, but it didn’t go well. We were close to making some changes.” He said there was competition for the players NAVI wanted and the deals could not be completed. The team therefore returned to the same five, partly because B1ad3 still valued the protocols and collective knowledge accumulated over more than a year together. That context is what makes the Esports World Cup so important. B1ad3 convinced management to skip BLAST Bounty, giving the team almost two months away from officials to rest, bootcamp and rebuild its game. NAVI consciously chose preparation and continuity. EWC was meant to show what that patience had bought them.
EWC has made the old problems difficult to ignore
For a few days, the decision looked sensible. NAVI opened with a 13-9 victory over 3DMAX on Inferno, with iM posting a 1.52 rating and makazze following at 1.27, then beat The MongolZ 2-1 to reach the playoffs. After such a long preparation period, NAVI had at least avoided an immediate stumble.
Then came Legacy, and nearly every concern surrounding this roster resurfaced in two maps. The scoreline was ugly, but the manner of the defeat was more damaging. This was a roster retained partly because of the depth of its shared system, coming out of one of the longest preparation windows available to a tier-one team. Against Legacy, that supposed reservoir of knowledge produced two consecutive 2-10 opening halves. NAVI had beaten the same organization 2-0 at the Cologne Major in June; two months later, after deliberately sacrificing official matches for preparation, they looked markedly less composed in the rematch.
The individual numbers were equally uncomfortable. w0nderful finished the Legacy series at 1.14 and was effectively the only NAVI player who kept the score from becoming even worse. b1t ended at 0.89, iM at 0.78, makazze at 0.72 and Aleksib at 0.70. When four players finish below a 0.90 rating in an elimination match, there is only so much blame that can be placed on vetoes, tactics or variance.
The concern is not entirely statistical, either. Dosia recently put words to something that has become increasingly visible when NAVI struggle. In a post on X, he praised B1ad3, the individual quality of the roster and even said the players have clear motivations, but argued that NAVI “lacks that spark that comes from a captain.” He contrasted them with Vitality, where apEX’s behaviour, decision-making and constant energy keep the team switched on, and said he does not sense the same vibe from NAVI.
Dosia was not accusing the players of not caring or being unmotivated. His criticism was closer to a lack of collective fire. NAVI can look strangely detached when a game begins slipping away, as if everyone is waiting for the system to provide the answer rather than dragging the team back into the match. After consecutive 2-10 opening halves against Legacy, it was difficult not to see some of what he was talking about.
NAVI Players’ Recent Stats
The broader form adds another layer. Over the last three months, b1t sits at a 1.15 Rating 3.0, followed by w0nderful at 1.05, iM at 1.03, makazze at 0.99 and Aleksib at 0.86. Aleksib is the IGL and makazze takes aggressive opening responsibilities, so rating cannot tell the whole story. Still, the numbers help explain why NAVI sometimes feel underpowered against the world’s best.
b1t should be the least controversial name in any roster discussion. His recent level remains comfortably above his teammates, he was NAVI’s highest-rated player at the Cologne Major, and replacing him would mean removing their most dependable elite rifler. w0nderful is more volatile, but his position is also difficult to attack immediately. He won the Atlanta MVP only three months ago and was NAVI’s best player by a considerable margin in the Legacy loss. His issue has never been the absence of a ceiling, but how intermittently NAVI manage to access it.
makazze’s recent 0.99 rating and 0.72 against Legacy are more concerning, but cutting him now would be a strange conclusion to the project NAVI started last summer. He is 19, plays a demanding aggressive role and already has an EPL MVP to his name. There are legitimate questions about how consistently his style translates against elite opposition, but enough upside remains that replacing him after one year would feel more like abandoning the investment than refining the roster.
That leaves iM and Aleksib as the two names around which the uncomfortable conversation is most likely to revolve. Aleksib’s 0.86 rating over the past three months is poor, but changing an IGL is not a normal roster upgrade. It changes the architecture of the team, forces B1ad3 to rebuild years of shared calling language, and only makes sense if NAVI can acquire a leader they genuinely believe raises the ceiling.
If NAVI make a conventional one-player move, iM looks like the most plausible candidate from the outside. That is analysis, not a report of NAVI’s plans, but the logic is straightforward. b1t is their best rifler, makazze is the young development piece, w0nderful occupies the premium AWP role and has recently demonstrated MVP-level upside, while Aleksib holds the calling structure together. iM is a good tier-one rifler and has produced important performances for NAVI, but a 1.03 rating across the past three months and a 0.78 elimination series leave him in the slot where a high-end rifling upgrade could be made without rebuilding the entire team.
If NAVI make a change, FUT should be one of the first calls
If NAVI decide that one conventional change is enough, iM remains the most obvious position to examine. That does not make him a bad player, nor does it erase how important he has been to some of NAVI’s runs. The issue is that, when every spot is viewed through the lens of role, upside and replaceability, his position is the easiest one to change without forcing a wider rebuild.
b1t is NAVI’s most dependable rifler and should be untouchable. w0nderful has been inconsistent, but he won the IEM Atlanta MVP only a few months ago and remains capable of taking over series with the AWP. makazze is 19, has already produced an EPL MVP and represents the long-term project NAVI committed to when they promoted him from the academy. Aleksib’s individual numbers are the weakest of the five, but replacing the IGL would be a fundamentally different decision. NAVI would not just be swapping one player for another; they would be rebuilding the calling structure and much of the system B1ad3 has spent years developing.
That leaves iM in an awkward middle ground. Since makazze arrived, some of his more aggressive responsibilities have shifted, leaving him in a more passive and lurk-oriented role. He can still produce big maps, but a 1.03 rating over the past three months does not make the position impossible to upgrade, for a team with NAVI’s ambitions. If NAVI want change without detonating the entire project, this is therefore the cleanest route. They can preserve the core structure around Aleksib, keep makazze’s development moving, retain their two highest-ceiling stars in b1t and w0nderful, and use the fifth slot to search for either more consistent firepower, a cleaner positional fit or the extra energy this lineup seems to lack. That is where FUT becomes particularly interesting.
