In Rocket League’s first competitive era, Connor “Jessie” Lansink stood out as something unusual. He was a Dutch player who reached the very first RLCS World Championship with The Flying Dutchmen, helped define how early European teams played, and then reinvented himself as one of the scene’s most recognizable entertainers. By the time he stepped back from regular competition, he had collected a fourth place finish at the inaugural RLCS finals, a regular season title with Savage!, and more than twelve thousand dollars in tournament winnings, then turned that resume into a full time streaming career and a content creator role with Dignitas.
This Esports Legacy Profile follows Jessie from those first LANs and online cups to the era when he was better known for “Jessie Being Jessie” highlight reels than for league tables, and considers where he fits in the larger Rocket League story.
Origins, The Flying Dutchmen, And RLCS Season 1
Jessie was born in the Netherlands on November 4, 1996, and he entered Rocket League almost as soon as the game took off. According to later biographical summaries, he started playing in August 2015 after seeing popular variety streamers battle each other, and he tried to move into the competitive scene almost immediately.
By late December 2015 he had joined The Flying Dutchmen, first formed alongside Paul “PauliepaulNL” Brandsma. In early 2016 the roster took its familiar all Dutch shape when Dogukan “Dogu” Yilmaz and Jasper “Vogan” van Riet joined Jessie on the lineup. Through the first half of 2016 they lived in weekly tournaments and online cups, building up experience against the best in Europe and collecting modest prize checks in events such as Gfinity weeklies, Go4RocketLeague, and Mock It cups.
That grind led directly into the first Rocket League Championship Series. The Flying Dutchmen qualified for the Season 1 European league, survived the season, and earned a spot at the inaugural RLCS World Championship. In Los Angeles they finished fourth overall behind iBUYPOWER Cosmic, FlipSid3 Tactics, and Northern Gaming. For Jessie, those few days became the anchor of his competitive legacy. He was a starting player in the first RLCS finals, one of three Dutch teammates representing an entirely Dutch organization, at a time when the game’s professional future was not yet guaranteed.
The Flying Dutchmen became legendary for how structured they were. One later tactical breakdown described the team’s rigid system for rotations and calls, which limited mid game chatter and put most decisions into a set of pre planned patterns. That style suited Jessie’s early career. He was not the flashiest mechanical player at the event. Instead he was part of a system that squeezed value out of disciplined positioning, safe touches, and a willingness to grind through awkward series against more individually famous opponents.
Financially, that first year was also his most successful purely as a player. EsportsEarnings records more than four thousand dollars in prize money for Jessie in 2016 alone, including his share of The Flying Dutchmen’s RLCS world championship payout and later victories at British LANs such as Insomnia 58 and Insomnia 59. In a scene where prize pools were still relatively small, that was a meaningful return for a player who had only discovered the game the previous summer.
Summit, LAN Roads, And The Search For A New Home
By August 2016 The Flying Dutchmen broke apart, and Jessie found himself hunting for a new environment. An ESPN roster feature that summer already listed him as a free agent, paired off with Dogu as two players trying to build on their RLCS top four.
Within a few weeks he helped form Summit alongside Jesper “Flarke” Johansson and Sebastian “Sebadam” Adamatzky, with Yumi_cheeseman as coach. On paper Summit was another ambitious European mix, built from players who had flashed potential with different lineups. In practice they never matched The Flying Dutchmen’s breakthrough. They reached the RLCS Season 2 European league stage but finished near the bottom of the table, and their best result came in that league where they placed eighth.
Jessie’s individual calendar did not slow down. Across 2016 and 2017 he continued to appear at offline events such as Insomnia 60 and smaller European LANs, and he won or placed highly in multiple secondary cups and weeklies. EsportsEarnings credits him with more than two thousand dollars in 2017 prize money, including a title at Insomnia 60 that showed he could still anchor a LAN winning roster outside RLCS.
Those years were also restless ones. Summary databases show Jessie cycling through several smaller teams, even as he maintained a positive win rate across his recorded matches. The pattern would become familiar. Jessie was good enough to sit close to the top of Europe, but as the scene professionalized he often landed just outside the most stable, organization backed rosters.
Savage!, FlipSid3, And A Different Kind Of Breakthrough
Jessie’s last major push as a professional came in 2018. Early in the year he joined FlipSid3 Tactics as a stand in, a role that led to a fifth to eighth place finish at DreamHack Leipzig where he shared the stage with some of the strongest teams in the world.
Later that year he became a substitute for Savage!, one of the most hyped unsigned teams in Europe. Official Rocket League previews for the Rival Series Play Ins and Season 6 league play list Savage! with a quartet of Euan “Tadpole” Ingram’s former teammates Bluey and Deevo, rising star Yanis “Alpha54” Champenois, and Jessie in the sub spot.
Savage! went on a remarkable run through the RLRS system. They qualified for the European Rival Series, then won the regular season to secure a place in the Promotion Tournament and ultimately earn promotion into the RLCS. Jessie did not start every series, but when ViolentPanda later took a short break from competition and community members asked when Jessie had last appeared in an official Psyonix event, fans pointed back to his substitution for Savage! in a crucial series against exceL that helped the team’s push toward promotion. One Reddit reply even argued that without his contribution Savage! might not have reached RLCS at all, and that Barcelona’s later entry into Rocket League through the promoted roster might never have happened.
From the perspective of pure results, the Savage! chapter gave Jessie his second headline achievement. Dignitas’s news post announcing his signing in 2020 described the rival series campaign as his “career best finish” because it crowned him a European regular season champion. It was not a world championship podium, but it was tangible proof that he could still contribute to top tier competitive success several years after his RLCS Season 1 breakout.
ReciprocitY, Dignitas, And The Pivot To Streaming
Around the same time that Savage! rose through the Rival Series, Jessie’s public identity began to shift. He was no longer only a player known for systems and early LANs. He was becoming a personality.
On YouTube, compilations titled “Jessie Being Jessie” and “Worlds Unluckiest Rocket League Player” stitched together his tilted reactions, improbable own goals, and clutch recoveries into ten minute highlight reels. His brand became a mix of self deprecating humor and genuine skill, the kind of persona that made viewers feel as if a former RLCS mainstay was going through the same ranked frustrations they faced.
By 2020 that persona was strong enough to carry him into a new phase of his career. Jessie began streaming Rocket League full time on Twitch, and his channel biography summed it up simply as the work of “an RLCS veteran who streams full time Rocket League” who served as the official fourth for Dignitas while making content.
His success as a streamer caught the attention of organizations. In January 2020 he signed with Team Reciprocity as a content creator, representing the team during the European Invitational that spring. When Reciprocity later sold its Rocket League roster amid wider restructuring, part of that roster moved to Oxygen Esports, and Jessie briefly followed as a streamer.
The real pivot came in July 2020 when Dignitas announced that it had acquired him as both a content creator and substitute player for its Rocket League roster. In their announcement, Dignitas described Jessie as a 23 year old Dutch gamer whose first big moment had been The Flying Dutchmen’s fourth place finish at the RLCS Season 1 finals, and noted that he had spent much of the intervening time on stream rather than in official leagues. At the time of that signing, he was regularly drawing well over a thousand viewers on Twitch and ranked among the more watched Rocket League channels on the platform.
Jessie continued to appear occasionally in competition during the RLCS X era, including a stint as a stand in for Dignitas during Grid play. Community discussions around those appearances treated him as a cult favorite, a player whose Octane.gg rating and results mattered less than the fact that he had, in the words of one tongue in cheek fan reply, been “one of the players to ever play the game.”
Legacy, Style, And GOAT Tier
Across his career Jessie earned a little more than twelve and a half thousand dollars in prize money from Rocket League tournaments, with his competitive earnings spread over every era of the game from the first RLCS to Twitch Rivals showdowns in the early 2020s. Those numbers place him below the big trophy winners, but they tell only part of the story.
First, his role in The Flying Dutchmen matters disproportionately to his raw statistics. Any legacy system that gives heavy weight to world championship finishes will treat a fourth place at the very first RLCS finals as a major accomplishment, and third party GOAT style metrics already assign significant points to that specific result. For European Rocket League history, he is one of the players who proved that a national stack from a small scene could stand on stage with giants like FlipSid3 Tactics and Northern Gaming in 2016.
Second, his time with Savage! links him to another turning point. By helping that roster secure promotion through the Rival Series, he played a small but meaningful part in the chain of events that eventually brought FC Barcelona into the game and reshaped the European league’s competitive map.
Third, his entertainment work has given him a different kind of visibility. Countless Rocket League fans first heard his name not from an RLCS broadcast but from a YouTube compilation or a Twitch recommendation. The “Jessie Being Jessie” series and other highlight clips ensured that the RLCS veteran became a kind of shared inside joke across the community, someone whose misses and own goals were remembered as fondly as his clutch plays.
In the standardized GOAT Tier framework used for this project, that blend of competitive impact and cultural visibility situates Jessie most naturally in a B Tier “regional legacy” band. He is not a world champion or a perennial MVP, yet he has two distinct competitive peaks, a long record of appearances across key eras, and a post professional career that helped humanize the game for thousands of viewers.
Taken together, those threads make Connor “Jessie” Lansink more than a trivia answer about the first RLCS finals. He stands as one of Rocket League’s bridge figures, someone who began in the structured systems of early LAN teams and ended as a face of the game on stream, reminding viewers that even the players who once battled for world titles can laugh at their own misses and keep queuing for the next match.
Changes made were limited to correcting The Flying Dutchmen’s early roster timeline, tightening the Insomnia phrasing so it does not read as a Flying Dutchmen accomplishment, fixing the RLRS “promotion” wording to reflect the Promotion Tournament path, and softening the overly specific Twitch ranking and viewer claims.