Former Cloud9 coach Inero has announced he is retiring from full-time League of Legends coaching after an 11-year career.
Nick “Inero” Smith announced on Tuesday, September 8, that he is retiring as a League of Legends coach, ending an 11-year-long career in the esports scene.
Mostly known as a former Cloud9 coach, Inero announced in an X post that he no longer intends to pursue a full-time coaching career in League of Legends.
The announcement came two months after the 32-year-old left Cloud9, who were the fifth LoL Championship Series (LCS) team Inero has coached over the last 11 years.
Inero started his coaching career in May 2016, when he joined Dream Team, with whom he placed top-four in NA CS Summer, narrowly missing out on securing a spot in NA LCS 2017 Spring Promotion.
Following a successful debut as a coach, Inero signed for Echo Fox, with whom he stayed for over a year, leading the team to a bronze medal in NA LCS 2018 Spring and placing top-six at NA LCS 2018 Summer, before leaving to join Golden Guardians.
On Golden Guardians, Inero secured several top-six finishes across five years in the LCS, until the breakthrough year in 2023, when Golden Guardians won silver in LCS Spring, thus qualifying for their first international event, the Mid-Season Invitational.
The promising season ended with GG missing out on LoL Worlds, with a fourth-place finish in LCS Summer and a crushing defeat against Team BDS in the Worlds Qualifying Series.
The bittersweet ending to the year saw Golden Guardians pull the plug on their project, releasing all players and Inero, who spent the next season coaching Disguised and Immortals.
For the 2025 season, the American coach was picked up by Cloud9, with whom he won silver medals at LTA North 2025 Split 1 and Split 2, but failed to qualify for LoL Worlds.
This year started similarly for Inero and Cloud9, who had already placed second in LCS Lock-In and the Americas Cup, and third in LCS Spring.
In June, Inero left Cloud9 to shift his focus toward coaching Team USA for the Esports Nation Cup.
However, after the Esports Foundation announced the ENC would be postponed until 2027, Inero was left without a coaching position until the end of the year.
Inero has not ruled out a potential return to the role or that he would remain involved in the scene in some other way.
However, for now, he has no intention of returning to the competitive world of League of Legends.
Mark Prezelj
Esports Betting Analyst
Mark Prezelj is a Slovenian esports betting analyst with over 3,500 articles at EsportBet and the founder of Lines64.com — someone who has been reading odds longer than most readers have been watching esports.
