With all the new Chinese teams finding their way into franchising for the 2024 VALORANT Champions Tour season, one familiar squad is reportedly getting some support from down under.
Popular Australian VALORANT player Kale “autumn” Dunne has reached a verbal agreement to join Chinese team FunPlus Phoenix, according to reporter Bo Hoogland. This marks the second reported Australian player to enter the franchised league for 2024 onwards, joining a roster looking to compete with other powerhouse Chinese teams like EDward Gaming and Bilibili Gaming. This also comes soon after reports that Korean org T1 is considering signing Australian IGL Nick “tixx” Quinn in its rebuild.
Out of all the Australian talent across VALORANT, autumn was a part of one of the longest stretches of regional dominance across 2021 aside from DRX in Korea. He grew in popularity playing for the Australian team ORDER, forming a fully Aussie team and rolling over all opponents in the Oceania circuit. As the Jett main, autumn helped the team maintain their spot at the top, but the squad split up after their 2022 championship.
One of his teammates on ORDER, Australian and Laotian player Michael “WRONSKI” Wronski, was signed by Global Esports and became the first Aussie to join VALORANT franchising. Autumn moved to Honey Badgers, but early in 2023, he moved from Oceania to South Asia, joining Gods Reign and competing in a different Challengers circuit. Autumn’s play remained strong and the team finished second and fourth in the first two splits.
Now, according to Hoogland, he’s moving regions once again, this time joining the Chinese scene but getting a promotion to the franchised league. The reported move makes sense for FPX, considering the organization’s storied past. The Chinese org picked up a mixed roster to compete in EMEA and even won Stage Two Masters in 2022. But then FPX changed rosters and became one of the few Chinese teams joining VCT earlier this year.
That Chinese team quickly got outpaced by their regional rivals, with EDG as the gold standard for Chinese VALORANT so far. FPX dropped out of LOCK//IN in one game, didn’t make Masters Tokyo, and got into Champions 2023 only to go out in groups. It’s clear that if FPX wants to get on the same level as EDG, the team is going to have to improve—and autumn could be the start of some significant changes at FPX.
Any VALORANT fans who are curious to see what autumn’s impact could be on FPX will have to wait for an official announcement to confirm the reported roster move. It’s not out of the question for an import to change an Asian team significantly, as we saw exactly that with Ilya “something” Petrov and Paper Rex. We can’t expect autumn to be the next something, but he’ll have to start strong to prove his worth as he did for ORDER.
