Team:Team GEKI
| GEKI | |
|---|---|
| |
| Location | Osaka, Japan 
|
| Owners | Naoya Yamamoto |
| Player manager | Daichi Mori (GaiA) |
| Sponsors/Partners | Next.Growth Game8 MIROKU Force One evolu CSO Kazunari Soma |
Team GEKI (チーム激, GEKI) was an esports team based in Japan. Team GEKI is the esports team of the business company Next.Growth, owned by Naoya Yamamoto, and was centred exclusively on Smash.
Team GEKI signed HIKARU[1] and ZAKI[2], along with GaiA[3] as their manager on August 12th, 2018. Six months later, on March 25th, 2019, GEKI recruited T[4], Gackt[5] and YOC[6]. The team was disbanded on October 30th, 2019, notably due to financial and managerial conflicts between the owner and the manager[7][8].
Former smashers
Professional smashers
| ID | Name | Game | Main(s) | Join Date | Leave Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
ZAKI | Unknown name | Super Smash Bros. for Wii U Super Smash Bros. Ultimate |
 
|
2018-08-12 | 2019-10-30 |
|
|
HIKARU | Eita Hoshi | Super Smash Bros. for Wii U Super Smash Bros. Ultimate |
  
|
2018-08-12 | 2019-10-30 |
|
|
T | Isami Ikeda | Super Smash Bros. Ultimate | 
|
2019-03-25 | 2019-10-30 |
|
|
YOC | Unknown name | Super Smash Bros. Ultimate | 
|
2019-03-25 | 2019-10-30 |
|
|
Gackt | Gakuto Ito | Super Smash Bros. Ultimate | 
|
2019-03-25 | 2019-10-30 |
Other smashers
GaiA 
(Manager, joined August 12th, 2018)
Controversies
HIKARU's unpaid salary
At the beginning of GEKI, according to GaiA, him and ZAKI agreed to be unpaid due to not having enough time to earn a monthly salary, but HIKARU agreed to quit his part-time job in order to earn a monthly salary of 100,000 yens (around 875$ USD). However, HIKARU did not get paid for the first two months, despite having quit his part-time job. According to GaiA, HIKARU and Naoya Yamamoto agreed to lower his salary down to 70,000 yens (around 610$ USD) with additional tasks such as daily Smash content creation for Next.Growth.
If Naoya Yamamoto claimed that there were issues at the beginning of the project, he also said everything was resolved after a 3-hours phone call with HIKARU and that there were no unpaid salaries, also posting proof that he didn't lower HIKARU's salary in a text conversation with GaiA.
6,000,000 yen funding
A few months into Team GEKI's existence, GaiA invested 6,000,000 yens (around 45,500$ USD) into the company Next.Growth, at the condition that this investment should not be written in any document. Because of that, GaiA is unable to take legal action in order to get back his money from the company. Despite recruiting new members for GEKI, organizing a six-man trip to EVO 2019 and still living a luxurious life, Naoya Yamamoto never refunded GaiA's loan. Whenever GaiA tried to get his money back, Naoya Yamamoto claimed that he has no money left. According to GaiA, Naoya Yamamoto tried to spread lies to other GEKI members in order to have a valid reason to kick GaiA out of the team. So far, GaiA claims that he only got back 500,000 yens, less than 10% of the original sum.
Naoya Yamamoto confirmed that he has received the 6,000,000 yens from GaiA, but not as part of an investment for GEKI, but rather as a separate business between GaiA's and Naoya's company on GaiA's demand. According to Naoya, GaiA is in a loan brokering business, and he borrowed out an unjustified bank loan called an overloan and was now unable to manage this business alone. Naoya accepted to help him and to not list the 6,000,000 yens as part of an investment because the money came from an overloan. Also, Naoya actually owns the receipts of it, contradicting GaiA's claims, and posted it as a proof. He also said that he refunded around 3,070,000 yens out of the 6,000,000 yens, but because of the embezzlement of a major partner of Next.Growth in December 2018, the cash flow of Next.Growth was severely affected and delayed the refund of GaiA's loan.
This dispute, so far unsolved, is the main reason of Team GEKI's disband.
