Al Qadsiah players still waiting on prize money
Kristian "Kellex" Keller says he is still owed roughly $23,000 in prize money by Al Qadsiah, more than a year after he helped the organisation to some of the best results in their history.
He is not the only player waiting, and the money is not the part he wants to talk about most.
Al Qadsiah had a 2025 season that most organisations in EMEA would envy. They won the first Saudi eLeague major, took OWCS 2025 EMEA Stage 2, finished second at the Midseason Championship during the Esports World Cup, and finished the year as world runners-up at the World Finals in Stockholm.
Behind those results, according to Kellex and two other players who spoke to OWTV on condition of anonymity, sat an organisation that could not reliably pay the people producing them.
Kellex, now with Geekay Esports, agreed to speak on the record. He is 27, a decade into his career, and says he is doing this less for himself than for whoever comes next.
"If I can't have my money, okay," he said. "But at least I want them to sort it out for the next players they have, because no one should have to deal with this."
A rocky start
Al Qadsiah first approached Kellex on March 28, 2025. He joined in May, a handful of days before a roster lock, and the organisation announced him publicly before he had a valid contract in hand.
He was given a placeholder contract instead. He travelled to Saudi Arabia for the ESL Saudi Challenge, and came in second place. Without an official contract in place, Kellex’s worries had started taking root.
A second contract arrived weeks later, brokered through a teammate who knew a member of staff. That one was wrong too.
Kellex received the correct agreement on July 9, 2025, two months after joining.
His first payment would arrive in the middle of that month, and only after he refused to board a flight to Korea. He asked for proof before he would travel, and was sent a screenshot of the transfer going through.
There was one month in his six-month tenure, during the 2025 Midseason Championship, when his salary arrived on time. He remembers it clearly because of how it felt.
"I got my third salary on time. That was the only time," he said. "I remember thinking, they finally figured it out. I don't need to do anything more."
Learning the process so someone else would follow it
The prize money never resolved as neatly.
Players competing in OWCS choose whether to take their share directly from the tournament organiser or defer it to their organisation, which then takes its cut before distributing the rest. Kellex was contractually obliged to defer.
He describes an organisation that had the money and did not know how to move it. As he understood it, Al Qadsiah's finance department required invoices from tournament organisers, itemised by player, before it could legally release anything.
Nobody at the organisation appeared to know that this process existed.
"If I didn't take time out of my day to work on this, we would never have gotten prize money, because they didn't even know about the process," Kellex said.
He says he researched the requirements himself and then walked his own team manager through them. He has screenshots of a staff member requesting a tournament invoice four months after the money had already landed.
What frustrated him was not incompetence so much as the pattern it produced. Requests moved through a chain of people, and stalled wherever one of them did not act.
I have to convince one guy, who has to convince other people, so it has to go up the chain. At some point, one of them will not do it, and then it will just be like this, the way it is now. They just hope people forget about it and move on.
That description is close to identical to one given by Chris "ChrisTFer" Graham about The Ultimates, a different Saudi organisation, in a separate case OWTV looked into last year. ChrisTFer described a small organisation in which a single question somehow required a five-person chain, and payments that slipped a week, then 10 days, then months.
What actually made things move a little
Kellex's account is not that Al Qadsiah lacked funds. He is emphatic about the opposite, and unwilling to characterise the people involved as acting in bad faith.
"It's not a money issue," he said. "It's just someone in the esports department not doing their job."
What he objected to was the asymmetry in how urgently things got fixed.
"When it's something I'm frustrated about, they don't care," he said. "But when it's in their best interest, they make it work."
He watched a teammate raise a travel problem publicly on social media. By his account, the post came down within about five hours, and the problem was solved.
Every time he asked privately for an update on his own money, he says, the answer was the same. Give me a week. Give me a week. Give me a week.
The pattern held at The Ultimates too. Robert "SKAI" Lupsa described the same paralysis among players who knew complaining publicly was their only leverage and were frightened to use it.
"You feel like you can't do anything, because if you protest, it's a lose-lose situation," SKAI said.
ChrisTFer’s own conclusion, after his team were paid in full within days of him going public, was blunt.
"Everybody is terrified that if you go public, they'll just decide not to pay you," he said. "But the only power you have is the ability to make things public."
Resorting to LinkedIn for resolution
Kellex eventually received his OWCS Stage 2 prize money on December 4, 2025, along with his outstanding salary. The tournament had taken place in the middle of that year, and players who did not defer their payments to their orgs were paid months earlier.
He does not credit the resolution to anything he did inside the organisation.
His father contacted Trafford Wilson, Al Qadsiah's multi-sports director, on LinkedIn, and had to comment publicly on one of Wilson's posts to get a reply to a private message. Kellex says Wilson responded quickly, shared a personal contact number, and escalated the matter internally.
He also says Wilson did not appear to know the situation existed.
That is the part Kellex keeps returning to. The organisation was sponsored, funded and capable, and the people with the authority to fix it were unaware there was anything to fix.
Other players describe the same experience from other angles. Two told OWTV that Saudi players on the roster have still not received their prize shares, and that the team received no per diem while travelling to Korea and China for competition.
One player said the organisation spent a year telling players their money would arrive the following month.
The cost of chasing it
Kellex is direct about what the year did to him.
He describes visiting doctors repeatedly during his final months at the organisation, and experiencing daily panic attacks brought on by the stress of chasing money he was owed. He accepts that his form suffered, and that he let teammates down at points.
"I was playing poorly sometimes because of my mental health, and I feel bad about that," he said. "But in the end, it's a job."
He is careful not to let that stand as a verdict on the whole experience. He says he had a good time at Al Qadsiah, that conditions at events were fine.
Al Qadsiah did not respond to two requests for comment from OWTV, sent over a period of 13 days, which set out each of the points raised in this article.
Advice for the next one
The reason Kellex reopened the matter this year is that he learned players at another organisation had received their Esports World Cup prize money. If that money had been distributed, he reasoned, then Al Qadsiah were holding his.
He asked for a meeting with staff and the other affected players. He is still waiting for a reply.
What he wants from the piece is narrower than payment.
"I just want to be acknowledged, and to feel like they know it's a problem," he said.
His advice to players in the same position is to compare notes with teammates first, then escalate through staff, and to treat publicity as a valid last resort.
"Don't be discouraged from joining teams that seem a bit suspect," he said. "Just make sure things are how they're supposed to be, and always reach out to people for help."
He mentions Eemeli "Woomera" Ikonen, his former team manager at ENCE, who used to keep him in the loop on prize money before he had to ask.
That, Kellex says, is all it takes.
He knows respect is a two-way street. I just wish it was like that for these teams now too.
It’s been over a year since the conclusion of the OWCS 2025 Midseason Championship. Kellex and his teammates are still owed their share of prize money from multiple tournaments they’ve participated in.